Welcome to Econ Talk from the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts

of George Mason University. We'd love to hear from you if you have any comments or feedback

on this podcast. Please send me an email at Roberts, my last name, R-O-B-E-R-T-S, Roberts

at g-m-u-u.edu. I'm talking today with Mike Wunger, an economist at Duke University.

And Mike, you know, we both have been teaching economics for a while and people like to

complain that economics is just common sense. It's so intuitive. And yet, when we get

in the classroom, we sometimes find it's a little less intuitive than we might have thought.

Has that been your experience as well? It has been my experience. I asked the question

of my students when I was teaching at Dartmouth College and the economics department back

in the mid-80s. And the fact that so many of them got it wrong prompted me to ask some

of my colleagues, some of them were economists and some who were not. And it turns out that

their answers to that question were really different from what I expected. And then

not talking to them more, it really did seem like the economic way of reasoning was more

different than I expected. Let me tell you the story and then we'll talk a little bit

about what I think the answer is. The premise was that I wish you really wanted to go to

a concert. And let's say now that it was a group called the Greenway. And you're really

excited about the Greenway concert and your girlfriend really wants to go to. So just

to make sure you get tickets, you show up the night before and camp out. And then as the

sun comes up, you realize that there's a whole bunch of people ahead of you in line that

the concert was more popular than you'd expected. Do you really hope that you get tickets

and you wait in line for three hours? And that the line snakes along towards the window

and you're a couple hundred people away. And the ticket window slams down and you realize

...