Mar 25, 2012

AFL

The Opportunity Cost of Friendship (and how sport can help)

1 Comment

I have often heard people say, “You can’t put a price on friendship.” To me, this has always been lazy thinking. Economists have long looked into the relationship between scarcity and choice; it’s called opportunity cost.

You have friends who represent an opportunity cost.

As the world’s single source of truth (Wikipedia) says, opportunity cost is ‘any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone.’

When you think scarcity, think your precious time. When you think choice, think friends or watching sport.

Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson, a man after my own heart, states in his Pyramid of Greatness, ‘Friends: One to three is sufficient.’

While three to me seems excessive, I know many people who currently have more. This is a worrying trend. In life, there are those people you dislike, who you would go out of your way to avoid. Next, there are those you are pretty much indifferent to. They have no impact on your life, good or bad. If they received a credit in the AMC drama of your life, it would be ‘woman in meeting’ or ‘disgusted co-worker’.

Then there are friends, for whom lazily lumping them into one big group actually cheapens the friendship category. We need better metrics and as always, sport provides the perfect solution.

For me there are a precious few who are true friends: they are worth catching up with over any alternative because they can out-entertain any other option.

I then have my ‘opportunity cost’ friends. This is a much wider group, which I run through some simple metrics to determine how good a friend they actually are. It’s important to note they are friends, we just want to rank them (Why? Why wouldn’t you?).

Let’s remember the opportunity cost definition, ‘the value of the next best alternative forgone’.

For example, a friend called ‘Bill’ (name is accurate to reflect how I feel about individual) invites me out to the pub on a Thursday night. The value of me spending time (and by extension our friendship) with Bill is the next best alternative foregone, in this case, watching a recorded A-League game.

This would seem like a good measurement of our friendship. Let’s for arguments sake (and realism) say I told Bill I couldn’t go due to another commitment. In this case you might say, well maybe then you’re not much of a friend of Bill’s and you’d be right. I’d already gone to the game in person the night before and I don’t even support either team. It was also a nil-all draw.

Let’s say though that instead the alternative was watching professional bowling and Bill had also mentioned he thought the footy might be on at the pub. In this instance, I would agree to come along.

I have now found the opportunity cost ‘range’ for my friendship with Bill. It’s below ‘pre-recorded A-League game I’ve already seen and don’t care about’ but above ‘watching ten pin bowling on TV.’

This calculation in itself is a key step. Once you have determined the ‘opportunity cost’ range for one friend, you can begin to plot your other friends with a clear baseline. Overall you should be able to plot all your friends between ‘Grand Final featuring your team’ right down to ‘junior badminton from Vietnam.’ The following diagram may help.

Now to many I know this seems a heartless approach to friendship but that doesn’t change the fact its true. To be fair, I know that to some people, I am an opportunity cost friend to them and I’m ok with that.

If we look at the opportunity cost approach to friendship more closely, we begin to see real differences between the range for men and women. The best way to measure this is to wait till you are out socially (for some of you this exercise may take some time).

It is easy to pick when a man is spending time with ‘opportunity cost friends’.

If you are male and in a relationship, you will spend far more time with the friends of your wife or girlfriend, as you are mostly too lazy to organise anything with your friends (or indeed anything social whatsoever).

A bloke will sit at dinner thinking ‘I could be watching the footy right now or the rugby. I’ve also got that NBA game on IQ and haven’t caught up with any NHL at all this week…. What did that guy say about IKEA just then? Oh no he’s looking at me like I’m meant to respond.”

A panicked response of “We have the Billy shelves. They hold things,” when the conversation was about how IKEA is a blight on design, tends to give the game away.

Proceeding to then play on his iPhone before making noises about ‘needing to head home due to a headache’ at about eight o’clock is another dead give away.

Wives and girlfriends are much harder to pick. Don’t be fooled, they feel the same about their partner’s friends and their own friends when it comes to opportunity cost.

Women however, have two things which prevent men from noticing: first, they are better mannered and classier than men. Secondly, men are born with a far lower ‘opportunity cost threshold.’

For men, actually doing something with a friend means the opportunity cost must be pretty low. This includes their very own friends. Just sitting on the couch flicking through shows you don’t want to watch is often a bar too high to jump.

“Hey mate, we should catch up this weekend.”

Subtext: It would be good to see you but gee, it will be a lot of effort organising it.

“That sounds good. Why don’t we pencil something in and I’ll call you closer to the weekend.”

Subtext: It would be good to catch up but you’re right about it being a lot of effort. Why don’t we vaguely commit to it now but leave it ’til later in the week and just act like we never had this conversation?

“Yeah that’s a good idea, pencil it in, speak to you later in the week.”

Subtext: Completely agree. I’m pretty sure you won’t call and I can just say work got hectic when we speak again in two months time. Also, the Vietnamese badminton is on Saturday night and it’s Tien Minh Nguyen going against Phu Cuong Nguyen.

In contrast your spouse’s conversation goes like this:

“We should do dinner this Saturday night. We haven’t caught up for almost a week.”

Subtext: My husband is having some people over to watch some badminton game and I hate his friend Gary.

“That sounds great. Lets lock it in. I’ve booked the restaurant while you were speaking, texted the girls and I already have seven confirmed.”

Subtext: Why are we still friends after all these years? Sure, we got along in school but that was fifteen years ago. I would much rather drink wine in the dark by myself than hear about your neuroses and your affair with Gary. I have been hoping you would get fat. As yet, I have been disappointed.

A women’s ‘next best alternative forgone’ must be far more significant than a man’s for them to not go to something because they feel far more guilt than men in blowing off a friend.

The same is true for single men. They will go out together far more than a man with a partner. This is because the opportunity cost of not going out is the chance to meet women, which will trump most sports except the finals (and you can go out after the final anyway).

For a man with a spouse, this is removed. He is a caveman with cable TV but with poorer social skills.

Now I’m sure I hear you saying ‘This can’t be true. I go out all the time with my friends and I’m a man’.

This is because of a coping mechanism that has developed over time where men do things together but only when they can change the opportunity cost equation.

To use my friend Bill as an example, remember he came in below a recorded A-League game? The coping mechanism will be to instead say ‘Why don’t you come over and watch the football with me? I will invite Tim, Geoff, Chook and Steve-o too.”

See how easy it is? This is why guys always see their friends around an activity, usually watching sport. If its something you already want to watch, no opportunity cost.

This is why you will never hear your boyfriend say, “Tim and I are just going to catch up for a coffee – we have no particular thing to discuss, we just haven’t seen each other in a while.”

This scenario has never happened in the history of the world and it never will and now you know why: the opportunity cost of friendship.

COMMENTS

Charlie Armstrong

Jun 03, 2014

Revelling in all your stuff mate [bloody hilarious] but compelled to comment on the quality of this piece - absolutely fantastic! Accurate.