Opportunities Squandered in St. Louis Affect All of Missouri

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Opportunity cost. The concept is so simple that a first-grader could understand it. I know, because I used to teach it to first-graders. Had you walked past my classroom at just the right time, you might have heard 20-something first graders chanting, “Opportunity cost is the opportunity lost.” The students understood that our decisions have consequences. It was a lesson they learned every time they went out to recess. If they chose to play kickball, they couldn’t play basketball. This basic life lesson bears some repeating for the adults who set policy in our state.

Though the term opportunity cost was not coined until 1914, French economist and writer Frédéric Bastiat provided one of the most salient examples of the concept in his 1850 work, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Using the parable of the broken window, Bastiat explained how money being spent on one activity is money that cannot be put to more productive use elsewhere. Imagine that a pane of glass is broken at a baker’s shop. Obviously, the money that the baker must pay to have it repaired becomes revenue for the window repair man. Anyone walking by can see the repair man doing work and recognize that he’ll be paid for his labor. But it makes no sense to look at the repair man’s good fortune in isolation. Doing so would lead to the harebrained conclusion that breaking windows leads to economic growth! Instead we need to remember that, had the window stayed intact, the baker could have done something else productive with the money. The problem is that we can’t see what the baker could have done with the money—only what he actually did with it.

Unfortunately, our board of aldermen and other policymakers regularly make decisions based on what they see without accounting for what they can’t see. Take for example the earnings tax in Saint Louis. Policymakers can see the revenue generated by the tax, but they can’t see the economic activity that has been lost. They can’t see the jobs that might have been created had those dollars been reinvested by the businesses. Nor can they see the economic activity that might have been generated if those dollars had remained in workers’ pockets.

Think about opportunity cost the next time you see a ribbon-cutting at some new development that has received tax breaks or some other form of support from the government. Whether it is a property that has been blighted and given property tax abatements for development in the Central West End or a big box store that receives tax-increment financing, we can see the product of those government actions. We cannot see the harm they do to other businesses through unfair economic competition.

I was reminded of these ideas when I read Lindenwood economist Howard Wall’s most recent paper for the Show-Me Institute, “Is Growth in Outstate Missouri Tied to Growth in the Saint Louis and Kansas City Metro Areas?” Wall uses an econometric model known as Granger-causality to estimate the impact of employment growth in Saint Louis and Kansas City on the rest of the state. He finds a statistically significant downstream relationship between Saint Louis and the rest of Missouri. That is, employment growth in Saint Louis leads to employment growth in the state. He estimates that a 1 percentage point increase in growth in Saint Louis would lead to an increase of 0.35 percentage points in outstate Missouri within two or three years. Why this connection exists (he doesn’t find a similar relationship in Kansas City) is a matter for some hypothesizing or future research. Nevertheless, the point is clear—Saint Louis is an economic driver for the state.

While Wall’s paper does not deal directly with the idea of opportunity cost, his findings make it all the more important for policymakers to understand the importance of their actions. When they support an earnings tax or other policies that harm the city’s economic growth, they are hurting the economic growth of the entire state.

Missourians, not just those who live in the city, benefit from a thriving Saint Louis economy. That’s why we need policymakers to put in place pro-growth policies that create the economic conditions for the market to thrive.