If you follow pop culture even a little bit, you recognize the reference in our title to Ben Stein’s portrayal of the boring economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Like the high school class staring vacantly as Stein’s character explains the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the Laffer Curve*, many of our clients fail to thoroughly consider economics, assuming that it is just financial calculations that should be left to the accounting department.
The scene works because economics is generally considered to be boring. Maybe this is because it is taught poorly, or maybe it has something to do with the terrible track record of macro-economic predictions. In any case, while most businesspeople have taken at least some economics, they tend to leave it behind at university like those nearly forgotten courses in psychology and sociology. Worse yet, many senior managers adopt the language of accountants when describing their businesses, sidestepping a real economic understanding of how their market and their business actually work.