I love university life.

It's not just getting to live the fabulous single life without the responsibilities that I love about it. It's picking up pieces of wisdom in the most unexpected places.

I like to think that Economics has taught me to make better decisions, or at least weigh out my options throughly. The ever-so-important opportunity costs always haunt me, never failing to make sure that I realise that everything I do comes with its necessary consequences. That possibilities are denied once an opportunity is chosen over another.

I'd have to say that the best thing I've learned in a long while came from Shelly, my Policy instructor. I decided to show up for lecture yesterday, and was surprised to find 20-25 students in the room, instead of the initial 150 or so that were in the first class. It isn't that the lectures or boring, it's that the insanely thick weekly readings and powerpoint slides are more than enough to compensate for missing classes. Anyway, back to that piece of wisdom I picked up. We were talking about the environment. Thirty years ago, hardly anyone cared, or knew anything about the environment. Fast forward to 2008, and almost everyone knows and cares about the environment, or at least they say so in polls. Then Shelley wrote carbon footprint across the blackboard, and asked, "Which of the two generations have a larger carbon footprint?"

We talked about tobacco too. Thirty years ago, people had an idea about the negative health impacts of smoking. Now, everyone has a clear knowledge of the human and environmental consequences of tobacco. "Who smoked/smokes more?"

It can be quite simplistic to think that knowledge, education drive change. But the examples of the environment and tobacco don't even show correlations of the positive effects of education.

Because as humans, sometimes knowledge isn't enough to let us know when we should stop. We need more than knowing because sometimes, it feels good to go against what we know.

And maybe that means we need someone, something to tell us that enough is enough: that our capacities have been filled to overflowing.

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I wanted to end off there, but I wanted to talk a bit about tobacco. People smoke less (at least in Canada and Australia), not necessarily because of the increase in knowledge and research. It could be due to a number of factors, namely: the significant increases in the prices of tobacco products, and legislation that makes it inconvenient to smoke pretty much anywhere and everywhere.