Tuesday's Assorted Links

Snow Costs, Turnitin and ChatGPT, Vacation Fines, Lottery Tickets, and Modern Family Size

One of the toughest concepts to teach is the relationship between average cost and output. The Hustle (Link #1) had a great graph in their story that can be used to demonstrate the relationship.

Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contained a lot of neat applications of economic principles.

1. Snow is peaceful when it falls, but it leads to billions of dollars in cascading costs [The Hustle]

2. Turnitin will release an update that allows educators to detect if students used ChatGPT in their papers [Business Insider]

3. Employees at an Indian startup face a $1,200 fine if they contact co-workers who are on vacation [Business Insider]

4. Can economics explain why we continue to see record-breaking lottery jackpots so often? [USA TODAY]

5. Four charts showing how the modern family size is changing [NBC News]

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A new study finds close to 13% of childhood asthma is caused by the use of gas stoves, but there are a couple of ways policymakers can address these negative consumption externalities. While people are afraid a nationwide ban is coming, there are alternative policies that allow people to continue using gas stoves.

Get caught up on Monday’s newsletter:

A Range of Solutions for Addressing Negative Externalities

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This week I’ll teach my first sports economics course in nearly 10 years! I taught this class when I was a graduate student at Washington State University, but I never got the opportunity to teach it at Penn State. I have developed a habit of assigning more traditional books in my field courses rather than a traditional textbook, and I think a lot of students appreciate the change.

I’m using two of the same books I used when I first taught the course, but one has been updated for the 2022 World Cup. The Soccernomics, it was nice seeing updated data and the revisions that have occurred since I first read the book. Scorecasting hasn’t been updated in 10+ years, but it was still fun to see which anecdotes are still accurate today.

This semester, I'll ask students in my Sports Economics course to read through these two books instead of reading a traditional textbook.