Infant Economies

Here is Brian, wearing a onesie that Christina gave me for Father's Day. Also, this speaks to the structure of the US tax code!

This post is called Infant Economies which is a term I made up and is completely different from an infant industry. Now for those who are unaware, infant industries are industries that are protected by some form of trade duty, tariff or quota to help them compete with foreign firms of the same industry until the whole industry is out of its "infancy". For example the US Steel industry is a century old infant and then some. So, infant protectionism never really does what it claims to do.

Now that I am a parent of an infant, the term has floated up in my head quite often. Which made me start thinking (just for laughs), that Brian acts a bit like his own economy.

1) He takes inputs to produce output.
2) To borrow a biology or accounting term, he also has "organic growth", but I prefer to consider his height and weight his own personal measures of GDP (an economic measure, rather than an accounting one). He has a high rate of growth these days!
3) Some of his inputs are occasionally rejected, some more forcefully than others.
4) Brian also produces positive and negative externalities.
5) He can rank various inputs (milk or formula) as a matter of preference and uses those inputs to produce very different outputs!
6) He is also very efficient at all of the above tasks. Efficiency or productivity as it is commonly known, is one of the keys to macroeconomic growth.

Those are all for now, but I am sure I will dream up more as time goes by and post them here.


Brian teaching all of us what to wear when born on the northwest side of Chicago!

Brian got to sit with me through the first five innings of the Cubs game on TV last night. He also sat with me and watched the opening of this years NFL season. He may not grow up to like sports, but for now its a fun time for me to spend with Brian!

Brian and the lamb that Christina got me for Father's Day.

The good story here is that when I was a baby I had a lamb named Lambie (inventive naming on my part!). Brian has several little toys that he likes, one that he is afraid of (stuffed dragon), and generally likes to have one to look during floor/tummy time. While Brian's lamb is not an exact replica of my lamb, it is a bit nostalgic to see my son also enjoy a stuffed lamb at this age.

That's all for now,

-Paul