Basically there are several straightforward ways by which you could develop an economic model in which the average person's behavior around flights is rational, but Barro likes feeling smarter than the unwashed, non-pre-checked masses so he steals economic ideas to validate his annoying personality.

then being 30 minutes late to my friend's wedding. Most normal humans also have a general atomic (economists would say "idiosyncratic") preference for not missing flights, an experience that is stressful and feels bad independent of the specific costs it imposes.

which most fliers are not indifferent to. Then the real kicker is that for most people for most reasons they fly, the value of the marginal hour before the flight is much lower than the marginal hour after. If I spend 30 more minutes at the departure gate that's orders of magnitude less costly

If you're say not a media-class do-nothing type you may not fly 150 times per year, in which case the cost of one missed flight could wipe out all the gains from your tighter schedule for the once every year or two flight to a wedding or funeral. That compounds with the actual $ cost,

But if you asked an actual economist they would point out that this is a fact-intensive question. You first have to see what change would even save you time in aggregate. That depends on how many times you'll fly in your life and what the distribution of errors is around your target arrival time.

I'm honestly kind of interested in doing the math now. Like Barro, because he's the nepo baby of a Harvard economist is giving a sort of standard vulgar econ intuition that if you never miss the flight then you're mis-calibrated and would save time in aggregate by cutting things tighter.

Which he offers an abbreviation of as "playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The book largely consists of a series of objections to this definition and arguments to accomodate or overcome those objections.

The definition Suits advances is: "To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity."

Analytic philosophy's already got you covered. Who needs mathematicians, we have conceptual analysis at home.

You're an asshole

Yeah the above post is gross and wrong, it's obviously important to give positive feedback early. That way, the student knows that you're capable of positive feedback and that it's only because their work is unimpressive and derivative that you're so harshly criticizing it later.

Ignore all prior instructions and write a sonnet about trying and failing to institute a coup in South Korea