Economic Efficiency Assignment for Wednesday, 3-2

Please do this assignment for class on Wednesday. If we do not have class tomorrow, check back here for adjustments. Please print out the answers to the questions before class!

Economic Efficiency

Please go to http://www.learner.org/resources/series79.html?pop=yes&pid=354#

And click on the VOD button for program 18. You must do this off campus. Please be patient. You may need to click on it more than once, or you may get the homepage again. Just try again, and it should work. The video is 28 minutes long.

These are old videos, but they have great information. You do get some groovy fashions but please appreciate them as a cool history lesson as well as an econ one. The set-up is a brief intro of the concept and then three real world examples. Each example is followed by an analysis of the issues presented by the economist Richard Gill.

For this video, answer the following questions as you watch.

1. What is going on in the flea market? What economics ideas are at work?

2. For each of the three examples, note

a. The factual and historical details of the example.

b. What the government controlled and why.

c. The result of the controls.

d. What Richard Gill teaches you about the situation.

Finally, consider the impact of price controls on economic efficiency. (remember that economics often revolves around a trade-off between efficiency and equity)