Economics in Action

Economist or rock star? Maybe it’s not either/or after all. This group of economics postgraduates at UCLA have made an amazing rap video paying tribute to Daft Punk and the drive for statistical significance. Come for the beats, stay for the academics-versus-robots battle at the end.

Stronger from ticoneva on Vimeo.

This was a follow-up to the same group’s earlier “(I Can’t Write No) Dissertation”.

Three short (i.e. 2 or 3 minute) videos from the BBC TV series “Trust Me, I’m an Economist” have found their way online, seemingly to promote the book by presenter Tim Harford. In part one, he gives free advice to someone who wants to be a gangsta rapper. In part two, he uses second-hand cars as examples of a problem called asymmetric information. In part three, he uses airport queues as an analogy for the stock market.

Films from our student film challenge are online. They can be viewed online or downloaded in better quality. Two of them show economics superheroes in action saving the world. Two more of them look at the university experience and why economics is a rational choice. Another film shows how various principles and concepts from economics apply to daily life. Thanks to all our student film-makers!

This is a gem of an item, found through the Improbable Research blog. It’s a study of the social benefits of celebrity suicide by Samuel Cameron (an economist at the University of Bradford) and his colleagues. You may need to be at an educational institution to get the full report, but here is the abstract:

“This Commentary suggests that it is possible, from an economic perspective, that any individual artist/celebrity suicide may be of net benefit to society. Sales of the artist’s products and associated merchandise may increase after the suicide, and people, including those who were not even born at the time of the suicide, may derive value from its iconic reification, not to mention the higher value they derive from some private goods. A case study of Kurt Cobain is given to illustrate this phenomenon.”

Read more: “Artists’ Suicides as a Public Good” Archives of Suicide Research, Volume 9, Number 4, October-December 2005, pp. 389-396(8)

The way in which people make money from music is changing.

One symptom of this is that it’s getting much more expensive to see a big-name live music act, and the reason turns out to be a knock-on effect from the advent of downloadable music. Live shows used to be a way to promote CD sales, but now that fewer people get their music from CD it is tours that have to make a profit.

The pricing of live shows and the balance of power in recording contracts are topics in what Princeton University economists Marie Connolly and Alan Krueger call “Rockonomics”: the economics of the pop music industry.

Read more: “Winners take all in rockonomics”, BBC News web site, 20 April 2006.
Reference: Connolly, Marie and Alan B. Krueger. “Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music,” Working Paper, April 2005