Dear Professor Buckles,

I am very sorry for missing class on friday. As it turns out, I had a midterm in my spanish class a little later that day, that I really needed to study for. In essence, the opportunity cost of attending your class was about an hour of study time for Spanish. We economists are aware of a phenomenon called the law of diminishing marginal returns. As applied to this scenario, the more I study for a subject, the lower the additional increase in test performance would be. Time was running low on spanish, so the marginal utility of that hour was quite large. The marginal utility of attending the economics class, while significant, was lower.

Due to the law of diminishing marginal returns, each additional hour will yield a smaller and smaller increase in test performance. Considering the time span between the economics class and test(well over a hundred hours), the marginal cost of missing an hour of econ was rather low, whereas the marginal cost of missing an hour of spanish study time with only 3 hours remaining was quite high.

Therefore, if I had learned anything in your class this semester, I could not rationalize the choice to attend economics.

Sincerely,
Milton F.