Thursday, February 09, 2006

Groundhog Day

So last week was Groundhog Day, which of course only reminds me of the Bill Murray movie from awhile back where he wakes up and every day is the same -- he keeps reliving Groundhog Day over and over again.

So to throw out an irrelevant, abstract though experiment, what do you think the economic effects would be if the world was stuck in a Groundhog Day (instead of just the Bill Murray character in the movie)? Keep in mind that everything resets when you wake up the morning to exactly what it was like when you woke up the day before.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If the world was the same everyday, each day would probably be pretty similar to the one before. People would make similar decisions. However, if people remembered what happened during the previous days (like he does in the movie), the world would eventually be perfect. The first few weeks would be weird because everyone would be confused and frustrated, but once they realized what was happening and got used to it they would experiment with different decisions until they found the set of choices that made their day as good as possible. If everyone was stuck in the same day and was able to change their choices, though, the world would not be the same each day. I'm not sure exactly what my point is, so I'm gonna stop now.

mynameisrichardmurpheythatsmyname

Anonymous said...

ya people would change their choices right? ok ya then i think peopole would seriously start to cheat the system...because they would think they know what will happen... but then other peoople will change their decisions too... so really its an entirely different situation... it would just start out the same.
stocks probably wouldnt work that well though because people would know which ones weree going to go up.

I hope though that after a while people would be able to get it all right and live in a peferct world like richard thinks
-kelli gaetano

Anonymous said...

If the world was stuck in a Groundhog day, there would be no incentive to do anything productive because you would have to do it all over again the next day. People would just do whatever they wanted all the time because there would be no permanent consequences. People would also act more recklessly if they couldn't die (like in the movie.)

Anonymous said...

If every day started over again.... well, Costco would definitely be out of business! People would have no more incentive to purchase things in bulk, because everything will just disappear by the next morning. Instead, they would only need to buy things that would satisfy them for that day. So in that way, not as much money would be spent in preparation for the future. Actually, in agreement with Wetstone, I wouldn't even be doing this blog cuz it wouldn't even help me out tomorrow. Hmm...

It also depends on how everything works with money, because if no matter what you did with your money today you'd have it all back tomorrow, people could totally splurge on the most materialistic, meaningless stuff today and not face the financial consequences tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

i agree with everyone else in that it would totally destroy people's work ethic. also, there would be no such thing as profit or anything because even if a store was to make profit, it would just be back to what it was at the beginning of the day. so there's no incentive to do anything except enjoy your day, and if everything thinks that, then no one would be able to because no one would volunteer to work the things that people would use to enjor their day (restuarants, theme parks, etc.) so basically life would suck because we wouldn't be able to do anything unless we provided it ourselves. on a happier note, we'd be immortal.... :)
-emily freebairn