Unexpected Authority

            I have been in Detroit over the weekend. ..When it comes to power growing up, I was at the mercy of the parents, teachers, and whatever authority felt like taking control. The specific one I will focus on is the parent child relationship. I will try to make this a bit broad as there may be value in a few stories.

            So there is the obvious one. My parents often tell us to clean the house or cut the grass. After that, there is minor supervision until work is either not getting done (sometimes a form of wrathful chaos ensues) or something needs to be clarified. Then the task is completed. But there is a certain amount of freedom in delegating tasks within the three children and that sometimes includes the father of the household. There is a certain amount of freedom in who gets to do what. It is often an attempt to come up with something fair. One individual gets the larger set of grass to cut, while the other has the wonderful task of PUP (picking up poop), one of the disadvantages of a dog. Anyway the tasks are then completed with the amount of effort and detail the individual inputs into the action.  There is a certain amount of authority under the authority of the parents when it comes to cleaning.

            My next example is a story from my childhood, which may apply. We had grown pumpkins when we were younger and do to a surplus of pumpkins, our mother instructed us to go out and give the block of neighbors our extras. These were some solid pumpkins. Well, it turns out people are suckers for three small children giving away large orange spherical gourds.  Our neighbors began offering payment for our door to door delivery. While we were instructed to give them away, we took it a bit farther and began to make up some prices for our pumpkins.  I guess we took a certain amount of authority into our own hands even though it was not designated for us. We made everything up on the fly and became door to door sales munchkins. I remember making a fairly good profit too. Of course everything was reversed once we got back to our head authority with an unexpected supply of dollars. We were required to return our well earned dollars. I guess the purpose of the pumpkins was just to be nice and nothing was expected in return. (Possibly favor within the neighborhood, but I think it was genuine selflessness)

            My guess for relation to economics is that this is to demonstrate that leaders cannot control everything, and there is often going to be some responsibility that falls on individuals in non leadership positions. This sort of falls right after the idea of monitoring. Now we are going to assume some unexpected leadership will fall on the lower levels that we accept as part of the normal process. Maybe we will be analyzing what the effects of this are. Or we will just talk about it.