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.
Birds on a Wire — Externalities
This clips was shared by CharityJoy Acciardo. It’s a nice clip to show before class starts or in the beginning of class on common resources, network externalities and congestion externalities.
Catch Me If You Can: Supply Curve
Here’s a clip from Catch Me If You Can illustrating a few great supply curve principles, including reservation wage. This is the full scene, but you can clip it at 1:19 to show just the relevant parts.
We The Economy: Monkey Business
What are the causes of inequality?
In “Monkey Business,” filmmaker Shola Lynch chats with economists from across the political spectrum to help explain the causes of economic inequality, with help from a couple of mammalian friends.
The Perfect Storm: The Giant Wave
In October 1991, a dying tropical hurricane from Bermuda collided with a cold front from the Great Lakes, resulting in a “perfect storm” of previously unknown destructive impact that resulted in 100-foot waves; tragically, the crew of a fishing boat was lost in the midst of the fearsome storm.
I use this as the introduction to my Compensating Differentials chapter. How much would you need to get on this boat?
Stealing Harvard: Selling Beer
Dial-a-bottle beer service provides beer to minors. The government has essentially set a price floor of an $∞ for minors to purchase, such that there is an extreme shortage of minors being able to buy beer. Tom Green steps in to offer packs of beer for well below the price floor.
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.
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.