Teaching Economics with Media
A summary of the labor market impacts for naming children with “distinctively black names.” Researchers conduct resume studies in Chicago and Boston to determine the frequency of callbacks for two identical employees with different-sounding names. This subtle form of discrimination lengthens the spells of unemployment and creates a gap between white and black workers. Not hiring a worker because an employed believes the applicant is African American is a form of employment discrimination.
The video shows how an investment in human capital and diversity can provide significant increases in productivity. Allowing employees to express their individuality brings new thoughts and ideas to the group. Without diversity, the company was trending down, when they embraced the balls of yarn it was trending up. While it was easy to keep everyone and everything the same, the company was not making money. By investing in a more diverse workforce, they were able to become profitable and a much more favorable place to work. The opportunity costs are implied but they are that diversity can have real bottom line impacts. In addition, diversifying your workforce can make you an employer of choice and allow you to hire more highly skilled employees. Lastly, it shows that diversity allowed the male employees to be more free with who they were and thus helped the company become more successful.
I think this video applies to everyone from women to men. Introverts to extroverts, it shows the benefits of staying true to who you are. Additionally, it shows the benefits to companies by encouraging diversity.
Clip suggestion & description submitted by Keven Tarantino
The local flower delivery guy makes racist remarks to Franco because he’s African American. The rest of the characters discuss other comments they have received regarding their nationalities. Labor market discrimination in this scene occurs as Arthur’s donut shop is a customer of the flour supplier. Customer discrimination could persist, but if the customers aren’t discriminatory, they have the ability to take their business elsewhere, which Arthur and Franco try to do. The Becker Model of discrimination argues that only customer discrimination can last in the long run because competition should drive out co-worker or firm 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.
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.
Billie Jean King left the United States Lawn Tennis Association because of the promoter’s refusal to compensate the female players the same as the male players. Promoter Jack Kramer (played by Bill Pullman) argues that the men are paid more because they are stronger and faster. His colleague argues it from a reservation wage standpoint, that men needed to be paid more to attract them to the circuit. King (played by Emma Stone) argued that women should be paid equally based on marginal revenue product theory since the women sell the same number of tickets as men.
This same issue has been recently discussed regarding the US men’s and women’s national soccer teams.
Daily Show correspondent, Jason Jones, interviews Dan Hamermesh about looks-based discrimination. While people traditionally associate discrimination with race and gender, discrimination from an economic perspective is showing priority to one group of people over another. While the correspondent takes a comedic approach, the research by Hamermesh has been covered by a variety of outlets including Wall Street Journal, Freakonomics, New York Times, and US News.
A 20/20 investigation into how we subtly discriminate based on looks when it comes to donating to charity. About 1/5 people in total donated money, but requesters who were rated as better looking raised more money than the other requesters. Better looking women were able to raise twice as much money as their counterparts.
This is a great clip to discuss employment discrimination and the value of a name (Freakonomics has a nice piece on that as well). I often joke that this is the only time I can show them a clip from Buzzfeed and it has relevant material for class.
This classic bit from Freakonomics always starts an interesting conversation when I get to the discrimination section of my labor economics course.