Ch 1: Preferences

The chapter talked in length about exhausting your utility and how much baseball players make, but what stood out to me even more was the discussion on the contrasted preferences between cultures. "I nearly knock over my Starbucks latte in surprise and disgust." Wheelan explains that he said this after he heard that South American villagers were cutting down rainforest. Then he says "But I am not they "(7). These powerful and somewhat sarcastic statements resonate with me because it is not so obvious to us lazy Americans that the world doesn't revolve around our materialistic society. As I was reading the beginning of the portion of this chapters I,myself, thought about economics as a means to benefit my own atypical American life, but this portion highlighted economics as universally applicable.  Economics doesn't have to be about businesses or politics or whether not I should get a donut or a cupcake; economics is flexible to any culture system.