From Econ Lecture 8:00 on Tuesday and Thursday

College is a transformative period in one’s life. It is during this period that people, unsurprisingly, experience their strongest period of intellectual growth. Just in my first few months of being here, I have been exposed to numerous intellectual perspectives and arguments, as well as other ways of thinking about the world. The most compelling and interesting perspective that has been exposed to me, however, is the economic perspective. My first encounter with the economic perspective has exposed to me, among numerous other things, that besides being a place of intellectual stimulation and growth, college is a place of extreme price discrimination.
This price discrimination is best encountered in the market for school supplies. The other day, I found that I had completely filled up my notebook with notes. I went to CVS after class to buy a new notebook, and found that a 3 subject notebook cost between $8 and $9. The same notebook would have cost less than $5 back at the convenient store in my home town. I also found that 1 subject notebooks were between $1.50 and $3, whereas back home they were $0.50. This price discrimination in school supplies is the result of the higher value college students place on the availability of such resources. I know that this is indeed true because despite my indignation at being ripped off so hard, I did indeed value that $8 notebook enough to buy it. I knew that other vendors would also take advantage of the higher value we college students place on school supplies anyways, and that I wasn’t likely to find a much better price.
Another economic phenomenon associated with college life is the consumption of an EXTREMELY INFERIOR good – Natty Lite. I mean “inferior good” in both the economic sense and in the sense that Natty sucks….seriously, if you didn’t want to puke the first time you tried natty you either have a really high tolerance for pain or were already drunk. Regarding natty’s status as an inferior good in the economic sense can be explained by the fact that in college, students have relatively much lower income compared to other segments of the population. When the income of a given population goes down, it generally leads to an increase in consumption of what are called inferior goods- cheaper alternatives to normal goods, which are defined as those goods consumed when income is higher in a given population. Because many college students don’t work, and those that do don’t work often, so as not to compromise their schoolwork, we have lower incomes during this period, and must consume the inferior good Natty Lite, the normal good alternatives to which are tolerable to good beers like Miller, Budweiser, Sam Adams, etc.