Skip to main content

Christmas inflation

As a microeconomist, I don't spend much time talking to my students about price indices but once a year, I wish I did. That's because I always get such a geeky kick out of the Christmas Price Index, PNC's annual update of the cost to actually buy all the items in the song 12 Days of Christmas. The "cost of Christmas" is up 8.1% this year, to over $21,000 (driven again by the cost of swans-a-swimming). What I hadn't realized is that PNC's website also has some cool tools for teachers, including a Pin the Price Tag on the Gift game and and an Economics Trivia quiz. Definitely worth checking out...
Labels:

Comments

  1. Don CoffinDecember 2, 2008 at 12:18 PM

    The Economics Trivia quiz is pretty nice, although I think that the answers to a couple of the questions are at best debatable. Question 4 asks which of three things is not an example of capital, and the correct answer is a college degree. One can at least argue that obtaining a college education, of which the degree is the indicator, is an investment in human capital. And (I think it's) question 10--the implication is that an increase in the price of bread (between the 1920s and now) is an example of inflation; in fact, that could simply be a change in relative prices.

    I know, picky, picky, picky...

    Happy holidays, Jennifer.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jennifer ImazekiDecember 2, 2008 at 7:20 PM

    I agree! I thought that capital question was really weird - I got that one wrong and their definition of capital as anything with value in and of itself was just odd. With the inflation question, I thought all the answers were not quite right (I know my students would want to argue that your wage going up could be because you're more productive or something like that) but I think the main point was that only one option was a DECREASE in nominal prices and I assume they defined inflation as an increase in nominal prices. But clearly, these questions have not been vetted by lots of whining students! :-)

    Happy holidays to you too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 18, 2008 at 2:28 AM

    Hi

    There are so many people decrease the prices of goods on christmas.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJanuary 5, 2009 at 10:28 PM

    Hi

    I think this inflations is coming soon is Pakistan.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

Designing effective courses means thinking through the WHAT and the HOW (in that order)

I think most folks have heard by now that the California State University system (in which I work) has announced the intention to prepare for fall classes to be primarily online. I have to say, I am sort of confused why everyone is making such a big deal about this - no matter what your own institution is saying, no instructor who cares about their own mental health (let alone their students) should be thinking we are going back to 'business as usual' in the fall. In my mind, the only sane thing to do is at least prepare  for the possibility of still teaching remotely. Fortunately, unlike this spring, we now have a lot more time for that preparation. Faculty developers across the country have been working overtime since March, and they aren't slowing down now; we are all trying to make sure we can offer our faculty the training and resources they will need to redesign fall courses for online or hybrid modalities. But one big difference between the training faculty needed ...
Post a Comment
Read more

This is about getting through, not re-inventing your course

As someone who has worked hard to build a lot of interactivity into my courses, I have never been interested in teaching fully online courses, in part because I have felt that the level of engaged interaction could never match that of a face-to-face class (not that there aren't some exceptional online courses out there; I just have a strong preference for the in-person connection). But the current situation is not really about building online courses that are 'just as good' as our face-to-face courses; it is about getting through this particular moment without compromising our students' learning too much. So if you are used to a lot of interaction in your F2F class, here are some options for adapting that interaction for a virtual environment: [NOTE: SDSU is a Zoom/mostly Blackboard campus so that's how I've written this but I am pretty sure that other systems have similar functionality] If you use clickers in class to break up what is otherwise mostly lect...
2 comments
Read more

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne...
Post a Comment
Read more