Economics at the Movies - Foods that Make Billions
Here is a link to a you tube video from the BBC looking at the modern food business and the huge profits to be made from the breakfast cereal industry. Part of the series The Foods that Make Billions (cereals, bottled water and yoghurt)
The Foods That Make Billions - Cereals
Economics at the Movies - The Joy of Stats
In this blog we provide links to official You Tube clips from the Joy of Stats programme made available by the Open University. Click below to view the selection
read more...»Economics at the Movies - Monty Python Money Programme Eric Idle Sketch
This classic Monty Python Sketch will bring back fond memories for economics teachers of a certain vintage - but it also has a terrific resonance today - perhaps use it as an introduction to teaching money, banking or exchange rates!
read more...»Economics at the Movies - Freakonomics
This is a splended DVD with a huge amount to interest students. Great for using when discussing incentives and looking at social policy issues from a different angle.My own students love the section featuring Urail King and his attempt to raise his test scores!
read more...»Economics at the Movies: In Time
This weekend I saw this Justin Timberlake movie, In Time, which has quite an original concept – that time is a currency. The plot revolves around the idea that we all have a limited amount of time to live, but that same time is the currency we earn by working and then used to purchase consumption such as ‘4 minutes for a cup of coffee’.
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Contagion
I saw this movie yesterday called Contagion: It is a thriller that follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself. At the same time, ordinary people struggle to survive in a society coming apart..
Apart from the fact that its a decent thriller, (star-studded cast, great soundtrack, well-executed etc!) but… part of the movie could be used as a good discussion about what is the most effective allocation system for a scarce vaccine - in the movie they go for a national lottery system with your date of birth. Is this allocatively efficient? Or simply fair? The movie prompts a discussion of equity versus efficiency and social welfare.
read more...»Economics on YouTube
A useful clip for AS micro: barter economies. Or, alternatively, for A2 micro: perfect price discrimination.
UK economic history via YouTube
Here is an idea for a teaching resource - a listing of key landmark UK economic history events via YouTube. An initial grouping is posted below - but can we crowd-source some more to make this a terrific teaching resource for many other colleagues. If you are on Twitter please post a You Tube link using the hash-tag #ecbusteach and we can then add it to Mo’s blog posting below. Enjoy!
read more...»Economics at the Movies - Too Big to Fail
A big thank you to my former student Mike Dawes, who recommends the film of the book ‘Too Big to Fail’. The made-for-TV film has recently been shown on Sky Anytime, where you may have caught it, but if not there are some trailers and extracts available here on HBO’s website, as well as a synopsis.
Mike has also found a YouTube extract of a scene in the movie where US Treasury officials (Hank Paulson, Neel Kashkari, Jim Wilkinson) are deciding how to break the news of the AIG bailout in a press release and, in his words “there is a Scooby-Doo style unravelling of the recession which for 2 minutes is possibly one of the best explanations I have heard. They also neatly explain Credit-Default Swaps which is equally simple and may help those who were struggling to understand it.”
Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book which led to the film is available from Amazon’s US store here.
Economics at the Movies: Up in Smoke
Here is a new powerful, thought-provoking documentary on attempts to reverse the catastrophic effects of rain-forest destruction through burning. Up in Smoke follows the work of one British scientist, who over 25 years has been perfecting an alternative to slash and burn farming in the world’s equatorial rainforests Mike Hands has developed a way of keeping nutrients in the soil, which meant that farmers no longer have to burn hectares of forest to get a good crop and move on when the soil is depleted - requiring yet more forest burning.
There will be filmings of this documentary in the UK in the autumn of 2011 and TV coverage too. A DVD is planned for release later on in the year and looks to be ideal for teachers wanting fresh material on aspects of environmental sustainability, the tragedy of the commons and many development issues.
For more information go to the Up in Smoke website
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Seabiscuit and the Depression
There is a scene at the start of Chapter 4 in the DVD version of Seabiscuit in which the background to the Great Depression of the 1930s is explained. The film itself provides an evocative and compelling story and might be a good one to use when teaching the difference between a recession and an economic depression - although Seabiscuit does not provide the main explanation for lifting the USA out of a deep slump! Here is a link to the main movie trailer…
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Local Hero - Valuing our heritage
When Mark Knopfler’s iconic theme tune for Local hero rings out my mind takes me back to matches at St James’s Park and also to this fantastic film from the early 1980s.
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Economics at the Movies: Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World!
I love this film! Often shown on a Sunday afternoon when I am sat doing some marking, it features some of the comedy giants of the 1960s including Phil Silvers, Spencer Tracy, Terry Thomas and Ethel Merman. A man dying in the aftermath of an auto accident tells some bystanders that he buried a fortune under a big W in a distant town (Santa Rosa, CA). The bystanders could easily agree to share the information and the loot and reach a cooperative solution. Instead they choose each one for themselves and head off on a zany chase in search of the money. I wont give the ending away! How about using this clip when teaching cartels?
Economics at the Movies: The Cove - Trade in Dolphins
There are many high quality albeit harrowing documentaries about the exploitation of common resources driven by personal greed and the profit motive. The Cove is one such example and may not be on the radar of many students and teachers.
