I've been in Tarpon Springs, Florida, this week, which has a very strong Greek population. Several stores bragged about being part of a 1953 movie called Beneath the 12 Mile Reef, which I saw as a boy. What I remember about the movie was the remarkable underwater photography. (Indeed, it led to a 30-year love affair with scuba diving that took me all over the U.S., including Hawaii.)
What the movie-going public remembered about the movie was a Romeo-Juliet story, where a beautiful daughter of the Greeks falls in love with a handsome young son (played by a very young Robert Wagner) of the warring Anglos.
As a adult economist, I instead became curious why they were warring. It seems the Anglos were hunting for conch and sponges in the Florida Keys when there was some environmental event, like a Red Tide, making it uneconomical to harvest either conch or sponges. So, they migrated to Tarpon Springs, much to the chagrin of the Greeks who were already harvesting there. A "war" promptly and understandably broke out. The supply of harvesting grounds was fixed, but the demand to use those grounds increased. Voila, War !
Now, that's the problem with economics. You become blind to both beauty and love, in favor of simply understanding economic motivations. How sad . . . maybe, there should be a program like AA for recovering economists?
What the movie-going public remembered about the movie was a Romeo-Juliet story, where a beautiful daughter of the Greeks falls in love with a handsome young son (played by a very young Robert Wagner) of the warring Anglos.
As a adult economist, I instead became curious why they were warring. It seems the Anglos were hunting for conch and sponges in the Florida Keys when there was some environmental event, like a Red Tide, making it uneconomical to harvest either conch or sponges. So, they migrated to Tarpon Springs, much to the chagrin of the Greeks who were already harvesting there. A "war" promptly and understandably broke out. The supply of harvesting grounds was fixed, but the demand to use those grounds increased. Voila, War !
Now, that's the problem with economics. You become blind to both beauty and love, in favor of simply understanding economic motivations. How sad . . . maybe, there should be a program like AA for recovering economists?
