My wife and I found ourselves in Orlando a few months ago for a leadership conference supporting our home business with doTERRA (Check her out over at www.smallqueendom.com). She had made flight arrangements beforehand and found an awesome deal flying out of a regional airport nearby that had us both arriving and departing with some extra downtime without kids. However, when we checked the departure time again, it turned out that what we thought was a flight rather early in the morning was actually a very late flight in the evening leaving us with virtually an entire day in Orlando before leaving for home.
Luckily, my wife being the encouraging and inspiring thing she is, decided that instead of sitting by the pool reading (my vote, I lost) we would take advantage of the day and have a little adventure at the Universal Orlando amusement park. So we took an Uber after check-out, braved the draconian metal detectors and X-ray scanners and headed to the Islands of Adventure.
But while you can take the economist away from the pool, you can’t take the thoughts away from the eco…alright, that doesn’t work. But what I mean to say is that while I did enjoy the day, and while my senses were often assaulted with all sorts of sights and sounds, I couldn’t help but see so many concepts of economics playing out all around me.
Estimated Wait Times: AKA Opportunity Costs and Economic Calculation
One of the first illustrations that occurred to me as we roamed the different areas of the park was that of opportunity costs and economic calculation. As you can imagine, one of the main types of attractions in an amusement park are rides and Universal was no exception. And with those attractions has historically come time waiting in line. An amusement park is a rather closed system in which to view these principles. Everyone, no matter their income level or social status, pays the same entry fee, they enjoy the same rides together, and they only have a certain number of core hours to enjoy the park before it closes for the day. A single mother with two jobs may stand in line next to a corporate executive and both have the same precious few hours to ride.
In the past, wait times have been a mystery and a gamble but thankfully in the modern age some solutions have been devised. As we walked around looking for a ride that interested us, I noticed that many of the line entrances had simple time displays that showed the current average wait time for the ride. The simple addition of an average wait time clock at the beginning of each ride’s queue greatly helps visitors plan and make decisions. In fact, the addition of these clocks actually makes much more sense when seen as what they truly are: prices.
Imagine going grocery shopping with $100 and perusing the aisles but finding that there are no prices listed anywhere. Imagine the chaos that would ensue as shoppers did their best to guess what items would fit their budget, attempting to pay the cashiers only to find that halfway through their selections they were told they had all they could afford. Or, just as inefficient, imagine that they tried to be conservative with their selections in order to avoid such a fiasco only to find that they had chosen far too few items and had a large surplus of funds left over and would have to visit again to fully utilize their budget. Imagine the lack of satisfaction and the inefficiency of the whole enterprise without prices.
The same can be said of time. The simple act of quantifying the level of time commitment that a ride would demand of us made it much easier for us to make decisions about what we thought was worth our time and what we could forego. Seeing a range of average times at various levels of attraction helped us to gauge the overall traffic level in the park. It helped us to better plan what and when we would ride. And this was especially necessary since we had to make efficient use of our time with a hard flight deadline later in the evening. Instead of inefficient guessing that would leave us stranded in a long line for a ride we only halfway cared to be on, we were able to make wiser choices all around.
A Little City in the Middle of Orlando
For lunch, we decided to try The Toothsome Chocolate Emporium. It was a very elaborately themed restaurant set in a steampunk/Victorian universe with chocolate incorporated into just about every dish possible on the menu. It ended up being quite the wait not only to be seated but for the food itself and would probably constitute the least enjoyable aspect of the entire trip. If only they had as accurate of a system for gauging wait times for seating and menu items as the rest of the park!
But while we waited, we did enjoy a nice view of our surroundings. There was a winding riverway going right through the park, with a walkway on either side lined with shops and restaurants, an ornate bridge connecting the two sides. There were seating benches, trash cans, landscaping and street lamps. To put it briefly: I saw the makings of a city.
For those who frequent amusement parks more often than I, or for those who love certain parks like Disney or Universal, it may come as no surprise that these parks have quite the elaborate system of infrastructure in place. And when you think about it, these parks almost constitute little islands of self-sustained civilization. They often have their own waterways, their own roads and walkways, their own security systems and personnel, their own maintenance crews, sewer systems, backup electricity systems, and so on.
In short, it struck me that these parks took it upon themselves to construct and manage all of these separate tasks at their own risk and at their own expense. Now, I understand that they probably depended on at least some outside municipal assistance. They obviously did not maintain the roads to the park. They probably did not generate all of their own electricity or water. They did not have to support their own courts.
But in a slightly different world, they could. If all of the various systems I perceived could be sustained and justified within their own economic activity, then perhaps there was hope that it could be done elsewhere as well. I imagined apartment complexes and symbiotic relationships between the employees and business owners that would effectively allow them to never have to leave this little oasis and enjoy all that it had to offer. At the least, it renewed my sense of wonder and my curiosity at the possibility of a more sustainable and more voluntary society.
What Does Harry Potter Have to Do With Any of This?
As part of our research before coming to Universal Studios, which was admittedly scant, we were able to deduce that some of the major attractions were themed after Jurassic Park and Harry Potter. While my wife and I are both very much children of the ’90s and adore Jurassic Park, neither of us have historically been Harry Potter fanatics, neither of us having read the books and I alone having seen the films. Nevertheless, after taking a walk through the delightful Jurassic Park welcome center, we took a stroll through the Harry Potter village, modeled after the Hogsmeade Village and Diagon Alley settings. As usual, I found myself explaining what I could in whatever ways would make sense to an uninitiated wife.
Nevertheless, we were able to find some very fun attractions while we were there. The set decoration and walkway theming were exquisite, recreating the intricacies of magical shops and a sort of medieval or Oxfordian aesthetic in a very immersive way. The forced perspective Hogwarts School castle was, of course, impressive, and once inside, the curated spaces along the length of the waiting line were equally amazing.
But, above all, I was struck with a singular impression. Upon walking through countless winding roads of rides upon food carts upon buildings and set pieces, I had a simple thought. That none of this existed thirty years ago. Not the characters. Not the settings. Not the films or books or television shows they were based upon. Nothing.
And this illustrates perhaps one of the most under-realized economic concepts of our time: that wealth is created, not just redistributed. The simple fact is that, had Spielberg not directed Jurassic Park, and had Michael Crichton not written the novel, none of what I had experienced would have existed. And had J.K. Rowling not written the Harry Potter novels, not taken countless disparate mythological and literary concepts and mashed them together into a children’s sensation, there would be no Harry Potter village here.
And equally as important, if these licenses had not been used as a base for the attractions of Universal Orlando, far fewer people would even be drawn to travel here. This was no traditional county fair complete with requisite Ferris wheel, tilt-a-whirl, and funhouse. This was a unique invention, existing only here, only now. And this fact might represent the deciding factor in determining whether a family comes here, whether we would come here. These ideas, these icons of popular culture, held value, real subjective value. And that value was created, as something far greater than just the sum of its parts. And this happens every single day.
The Bottom Line
Economics underlies everything that we do and everything around us, whether we recognize it or not. Indeed, as those like MIses of the Austrian school have observed, the very mechanism of human action is suffused with economic calculation. And the more perceptive we are to the ways in which our actions are governed by these economic principles, the more beautiful and full of possibility our lives can become. So next time you’re at an amusement park, be sure to take a moment, take a deep breath, and smell the praxeology.