Stephen Happel would never waste his time standing in a long line to buy tickets to a baseball game.
That, he would insist, is a waste of opportunity costs, especially when there are scalpers just waiting to sell their extra tickets.
And if you weren't convinced by that logic, he'd be happy to take you aside and explain a few rudimentary theories of supply and demand, not to the mention the clear advantages of capitalism.
Where other economics professors teach, Happel preaches. And practices.
For the past 27 years, Happel, 55, has taught economics at Arizona State University with a fervor and conviction few other professors can match. For him, economics is much more than theory. It's the way people live. It's the way he lives.
Colleague Kay Faris, assistant dean of undergraduate programs in the W. P. Carey School of Business, said Happel has an amazing ability to apply economics to almost any situation.
"He is so funny because everything in life he can look at from an economics perspective," said Faris who worked with Happel when he was an associate dean in the College of Business undergraduate program.
"Whether it's anything in your daily life, something to do with family, friends, of course work-related things as well, running the college, he would relate it to economics."
In Theory and In Practice
Years ago, when the business faculty was getting ready to move into a new building, professors began scrambling for office space. Who would get the nice corner offices with the windows? Who would get the offices without windows?
While other departments gave senior professors their first choice, Happel came up with another suggestion: Why not auction off the offices? Those professors who bid the most would get the window office.
It was vintage Happel, and it worked.
Professors put in their bids, the offices were allocated and the department had a pool of money that was turned into student scholarship money. (Happel, by the way, opted for an inexpensive, windowless office.)
Other of Happel's proposals, however, have been greeted with less enthusiastic responses.
For example, when he wrote a series of articles a few years ago defending ticket scalping, members of the state Legislature and Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo were less than amused.
Happel proposed bringing some order to the whole ticket scalping enterprise. Put all scalpers into a legalized ticket resale area near the baseball stadium and let them compete with the box office, he said.
Naturally, Colangelo didn't think that was such a good idea.
Happel once again defended ticket scalpers when the 2001 Arizona Legislature attempted to outlaw ticket scalping after a public uproar about the cost of getting tickets to see the Diamondbacks play in their first World Series.
Happel said he doesn't mind making people furious, at least when there's an important economic principle at stake.
"Free market ticket scalping is your litmus test to whether it (ticket scalping] is going to work or not," he said.
But while Happel will rarely back down from a debate, he prizes himself on using logic rather than emotion to win an argument.
"There is no one on the face of the Earth that I would not talk economics with," he said. "You can go tooth and nail with someone and then go out and have a drink with them and not want to punch them out."
In fact, what annoys Happel most is when people use their hearts, rather than their brains, to make decisions.
Many times, people fail to think through how their decisions will affect others because they get caught up in emotions like envy and greed, he said.
"In many ways, the ugliest of all human emotions is envy," he said.
It's especially important for public officials and those in positions of power, such as the International Monetary Fund, to take into account the consequences of their economic decisions.
"I don't mind people screwing up, but at least when you make recommendations, please think it through," he said. "You see all of this devastation, and that's just as bad as what terrorists do."
Getting started
Happel grew up in a small mid-western town, next to a cornfield and close to the Mississippi River.
His life in Quincy, Ill., population about 30,000, was, in some ways, right out of one of Mark Twain's book.
"I was the oldest of five kids and my parents just loved me," he said. "So I did have an idyllic childhood."
After graduating from high school, he left for the University of Missouri to study mathematics.
But then he stumbled into an economics class and got a 'D' on his first exam. "I thought, 'Boy, this is a lot harder than I thought.' So I enjoyed the challenge of econ," he said.
He saw economics as a way for people to better themselves, and economic policy as a way to help the disadvantaged.
"I think in retrospect, it fit in with my life and the way I was raised, which is that I like to see people happy," he said.
Shortly after graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics in 1969, Happel went to Duke University to obtain his Ph.D. in economics. But before long, he quit and went to work at a bowling alley.
"I had burned out on school," he said. "I had gone from kindergarten to graduate school and just said 'Oh man, do I have to keep writing papers?'"
He said he was also "dealing with some difficult people at Duke at the time. I was hearing some things I didn't like, and I didn't like the chairman of the economics department."
The break turned out to be a good thing for him.
"I read a lot of Friedman and Schumpater, and these people stressed individual freedoms, individual choice, but with responsibility," he said. "You can do whatever you want to do, so you try to make your decisions such that hopefully you're better off and those around you are better off, and recognizing that when you make a bad decision, you should pay the price for it."
He returned to Duke - and the formal study of economics - a few years later.
Roy Weintraub, a professor of economics at Duke and Happel's thesis director, said that as a student, Happel "was a ferociously and theoretically gained poker player with respect to economics. It was clear that he wanted to be in an environment where he could eventually teach applied economics."
After graduating from Duke, Happel taught economics at North Carolina State University for two years before coming to ASU in 1975.
Inside the Classroom
At nearly 6-feet, 6-inches tall, Happel's snow-white head comes dangerously close to touching the door frame as he enters his classroom for a round of "Economics 111" with 300-some undergraduates.
He carries only a set of simple plastic overheads and rainbow colored markers.
Even without power-point presentations and fancy graphics, Happel manages to make what can be a dry subject interesting.
He does it by making students see how economics applies to their lives.
"I think the bottom line is that I like being a student and I like students," he said. "It's whether you can catch the crowd's attention, and if you can catch their attention, they'll go along on the ride with you - holy moly - 'cause they all want to learn stuff that will help them later on in life, and how they can use certain ideas to make the right decisions."
