Hollywood Economics

I'm a big fan of the television show The Wire, which aired on HBO between 2002 and 2008.  It's a gritty police drama, by which I mean that every fourth word is profane.  If you watch it, wait til after your kids are asleep.

Stringer Bell (played by Idris Elba) is a terrific character who's the #2 man in a big Baltimore drug gang.  He's unusual for a druglord in that he wants nothing more than to be a legit businessman, and he's hoping to use his drug profits to invest in legal businesses that he can run after he retires from selling dope.  There's a great scene in Season 1 where the cops are tailing Bell as he drives to the local community college.  He heads into class where the professor delivers a lecture on demand elasticity.   Later, Bell walks into a copy shop that's he's purchased as part of his plan to go legit, and notices that his employees --- who appear to have been hired from the neighborhood based on criteria other than experience or skill at managing a copy shop --- seem not to be pushing very hard in the direction of superior customer service.

Bell expresses his displeasure, as follows:

Yo, you know what we got here?  We got an elastic product.  You know what that means?  That means when people can go elsewhere to get their printing and copying done, they goin' do it.  You acting like we got an inelastic product and we don't.  Now, I want this to run like a true (gosh-darn) business.  Not no front.  Not no (other stuff).  

Gritty, as I indicated.

As with all Hollywood Economics, however, they don't get it quite exactly right.  (It's not nearly as bad as the economics disaster that is A Beautiful Mind....)  On the outside of the classroom door that Bell enters at the CC, a sign reads "Introduction to Macroeconomics."  Demand elasticity is a *micro* topic, but close enough I guess.