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Castaway Revisited
The Tom Hanks movie Castaway provides many clips useful for teaching aspects of the basic economic problem - scarcity of resources, basic needs and wants to survive, an inability to access an NHS dentist are among many of the important issues you can raise. Hanks is forced to live a life without specialization - having been thrown from his life as an international executive for FedEx.
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Wayne’s World & Product Placement
Product placement in films and television series is so ubiquitous that many film-goers take special delight in identifying the hidden forms of brand placement that takes place!
There is a new Morgan Spurlock film (The Greatest Movie Ever Sold) that makes light of the technique and this classic scene from Wayne’s World offers a short comic interlude if you are teaching business economics of advertising.
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Cool Hand Luke and Diminishing Returns
“If he eats one egg a minute, he’ll have ten minutes to swallow!” The classic movie Cool Hand Luke featuring the legend Paul Newman provides an ideal example of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Newman attempts to eat 50 eggs in an hour - I am not suggesting that students attempt to do the same thing but you can easily substitute hard-boiled eggs for Jaffa Cakes, cream crackers or something else to test the idea that marginal utility declines as consumption increases!
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Economics at the Movies: Plastic Surgery - Need or Want?
Just relax and I will make you twenty years younger! In this scene from the wonderful Brazil (1984 - directed by Terry Gilliam) Mrs Lowry (Katherine Helmond) undergoes a bit of plastic surgery to Sam’s (Jonathan Pryce) horror. When is plastic surgery a need and when it is a want? Why are people willing (and able) to pay huge sums for face lifts? Channel 4’s series Ugly Beauty here provides a window on some of the choices that people make about plastic surgery.
read more...»Economics at the Movies: Building a Baseball Field
One of my favourite movies - Field of Dreams - in this clip Ray (Kevin Costner) does something “completely illogical”: He plows under his corn to build a baseball diamond. I’ll use it to discuss the different uses of land (and associated returns and risks) and the factors of production needed to complete the field.
read more...»Economics at the Movies - The Game of Chicken
This classic scene from the film Footloose can be used to illustrate the game of Chicken - a popular example of game theory.
Economics at the Movies - Utility of Decorative Pillows
A lovely two minute clip from Along Came Polly starring Ben Stiller who plays a character who spends eight minutes a day (or two days a year of his life) placing and removing decorative pillows on his bed. Polly attempts to liberate him by tearing the pillows apart and asking what else he could be doing with the time - a classic example of opportunity cost and a great clip to show in introductory economics.
Tech & Pop Culture in Teaching Economics
I spent a tremendously useful forty minutes this evening watching a streamed presentation from Simon Halliday an economist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Simon gave a talk to his university colleagues in September 2010 about his experimentation in using different types of music, movies, images and open source content to enhance his own teaching and it was fantastic to see his energy and the many good ideas in his talk. His section on using movie clips has already given me more avenues to follow to build on our own highly successful Economics at the Movies blog posts from a few months back.
If you want to have a look at the presentation head over to this link on the Vimeo site.
Simon is on Twitter (as many passionate like-minded economics educators are!) here is his Twitter feed
Economics at the Movies - Margin Call
Now releasing in the UK and starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Demi Moore, Margin Call is presented as a thriller that revolves around the key people at a investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the financial crisis.
BBC Newsnight interview (Jan 2012)
read more...»Economics at the Movies - Four Yorkshiremen and Happiness Economics
There are many resources out there for teaching happiness and welfare. But this class Monty Python clip - The Four Yorkshiremen - does it for me! Idle, Chapman, Palin and Jones are on top form as they descend into ever-greater exaggerations about the deprivations they suffered as children….. “Cardboard Box ... you were lucky”. A hat tip to student James Tozer who flagged this clip up as a tool for teaching welfare!
Economics at the Movies - The Dark Knight and Game Theory
The end of this film is a superb chance to discuss game theory in action!
Economics at the Movies - Bank Run Scene from A Wonderful Life
I use this clip from A Wonderful Life when teaching the causes of a bank run, inter-mixed with a news report on the demise of Northern Rock and the collapse of Lehman Bros.
Economics at the Movies - Wedding Crashers and Free Riders
A good clip to use when teaching the free-rider effect! Best to play this clip from 8:31 onwards
Economics at the Movies - Our Daily Bread
Our Daily Bread is a no-commentary documentary that reveals the little-known world of high-tech agriculture. In a series of visually stunning, continuously tracking, wide-screen images that seem right out of a science-fiction movie, we see the places where food is cultivated and processed: surreal landscapes optimized for agricultural machinery, clean rooms in cool industrial buildings designed for maximum efficiency, and elaborate machines that operate on a ‘disassembly line’ basis. There are scenes here that have an immediate impact on students and really do stimulate discussion and further research on the economics of industrial farming and the economic and social costs and benefits.
Economics at the Movies - Couscous
A hat tip to Willie Taylor for recommending the award winning French language film Couscous (French). The film is all about a small business start up - with quite a detailed account of how they go about overcoming the obstacles of loans, permissions, staffing, launch and overcome the challenge of structural unemployment from a long run decline in a local shipyard. Have a look at the trailer.
Economics at the Movies - The Vanishing Bees
This documentary focuses on the economic and social consequences of the dramatic decline in the size of the global bee population. The trailer is a useful starter for discussion on the role that pollination plays in providing so much of what we eventually consume and for students to appreciate the feedback effects in the long run if the bees vanish for good.
