This morning I read an editorial from an Oklahoma newspaper arguing that if we had only already started to extract oil from the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, we wouldn’t be facing higher gasoline prices now. I sighed.
I got an e-mail from a friend several weeks ago urging me to buy my gasoline from a list of several companies that supposedly do not get crude oil from Iraq and to avoid buying any from another list of companies that do. I sighed then, too.
Another friend recently told me of a fund-raising message received from a church that has had major problems with sexual abuse committed by clergy. The fund-raisers emphasized that substantial payments being made to victims came out of other funds and that “none of your donations made will go to pay any legal fees or settlements.” I sighed yet again.
A relative spoke enthusiastically about a new ethanol plant under study in a South Dakota town within 25 minutes of the Minnesota state line. “This will really help prices for South Dakota corn producers,” he asserted enthusiastically. Guess what? I sighed.
Life as an economist would be significantly less frustrating if more people understood the simple word “fungible.” Coming from the same Latin root as “function,” two things are fungible if one can serve some purpose just as well as the other.
First-year law students learn the term in commercial law courses where they are taught that people running public warehouses have to keep their customers’ property separate unless the goods are “fungible.” In other words, if I bring a load of my furniture to store in a warehouse, the warehouseman has to keep my tables and beds separate from those of other people. But if I bring in 100 bushels of No. 2 yellow corn, it may legally be mixed with all the other No. 2 yellow corn brought in by others.
The important lesson for economics is that when goods are fungible, making or maintaining false distinctions as to source or purpose is meaningless.
Money and commodities such as corn, crude oil and gasoline are highly fungible. The distinctions drawn in the cases above made me sigh because all the people making the distinctions obviously did not realize how flat their reasoning was.
Despite much public and late-night-comedian sentiment to the contrary, global markets for crude oil and gasoline are highly integrated and highly efficient. The level of overall U.S. consumption has significant effects on world oil and gasoline prices. Iraq’s output has some effect. Alaska National Wildlife Refuge production would have virtually no effect since even its proponents acknowledge that output there would be small relative to U.S. or global production and usage.
As long as oil prices are determined by worldwide supply and demand, which they are, and the U.S. petroleum market is integrated with world markets, which it is, the specifics of where U.S. consumers buy gasoline or from which countries oil shipments come are absolutely irrelevant to oil and gas prices. Nor do such specifics have any real effect on the oil income or market power of nations such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
Yes, a widespread consumer boycott of specific firms that get crude from these countries may temporarily hurt those firm’s sales and give them an incentive to buy elsewhere. But the oil that Iraq formerly sold to these firms will go elsewhere in the world. The same is true for the church that promised no donations would go to pay legal fees or settlements. Money is even more fungible than oil and corn. If it is using money from some other dedicated fund to pay abuse damages, then those funds no longer are available to meet other needs of the church, needs which will have to be met somehow or which will have to go unmet. The fact that the checks sent in response to a new fund-raising campaign are segregated in a special account is essentially meaningless.
Similarly, to the extent that ethanol subsidies from the taxpayers of South Dakota, or of Minnesota for that matter, raise corn prices by increasing corn usage, they raise it for corn producers across the globe. Yes, because of transportation costs, corn price increases will be highest close to the ethanol plant and will decrease as one moves farther away. Local farmers will capture some of the subsidy. But there is no way that any single state can limit the overall effects of subsidizing a commodity to producers within its boundaries.
The same, of course, is true, of a single nation. When the United States tried to raise farm prices in the 1980s and 1990s by paying farmers not to produce, prices did rise. But, limited only by transportation costs, prices rose for corn producers in Northern Italy and Northern Argentina as well as in the Midwestern United States.
Lesson: When dealing with money or any other “fungible commodity” one’s options frequently are pretty limited. Costs and benefits will flow much more broadly than you may like, but there is little you can do about it.
© 2003 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.