The Outstater
Custer’s Vindication and More
WE SORELY MISS the late Norman Van Cott, our curmudgeon and senior adjunct. Van Cott claimed to have wandered into an economics Ph.D. while looking for something more useful to do. Nonetheless, he left us with two sterling insights, one on the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the other on rabid do-goodism.
First, the battle. Writing in the Journal of Economic Education, Van Cott noted that a primary source of military intelligence for the U.S. Army in 1876 was the count of Native Americans on reservations. Logically, the more warriors on the reservations should have meant fewer out on warpaths.
“But who counted the Indians?” the professor wanted to know.
The answer was government agents, according to a respected historian of the battle, Evan Connell. The reservation agents’ salaries varied directly with reservation populations. This provided an incentive for the agents to overstate the count.
In fact, the agents reported 37,391 Native Americans on reservations before the battle but a count afterward could find only 11,660. It is reasonable to believe, Van Cott argued, that Custer thought he was running to ground a relatively small party of warriors when in fact he was about to be surrounded by what may have been three times as many.
So, George Armstrong Custer was not done in by the white man’s arrogance or even incompetent or jealous senior officers, two of the more popular explanations. He was killed by a self-serving frontier bureaucracy.
Now to the do-goodism. Dr. Van Cott took mischievous pleasure in trolling a Muncie business’s annual clean-up day in which its employees were sent from their desks to go out into the community to pick up trash in parks, paint playground equipment, bag yard waste for the elderly, that sort of thing.
Van Cott would greet this self-congratulatory announcement by quoting Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments”: “It is not from the benevolence of the Butcher, the Brewer or the Baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
He would then explain that the company’s volunteer day actually was a net loss to the community, that in theory it would be better to keep the workers at their desks doing whatever it was they did in a normal work day.
Van Cott’s position was of course greeted by a flurry of outraged letters to the local newspaper. But I asked my assistant Grok to compare the economic value of the employees of a typical restaurant staying on the job with that of volunteering for community service. Grok estimates that Van Cott’s position was more valuable by magnitudes. Here is the comparison:
Restaurant Staying Open (one normal day)
Daily revenue: Common benchmarks for an average or small independent restaurant are around $1,350 (≈47 transactions at ≈$27 average ticket). More realistic for a typical neighborhood full-service/casual place is $2,000–$5,000 (higher for busier locations or weekends; some sources put new or average units higher still).
Value created: Revenue is a lower bound on customer willingness-to-pay. Add consumer surplus (the extra value diners get above the price paid — often substantial for meals/experiences) plus producer surplus (wages, tips, and any profit). A conservative estimate of net economic value generated that day is still in the $1,500–$6,000+ range after accounting for food, labor, and other variable costs (prime costs often run 60–70 percent of sales). The full social value of the output is higher.
Closing for Park Trash Pickup
Labor input: Assume 15–20 employees working a full day (or a substantial portion) on litter collection → roughly 100–150 person-hours.
Valuing the labor: Independent Sector’s 2025 estimate of volunteer time is $36.14 per hour nationally (based on average private-sector production/non-supervisory wages plus benefits). That puts a raw “value of time” of $3,600–$5,400. But this overstates the net social benefit of the cleanup, because these workers are not specialized in efficient litter removal and the activity replaces higher-value specialized work.
With those figures in hand, I can see Norman diving back into the letters-to-the-editor column with another quote from Adam Smith:
“Every individual neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote a (good) end which was no part of his intention.”
Rest in peace, Professor Van Cott. You and General Custer are fully vindicated. — tcl
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