How many tabs do you have open?
Nearly two-thirds of Brits keep five or fewer open, according to YouGov. Who exactly are these people?
Economists are not regular people. Consider how one recently attempted to explain to me the way in which she goes about booking concert tickets. Six months out, she purchases the seats for, say, £100 each. (For the sake of simple maths, and given the spiralling cost of attending any live event these days, we will have to assume this concert is taking place in 1993.)
But come the big day, it all starts to go wrong. There’s a Tube strike on, the heavens have opened and her cold still hasn’t lifted. In other words, the opportunity cost has been hijacked by an evil dynamic pricing monkey. Some people would push on regardless. They aren’t going to get that £200 back (what the economist would call a sunk cost but now really isn’t the time) and so they are going to get their money’s worth.
But my economist friend has no such compunction. Because, as she tells it, she didn’t purchase £200-worth of concert tickets. Rather, she bought the opportunity of going. If, as it transpired, half an entire orbit around the sun later, she no longer felt like going, that was fine. She already got what she paid for.
Put it on my tab
Earlier this month, YouGov asked a representative group of 5,382 British adults how many tabs they had open — across all windows — when using a desktop or laptop computer. The responses sent me into proper “I no longer understand my country” territory.
Almost two-thirds said they had five or fewer tabs open. Three-quarters had less than 10 on the go. There was little variation across gender, age or social class — which somehow made it worse.
