Some of my favorite video games tend to fall into the resource or time management genre (such as Stardew Valley and Satisfactory), and in playing through them, despite their differing styles and genres (Stardew Valley is a slow-paced, pixel-art farming game, while Satisfactory is a futuristic, analytical factory-building game), I’ve come to notice a few shared economic principles within them, from simple concepts like the ones of incentive and trade-off to more complex ideas like the elasticity or inelasticity of demand. In the case of trade-offs and incentives, those two concepts tend to be the foundation of just about every and any time or resource management game. Trade-offs usually include in-game currency versus better materials or production upgrades, or the cost of filling up production queues for specific buildings as opposed to leaving them free and losing an opportunity for more production while also providing space for unexpected but potentially necessary output. When looking at incentives, there are such concerns as which quest, reward, and/or unlockable is worth more to the player. Concerns like this can lead to completely different play styles depending on what any individual player deems more or most important. On the other hand, time and resource management games provide an interesting example of what could happen with complete inelasticity of demand and high elasticity of supply. In most resource and time management games, demand for products and materials is completely inelastic; certain things can only be made, and certain quests can only be completed with a certain number of specific materials, nothing more, nothing less, and there is no space for any kind of substitutions. However, there are plenty of ways to get said supplies and materials to fulfill the necessary requests. Therefore, the supply is somewhat elastic. Situations like these do not often occur in real life, but games like these do provide an interesting example of what can happen with such an interesting hypothetical, which could, in turn, provide interesting ideas on how to deal with more common economic scenarios in real. So, I suppose Economics is not just everywhere, but in the words of our textbook authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, Economics is also fun (Cowen, et al., 2020). References Cowen, T., & Tabarrok, A. (2020). Modern Principles of Economics (5th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education. https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781319329464

Often, when we think about economics (and I know this was the case for me), money is the first thing that comes to mind. Unfortunately, that perspective keeps us from perceiving economics as a way of making decisions. When we learn to expand our concept of economics to that definition, it's not difficult to find especially its most simple concepts in the most unexpected places. Like in the movie My Fair Lady. In My Fair Lady, an impoverished girl named Eliza who sells flowers on the street corner for a living is brought in by phonetics professor Henry Higgins under the auspices of a bet he takes up from his friend Colonel Pickering; Higgins fancies himself such an accomplished teacher that he bets that he can train Eliza to the point where she's mistaken for a duchess at a royal ball. While economics might seem absent from the film (except for maybe the commentary on class divisions), economics’ most basic principles (opportunity cost, trade-offs, and incentives) can be found within it. Firstly, the most significant example of opportunity cost in the film begins with Higgins’ bet. His specific opportunity cost in taking up the bet turns out to be the sleep, rest, and much-valued alone time he could have gotten without training Eliza, as he must take her through intense, almost 24/7 training to fix her broken, improper way of speaking. However, he has a great incentive to deal with that opportunity cost; Pickering is willing to pay for all the lessons and resources Eliza needs for her training (which means decreased monetary cost and increased personal benefit for Higgins), and Higgins has his pride to defend (of which he has plenty). Lastly, there are several trade-offs present in the movie, namely Eliza having to give up the independence she enjoyed before taking Higgins’ training in favor of bettering herself, Higgins giving up his time to train Eliza, and even Colonel Pickering giving up some of his time and money to oversee his and Higgins’ bet. With all that being said, economics can truly be found anywhere and everywhere, even in a musical from 1964.