I’m Confused

A few weeks ago, during college football season, my friends and I were watching SportsCenter when the broadcaster matter-of-factly announced that the head football coach of some team, somewhere, was being paid $500,000 a year to coach some team, somewhere. Half a million dollars. My friends didn’t blink. There couldn’t have been a longer spectrum for me to be at the exact other end of. “Astounded” is a profound understatement for what I felt at that exact moment. Half a million dollars. I could pay my tuition 16 team times. Half a million dollars. I mean I love football as much as the next guy, but $500 thousand dollars seemed to me to be a bit extreme for putting a few “W”s on the board. $500,000. That’s more than the President of the United States’s, who humbly comes in at $400,000.  Obviously, the next thing I demanded to know of my friends was where does this egregious salary come from. Their knowledge of this was about equal to their interest in the matter in the first place. After some discussion we concluded ( and profusely hoped) that this salary came from the revenue generated by the football department. I realized afterwards, that the salary of some coach of some team, somewhere was the price of tea in China. The important thing that I did realize, however, is that we really have no idea where our money goes. The roughly thirty grand that I pay in tuition every year could be putting gas in Bill O’Brian’s car, and I wouldn’t even know it. I guess what I’m confused about, is why we, as consumers, don’t put more stock into finding out exactly where our money is going. My econ book says that each dollar spent is equal to a dollar in revenue to some worker, somewhere. But this isn’t a zero-sum life, so how can that be? We see a textbook on sale for $200. We see that same textbook on sale at Amazon for $90. How come we’re not more interested in finding out the cause of the mark-ups? Perhaps it’s because no one has ever really put much thought into it. Or perhaps it’s because we agree that the price we’re paying is equal to the value of what we’re purchasing, and if a price increases, lets just automatically attribute this to inflation because a store-owner or big box company would  NEVER increase it’s prices up because demand is up and they think there is a possibility of earning an extra buck.  Or maybe, we just don’t care. Maybe we just want our good and we want it now. Either way, I think we should definitely be more invested in finding out where our money goes and it confuses my why people aren’t more interested in this.