Econonmic Analysis of His Dark Materials

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Economic Analysis of His Dark Materials Many people never stop to appreciate the economic relevance of today’s popular culture. For instance in Philip Pullmans controversial trilogy, His Dark Materials, is filled with material waiting to be economically analyzed. This fictional narrative is centered on a young girl, a child named Lyra Belacqua who has the ability to see the truth in everything, and travels through different worlds in a search for God. Throughout her travels she experiences many economic lessons that the trained eye could see are very similar to those used daily in modern economics classrooms. Some of these economic lessons that are portrayed are the use of currency exchange as she travels through different worlds, comparative and absolute advantage in how different worlds make products, how technology differences between societies changes the experiences of their day-to-day lives, and how she gets her human capital and how she uses it, and how they use choice and opportunity cost to make decisions. The economics in this story makes it more lifelike and believable to the reader as they read this extraordinary Sci-Fi thriller. Once Lyra travels to her first new world, the reader is almost astounded by her lack of knowledge about items that would seem common in our modern world. Some of these items include Coca Cola, hamburgers, hot dogs, and even the automobile. She comes from a very almost archaic world where they travel by carriage, have servants, and use gold as money. The use of gold as currency nearly gets her in trouble, when she tries to pay for an apple with a gold coin. A boy she meets, named Will, takes her to a jeweler where she trades some of her gold coins for British pounds. She does this so she can blend into the society of this strange new world she has just entered. At this point, Will admits he has killed a person, and the cops

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