His goal for each new batch of students is to get them to think critically.
"This is not a class where you say 'I know in my heart' this is right,'" Happel said. "No, we're operating from the mind here, and what econ has shown me is that you may have the best of intentions in trying to make the world a better place, but if you don't understand the laws of economics, you're likely to screw it up and make it a worse place."
He uses Ted Kennedy as an example.
Senator Kennedy, D-Mass., constantly lobbies to increase the minimum wage as a way to help the poor, Happel tells his students. But Kennedy is wrong.
When the minimum wage is raised, demand increases for higher-skilled workers, and the supply of poor, low-skilled workers is left behind.
"I mean, sheesh...Ted, it's not going to help the crowd you're trying to help. I mean get real," he says.
Then there's the issue of pay for women.
Should a women's studies professor get paid the same as an economics professor?
To him the answer is simple: Yes. Less.
"We economists have a very simple answer for this: demand and supply - live with it" he said. "It's a lot tougher to go off to graduate school and go through intense mathematical training then it is to read articles."
The same principle applies to ditch diggers and baseball pitchers, he said.
"Life isn't based on input, and value isn't based upon input," he said. "It's based on the quality and demand of what you are producing, and it's based on the number of other people that can supply what you are supplying."
Ann Hibnerkoblitz, a women's studies professor, sees it differently.
"It seems like an extremely oversimplified generalization, that if we were to take field by field in light of categorization of what's easy and hard, he would wind up not looking very logical," she said.
Nancy Roberts, also an economics professor, sides with Happel that "life is one big allocation problem. There is a reason why you pay engineering and business professors more."
While his students may not agree with some of Happel's conservative views, they seem to enjoy listening to them. They laugh at his examples of befuddled politicians and their poor economic decisions.
Chris Haworth a freshman business major taking his first economics course, said Happel's principles of macroeconomics have been anything but boring.
"He's great," he said. "I respect his conservative views."
Another business freshman, Kristen Cruzan, who described high school economics as boring, said, "I never really thought about how economics was applied to my life until being in his class."
Happel's teaching has earned him the Arizona Professor of the Year and ASU Student Affairs Outstanding Faculty member awards.
His secret to good teaching?
"I have great enthusiasm and passion for the stuff I teach, so I think that comes across to my students," he said. "My primary responsibility is to create a tremendous amount of self-confidence for a student in economics so that they can hold their own in a discussion with anyone on the face of the Earth."
Taking it home
Happel is what Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, would call a "monetarist," meaning that the government should set up the rules of the game, and then the game should be played out without the government intervening.
It's similar to baseball, where the umpire enforces the rules but doesn't become involved in the game.
At the heart of the theory is a belief in individual choice - even when the individual choice involves one's own daughter.
As a child, Happel's daughter, Sarah, could spend her allowance as she saw fit. When it came time to select a college and a major, again, the choices were hers.
"He was happy as long as his kids were happy," said the 22-year-old, who ended up choosing a field - supply chain management - close to her father's heart. "I honestly feel that out of everyone I know, I was least pressured into selecting a major they wanted."
There were times when being the daughter of an economist paid off, Sarah said - and not just when she was doing homework. Because of her father's passion for ticket scalping, Sarah got to attend nearly every concert she wanted.
There was only one time when Happel's mastery of the mechanics of ticket scalping failed to pay off, she said. That was when he bought extra tickets for a "New Kids on the Block" concert with the intention of scalping them. But he overestimated the demand, and when he couldn't sell the tickets, he had to give them away.
Happel said applying his theories to the raising of a child meant he couldn't always get his way.
"You have to let them know that mistakes happen, and how to avoid mistakes," he said. "There were many times when you give way and let them (do what they want), understanding, showing in the same process, that with benefits, comes costs...You can't always get what you want, and it's recognizing that there are opportunity costs."
Opportunity cost is one of Happel's favorite theories. It means that for every choice made, something of greater or lesser value is given up.
When Sarah was debating whether to take a job modeling or stay in school, her father jumped right in with an opportunity-cost argument.
"It was the case of: 'If I'm not in class, then I'll be modeling, but I will have to take time off school,' is what he said to me, and vice-versa," she said.
Sarah chose modeling in the short-term, but planned to return to school to finish her degree.
Hoping for a legacy
When he's not teaching, Happel travels around the country speaking at various economic conferences and gatherings, espousing his theories for real-world economists like the Federal Reserve Bank and the California Bankers Association.
He most often talks about issues in the banking industry, and how the industry's choices can affect billions of people.
And when he's not discussing the finer points of the banking industry, he continues to research ticket scalping and the laws that surround it. He hopes to create a national ticket scalping trading market, similar to that of eBay.
He enjoys his work beyond the University, saying that it helps him become a better teacher.
"If you're really going to be a teacher that remains on the cutting edge, you need to bring in new ideas that can constantly be debated," he said.
As he gets older, he said the response he gets from students, as well as the awards, mean more and more to him.
He's come to realize that "there are very good teachers that don't earn those awards ... (teachers who) are very gifted and talented people."
When he's "forced" to retire, which he hopes is still a ways off, he hopes to be remembered as someone who set high standards and who had a positive impact on his students, his college and the University.
"At the moment, I don't really want to retire," he said with a chuckle. "I may change my mind as I get older, though."
Tony Ku is the Managing Editor of The State Press. Reach him at tony.ku@asu.edu.
