Homer waits in line 8 days to grab a coveted ticket to a coveted event. His excitement is dismayed when a scalper, who happened to be first in line, decides to purchase all of the tickets for the event. Scalpers can serve as an efficient distributor of tickets, but many people don’t believe it’s fair.
If you love economics and The Simpsons, Josh Hall edited a book that may interest you.
If you’re teaching opportunity cost, this is a great clip to show the value of time. Homer waits in line 8 days to grab a coveted ticket to an event. A passerby accurately notes that the Homer could have just purchased the ticket with the money he would have earned from working.
The following scene has a nice clip that can be used to talk about efficiency and equity.
If you love economics and The Simpsons, Josh Hall edited a book that may interest you.
Introduce correlation vs causation using this music video from Brothers Osborne. In the story, the singer describes a bunch of events from a previous night of drinking, but reiterates that it wasn’t his fault. While his presence was correlated with a bunch of events, he insists he didn’t cause those events. He then goes on to list the causes of each event for the night:
Relevant lyrics:
Blame the whiskey on the beer
Blame the beer on the whiskey
Blame the mornin’ on the night
For whose lyin’ here with me
Blame the bar for the band
Blame the band for the song
Blame the song for the party that went all night long
But it ain’t my fault
For more country music videos that display economics, check out EconGoneCountry.
James Tierney shared this great clip on his website a few years ago and it covers the idea of using Project Runway to discuss specialization and gains from trade. One of the contestants describes the process of designing the outfit line and discusses each member’s role in the creation of the outcome.
While attending community college, Stringer Bell enrolls in an economics course and tries to apply the concepts of elasticity to his copying business.
Howard (Arnold Schwarzenegger) tries to get a coveted TurboMan action figure doll the day before Christmas. It’s only the hottest selling toy of the season, so everyone is in a rush to grab this item. Because prices aren’t (initially) adjusting in their usual way, a shortage occurs across the entire city.
A limited shipment of Turbo Man action figures does arrive at one store, which decides to allocate the doll through a lottery system. Whenever there are shortages in markets, there may be a misallocation of consumption, particularly when items are distributed randomly rather than to the consumers with the highest willingness to pay. Even the though the price of the doll increases by 100%, there doesn’t appear to be any change in the quantity that people want to purchase. This would imply that the demand for TurboMan action figures is very inelastic.
In this clip, Homer decides to monetize Bart’s elephant in order to try and recoup some of the costs of owning the elephant. When he quickly realizes he hasn’t set a high enough price, Homer tries to go back and increase the price, but he may have gone a bit too far.
This great, short clip comes from one of my principle’s students, Caitlin, this year.
While at an engagement party for Leslie and Ben, Chris starts to experience extreme mood swings and sadness because he’s lonely. Anne tries to cheer him up by bringing him a platter of shrimp. Chris takes a bite of the shrimp and exclaims “That’s amazing” then after taking another bite he says “This one’s not as good.”
This is a little NSFW and has some mild language, but it illustrates tradeoffs really well. This is the End is a movie about actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves in an apocalypse. In this season, the actors are trying to decide how to divide their stockpile.
This great clip from Friends shows the equity/efficiency tradeoff nicely. It’s also a nice opportunity to bring up the idea of fairness. While splitting a check into equal parts is easier, it’s not always appropriate for people who don’t eat much.