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.

2018 0

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.

2018 0

Battle of the Sexes — The Press Release

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.

2018 0

ABC 20/20 — A Test on Looks

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.

2017 0

Verizon: Inspire Her Mind – Extended

“Our words can have a huge impact. Isn’t it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too? Encourage her love of science and technology and inspire her to change the world.”– Reshma Saujani, Founder of Girls Who Code

This commercial is a great starting part for the unseen discrimination that we impose on children at an early age.

2014 1