Economics lessons for today in The Cosby Show pilot.
As Jaime Weinman writes here, September 20 marks the 30th anniversary of the pilot episode of The Cosby Show. In addition to the chance to re-examine Cosby’s comedic genius, the first episode also offers some fascinating — and disappointing — lessons about inflation, its devastating impact on savings, and stagnation The economy is causing hardship for low-income Americans.
Watching old TV shows or movies can make you feel uneasy when money issues arise, because the amount of money the characters steal, spend, get paid, or fantasize about often seems excessive. little. This is not the same as the giggles when the plot revolves around answering machines or Palm Pilots. People inherently understand that technology changes rapidly. But with money it’s different. The currency remains the same—we’re still talking about dollars—but our frame of reference for its value has been lost in the fog of inflation, which over time erodes what a dollar once meant. la will bring it to you. At the same time, the 1% surge in income, skyrocketing corporate revenues, and sky-high levels of government debt have left us with some really big dollar figures. A trillion is the new billion, just like a billion was the new million not so long ago. (Interestingly, you can see this evolution in the use of the words million, billion, and trillion over time in the New York Times.) So in Brewster’s Millions in 1985, all Richard Pryor could do is spend $30 million in 30 days, today. he can simply do this, this and this.
This diminishing dollar effect occurred while watching the pilot of The Cosby Show, titled “Theo’s Lessons in Economics.” In the episode, Cliff Huxtable confronts his son Theo about his poor grades in school and the difficulties Theo will face entering college unless he improves. Theo assures his father that his grades won’t be a problem because after high school, he plans to “get a job like normal people” — which Cliff, using the game Monopoly Money , Theo schools in the economic reality of the working class.Cliff’s lesson for Theo is even more valuable in 2014 than in 1984, when we updated the figures and information on the dollar for the world today. Because you quickly realize that, as challenging as the hypothetical Theo faced back then, it would have been an easy walk compared to today’s reality. Let’s go through each section one by one. (I’ve condensed some of the dialogue.)
