Here’s a great clip from Parks and Rec about the free market and how capitalism is a beautiful thing.
ABC News: Are Keys to a Happy Marriage in Your Wallet?
Author of “Spousonomics” says the secret is a life of economic analysis.
Freakonomics: Causation vs. Correlation
Bad historical assumptions about why things happen – after all, ice cream consumption was blamed for causing polio once upon a time.
Freakonomics: Potty Training
Levitt’s incentive scheme for potty training his daughter, Amanda, backfires.
Freakonomics: Cheating Teachers
This is a great clip to introduce the concept of unintended consequences. While not all students are familiar with the struggles of potty training, nearly all of them can relate to the incentives of cheating on a standardized test.
AT&T: We Want More
I use this clip in a couple of different ways. One of the weirder demand shifters is the idea that tastes and preferences can shift the demand curve. This commercial from AT&T is a great example of that concept: “you really like it, you want more.” The preference shifter is that you’ll consume more (demand increases) when you start liking things and then you’ll consume less (demand decreases) when you don’t like things anymore. I also use it a bit in my upper-level course when I get to the idea of indifference curves being mapped in a good-good space.
King of the Hill — The Best of US and Canada
Hank and Gordon get into a debate on the merits of each country. They go on to discuss different comparative advantages of their home countries. Both Canada and the United States likely have enough resources to produce all of the items they mention, but they benefit from trade when they specialize in their comparative advantage.
Along Came Polly: Stabbing the Pillows
Ben Stiller invites a woman over to his apartment and she’s blown away by the number of pillows on his bed. She calls him out for how much time he’s wasting, but he doesn’t initially see the point. After some aggressive reflection, he realizes how much time he actually spends fluffing pillows on his bed and what he could have been doing instead.
Big Bang Theory — Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Just because something happened before an event does not mean that the event was caused by that action.