Volvo has recently unveiled self-driving garbage trucks in Sweden that are designed to be operated by only on single garbage collector. The trucks match the pace of the garbage collector to allow for differences in worker characteristics. This is just one of the many ways in which automation improves the efficiency of tasks.
Adam Ruins Everything — Tipping & Wage Discrimination
Adam Ruins Everything is a half-hour informational comedy were host, Adam Conover, debunks popular myths. Each episode is divided into 3 segments with some common theme. In the Spring of 2018, James Tierney and I sat down to go through all three seasons of Adam Ruins Everything to pick out examples in each episode that could be used in an economics course. If you’re curious about the paper, you can read about it here.
In this scene, Adam discusses the discrimination aspect of tipping in restaurants. While the segment focuses on the history of tipping in the United States, this scene is poignant because so many students work as waiters or at least have been waited on. Subconsciously, they may be discriminating against minorities without realizing it.
There’s a great scene from Reservoir Dogs that covers the issue of tipping as well as an in-depth Freakonomics podcast asking whether tipping should be illegal.
Horrible Bosses 2 — Child Labor
Nick, Kurt, and Dale start up production on their new product, the Shower Buddy. After hiring some workers, they decide to hold a day where employees can bring their kids to work. It turns out that the kids actually started working on the factory floor and are enjoying it. At first blush, it seems like this shouldn’t be happening, but when Nick finds out how productive they have been, he walks away to change the sign instead.
Vox — What people miss about the gender wage gap
Vox analyzes the gender pay gap and explains with how the measure is calculated and some of the issues with the way the gap is calculated. In particular, the measure focuses on the median earnings of men and women across the United States, but that isn’t necessarily the fairest representation of underpayment for women in the United State.
South Park — Alexa is Stealing Our Jobs (NSFW)
In the episode, everybody in South Park is buying that Amazon Alexa as a voice assistant to make their lives easier, however there is a negative externality to buying the Alexa. The local low-skilled workers in their town believe that these new machines are stealing their jobs, a classic South Park catchphrase, and they start to protest. Randy Marsh, a tv show personality comes up with a solution to fix this by having the locals replace the personal assistants, but not all of the locals are happy about this.
Thanks to John Miller for the clip suggestion!
Superstore — Negotiating for Higher Wages
Amy wants to ask her boss for a raise, but she’s nervous. Jonah attempts to encourage her to fight for a higher wage because a portion of the wage gap is partly due to women being socialized that negotiating isn’t in their favor. Amy isn’t in the mood for his lecture, and Jonah gives up.
Superstore — Winning the Lottery
What would you do if you won the lottery? This clip fits nicely with two different sections of an economics course. The first is how people respond to income increases in terms of purchasing normal goods or luxury goods. For labor economics, this discussion is a good segue to discussion how increases in income decrease the time people devote to work assuming leisure is a normal good.
Superstore — A Pharmacist’s Salary
Tate has no problem sharing his salary, but it’s unclear the main driver of the salary. In reality, salaries are comprised of a variety of skill and compensating differentials as well as potential efficiency payments. Tate has a doctorate of pharmacy, which should result in higher pay for human capital investments. In the clip above he mentions that people could die if he messes up, which probably adds a lot of pressure to his workday. This pressure could be a compensating differential that increases his pay. However, there’s also a chance he’s paid highly so that he doesn’t goof off, which would be an efficiency payment.
Superstore — Opportunity Cost
Tate is asked to ring up some additional items for a customer, despite his main job duty as a pharmacist. With a long line behind the customer, Tate recognizes that his Doctorate of Pharmacy is probably better spent helping his customers with medical needs.
Chris Rock — High School Orientation
Chris Rock describes taking his daughter to her high school orientation and hearing the vice principle talk about how students can be anything that they want to be. While optimistic, Rock points out that it’s more appropriate to tell them that they can be whatever they’re good at as long as someone is hiring. It turns out Chris Rock and stand up comedy has a lot of insights on economics.
Thanks to Kim Holder and ECONShots for clip idea!