Around this time last year, I attended a holiday on Franklin Street known as “Halloween.” The holiday was not like the Halloween I’d known as a lad: While all my peers were indeed wearing costumes, they were not soliciting candy from suburban houses. Instead, they were running wild on Franklin Street, yelling profanities and being Publicly Drunk While Under 21.
This nouveau Halloween celebration seemed fun for a while, but by the night’s end I’d witnessed enough blackouts, festive orange vomit and wrecked home decor to wonder whether college Halloween was really an “upgrade” from that of our childhoods.
Instead of spending our Halloween getting candy (treats), we now spend it on assorted mischievous acts (tricks). Why do we stop trick-or-treating as we get older, opting for tricks rather than treats?
Like the pitchfork of Satan (Halloween’s patron saint), the query’s answer has three prongs.
As we grow up, our trick-or-treat budget line expands. A budget line, in economic terms, represents the combination of goods one can afford.
Part-time jobs and allowances beginning in middle school expand our budget lines, allowing us to buy all the cheap candy that our stomachs, mass-marketed to by Mars, consider reasonable.
At that point, two effects occur: one, we begin to value candy less, because we can afford it with relative ease; two, parents take less pity on our richer selves, so they lower older kids’ candy handouts.
Here’s a second economic effect that makes us value tricks over treats as we age: preference shifts. Preferences, in economic terms, rank the order in which we prefer various goods to one another.
As kids, our ultimate preference in life is clear: candy. What could be better to a child than candy? The answer is nothing.
Yet as we transition to our tweens, teens and Seventeen magazine, our preferences shift. Instead of candy being our ultimate preference, influences like hormones and MTV cause us to value certain goods more than candy.
Around this time, we may rather be rambunctious with peers, get intimate with a coed or drink fermented beverages than consume Reese’s Pieces.
A third and final change occurs in college that summates the economic trifecta of fewer treats and more tricks.
