Where There's a Will, There's a Way?

Steven Horwitz

That's the title of this week's column at the Freeman Online.  A snippet:

Recently I had cause to think about another aphorism that looks different when we shine some economics on it.  In the course of an online discussion about how to address the need for budget cuts on my campus, one member of the campus community urged us to find a way to do so without cutting the jobs of hourly or clerical staff.  Surely, he argued, there must be some way around this, perhaps by job-sharing or other strategies.  Eventually he said that if there is a will on the part of the faculty to save those jobs, there is a way.

And perhaps there is.  But perhaps there isn’t.  Taken literally, the expression says that if enough people want something to happen badly enough, it will happen.

The problem, of course, is that wishing doesn’t make it so.  And this is no less true in the social world than elsewhere.  In fact, it is probably more true there, and the consequences of thinking that wishing can make it so are much larger than they are in many other places.

Comments

[Rasneet Sethi]

Budget cuts have effected the education a lot. We are paying more and the faculty is getting less. Where is the funding going? Neither the students nor the faculty is able to help. We all are willing to find a solution to this huge problem but way is hard to find. Serious efforts have to be made to solve the budget cut problem. Hope we all find a way soon.

[topills.com review]

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