Economies of Scope in Personal Life

• John Vandivier

One of the reasons I got interested in economics is because you can apply it in your personal life. Done right, it's very practical.

Here are some ways to leverage <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scope">gains from scope in your personal life:

  1. Underclothes that work for work or the gym
    1. Black fruit of the loom undershirts
    2. Thin black dress socks - fold them over at the gym. Or, if your work environment is casual then where gym socks to work.
    3. If permitted in your workplace, where gym shoes to work.
    4. Adidas Climalite Briefs are magic things like compression shorts but comfortable.
  2. Trucks
    1. If you are actually going to haul stuff these can be great for economies of scope. Otherwise you are wasting gas money.
  3. Certain cooking ingredients
    1. Eggs, potatoes, milk and so on. These ingredients can be used in many different recipes and perhaps consumed on their own.
  4. Github. If you upload code to a Github account you can get all these benefits at once:
    1. A regular work or corporate tool to facilitate day job productivity
    2. Ongoing skill development for professional coders
    3. Build a visible online portfolio and reputation as a programmer, even if you are just trying to get your first job.
    4. Build a visible online portfolio and reputation as an industry specialist. That is, if you are contributing code which is useful to some industry.
      1. Like coding a budget calculator or something could establish you not only as a coder but as a finance dude.
    5. Learning as a student in school.
    6. Social networking.
    7. Contribute to worldwide quality of life through open source
  5. Investing in your own company
    1. Warning! This is risky. There are some gains to scope though.
    2. Maybe you should try to calculate your ROR? Return on risk? Also is ROR a cool new thing I just made or has it been around? I should look…