Guns and Butter

For the past three years, every spring I have done intensive learning about guns and butter. Did you know that with five units of labor, you can make either five tons of guns or 40 pounds of butter? Well, now you do, and you have Case, Fair, and Oster to thank for that.

Similar to McQuarrie and Simon* of Big Red Book fame and the unparalleled Harold Jacobs**, Case, Fair, and Oster have entered my life by being hand-selected to be my textbook writers for the semester. Their first production possibilities frontier example involves an economy that produces guns and/or butter using up to five units of labor (capital is fixed). The reason I have found myself studying guns and butter for the last three years comes down to one thing: graduation requirements.

In my senior year of high school, I was finally forced to fulfill my economics requirement so I could graduate at the end of the year. I didn't have room in my schedule for a full year of AP Economics, so I took half a year of honors economics. The book we happened to use was Case and Fair’s Principles of Microeconomics. This was the edition before they were joined by Oster. Anyway, that was the first time I encountered the guns and butter.

Then last year, I was looking to start my liberal studies requirements since I had physics credit from the AP Physics C exam. I had thought economics was interesting, so I decided to take introductory microeconomics, where everything is linear and lives in some sort economic utopia. The book we used was Principles of Microeconomics by Case, Fair, and Oster. Guns and butter, take two.

This year, the only liberal studies class that wasn't 4000-level with a title like “Gender roles in Paintings on Ancient Greek Pottery Shards” and fit into my schedule was Introductory Macroeconomics. I show up to the first class, where I am informed that for the first few weeks we will be reviewing certain microeconomic principles. At the second class, we quickly review the definitions of opportunity cost and several other terms, then start working on an example production possibilities frontier featuring none other than my friends guns and butter.

By this point, I’ve started wondering about this economy that only makes guns and butter. Are they a highly antagonistic society that needs high fat foods to have the energy to fight all their enemies? Do they shoot butter during battles since they don’t seem to have any bullets? Does butter really contain all the vitamins and minerals they need? Don’t Find out next time when our two shipwreck survivors on a desert island decide how to allocate their time between picking coconuts and catching fish.

*authors of Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach
*author of Geometry: Seeing, Doing, Understanding. Harold Jacobs is somewhat mathematically famous for his extensive use of real life examples of geometry in his textbook. When I took geometry in high school, my geometry teacher would refer to Harold by first name when she talked about particular problems. For example: “Here Harold uses the example of dividing up land to show Heron’s theorem.”