Teaching Economics with Media
Really neat summary of the history of the price tag. This could make a great opening for a principles course or a good example of price discrimination before the price tag was invented. The price tag can be used as an example of the Quaker’s insistence on the law of one price or the idea of efficiency/equity tradeoffs. I like to use this video in the beginning of my course to introduce the idea of prices, values, and costs.
Young Sheldon teaches his family about the statistics behind going for it on 4th down. A lot of football fans believe you just have to punt, but studies by economists like David Romer show that it’s often better to go for it on 4th down than to punt. The famous Pulaski Academy coach who never punts became a bit hit after being interviewed by ESPN. The NY Times even created a Twitter bot that would tweet about whether teams should punt or go for it and the bot tweets during NFL games.
In this clip from Young Sheldon, his pastor makes the claim that God’s existence was 50/50 and that people should bet on that coin flip. Sheldon is quick to point on that the pastor is confusing possibilities with probabilities, which is also a common mistake that students make in stats courses. A similar clip was posted before about a scene in Corner Gas involving a riot.
Have a friend who brags about things they get for free? One of the common components of long-term contracts is that it includes a phone, but the price of the phone is often just built into the contract so the phone isn’t really free.
In this commercial, office workers are lamenting the apparent weakness of the dollar relative to other currencies. Another worker comes by with a hamburger from McDonald’s $1 menu and the office changes their tunes when they realize that a dollar can buy a whole hamburger.
What does the world look like (wealth and health) over the past 200 years, but squeezed into 4 minutes. Hans Rosling looks at the change in a income and life expectancy for countries across the world over the past 200 years. What’s nice about this visualization is that it’s color coded to be able to show how different regions changed over time. We can also see how globalization has affected major countries like China, Japan, and India.
This clips includes a few different economics concepts rolled in to one. The overarching theme is that of consumer choice where Homer appears to experience diminishing returns while trying to eat a 16 pound steak. He’s competing against a previous eating contest winner, who dies at the end from eating too much steak.
In the middle of the clip, Marge asks Dr. Hibbert if that much steak is healthy and Dr. Hibbert exhibits a bit of the principle-agent problem where his interests now align with eating competitions because he owns a portion of the restaurant. The good doctor tells her not to worry because they have a new heimlich machine, which decreases their need to focus on choking hazards.
Homer forgets it’s Valentine’s Day so he has to rush off to the Kwik-E-Mart to pick up a last-minute gift. Seeing that Home is desperate, Apu takes the chance to raise the price of a box of chocolates to $100. Despite Homer’s annoyance, he pays the higher price because he knows he’ll be in trouble if he comes back empty-handed. After threatening never to shop there again, Apu offers him a discount on other products to keep him from shopping next door.
The crew of Apollo 13 is stuck in orbit around the moon and the NASA crew on the ground is trying to figure out how to get the astronauts home alive. Faced with only the tools in space and a limited time window, the engineers must use every available item at their disposal to maximize the amount of time before reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. This clip is a nice introduction to the idea of consumer choice, budget constraints, and utility maximization. All resources must be used in the model and there is no value to saving anything. The goal is to earn as much utility as possible given the budget constraint. The same issue faced the NASA engineers: they had to use all available resources, there was no benefit to saving items for next time, and they had to maximize the time/oxygen/energy for the astronauts.
My students favorite clip when discussing product differentiation is this clip from MedicoreFilms where a guy offers Deluxe Hugs for $2 more. One of his opening lines best illustrates the concept of monopolistic competition:
Deluxe guy: How’s businesses?
Free guy: Mine are free, this isn’t a business.
Deluxe guy: Different people want different stuff, so it’s cool.
Businesses can differentiate their products by quality, style, location, etc. The guy offering deluxe hugs is trying to fill a portion of the market from people willing to pay more for “better” hugs.