The Great Digital Divide: Using Popular Media to Teach Economics

Abstract

Educators of economics have increasingly embraced the use of popular culture as a teaching resource to enhance their lectures. The use of television show, music and media clips presumably makes economic theories, concepts and terms more relevant to today’s students. For example, shows like The Simpsons, The Office, The Big Bang Theory, Seinfeld and many others have been suggested as great teaching tools for economics due to students’ familiarity with the content. We evaluate this claim by surveying students at four institutions over two years to identify which television shows work best. Our results indicate that the popular media frequently used by economics instructors are not always correspondingly popular with current students.