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Getting students to understand the economic way of thinking might be the most difficult aspect of a teaching economist's job. The counterintuitive nature of economics often makes it difficult to get the average student to think "like an economist." To this end, the need to keep students engaged and interested is essential when teaching economic principles and interdisciplinary approaches to engaging students are becoming increasingly common. For example, Leet and Houser (2003) build an entire principles class around classic films and documentaries while Watts (1999) discusses how literary passages can be used to teach a typical undergraduate course more effectively. I further extend this interdisciplinary approach to economic education by providing examples from the long-running animated television show The Simpsons that can be used to stimulate student discussion and engagement in an introductory course in microeconomics.
Using The Simpsons in the classroom
The bulk of this paper describes scenes from The Simpsons that illustrate basic economic concepts. While the examples are pretty straightforward, the difficulty in using The Simpsons lies in deciding: where to place the examples into the lecture and the best way to present the scene to the students.
One difficult feature of using any popular culture in the classroom, even a show that has been on the air for fifteen seasons and 300-plus episodes, is that students do not all have the same frame of reference, even in the most homogenous of classrooms. For that reason, it is often best to use the examples given in this paper as either an introduction to a discussion of a particular topic or additional reinforcement of points already introduced in a more conventional way. For an example of the latter, I introduce the idea that economic actions often generate secondary effects with the real world example of automobile safety regulation. The direct effect of automobile safety regulation is a decrease in the risk of death from an automobile accident. The secondary effect is an increase in risky driving, since the "price" of risky driving has been reduced by increased safety regulation (Peltzman 1976). I then follow that up by discussing with students Homer Simpson's dissection of a proposed 55 mile-per-hour speed limit ("Millions will be late!"). This reinforces the importance of (correctly) thinking through...