Ideas You Need to Know #27: Marginal Utility

From the Ideas-You-Need-To-Know file comes this beauty.  The Philosophical Mortician explains brilliantly the important economic notion of Marginal Utility, which explains among other things why diamonds are worth more than water (even though we’ll never die for lack of diamonds) and why CEOs of large companies, even bad ones, calculate their salaries by the number of zeroes at the end -- while teachers, even good ones, spend their spare time checking behind the cushions for spare coins.