The economics lesson of the day comes from The Onion’s American Voices (Link)
Sales and rentals of adult DVDs are down 30 percent due to the rise in homemade Internet porn. What do you think?
“That’s the problem with the porn biz. No matter how low your price is for having an entire billiard-ball set shoved up your ass, there’s always some punk waiting in the wings willing to do it for free.”
This brings up the concept of Marginal Utility. That is the additional added utility of a good or services, or the additional disutility of time spent doing something (e.g. working). Utility being a generic term for happiness. So here one person has a negative marginal utility of shoving billard-balls up their assand thus must get compensated for doing so. This compensation will be slightly greater than the disutility of shoving billard-balls up his ass resulting in a positive addition to his utility. Where as another is willing to do it for free, and even presumably pay someone to do it, because they have a positive marginal utility of this action adding to their total utility.
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