The 40,000$ of a bespoke coffee table comes from the uniqueness of the manufacturing process. No piece of wood is the same, and the way it is prepared from start to finish differs based on numerous factors.
The price of a computer chip has been lowered so significantly because of the standard process that is used across millions of chips with materials that are 99.999999999% pure.
Interesting to see the work that has to go into truly localizing a comic like Asterix and Obelix. There is notes on how the comic strip format does aid in translation, because slapstick humour is rather global. But having to translate expressions that only make sense to a native French speaker is just hard work.
Incredible work from Dipa Chaudhuri and Puneet Gupta!
> "we gave full A’s to over 4,000 students, or more than 49 percent of the people we taught [...] they hadn’t all crossed the threshold of “extraordinary distinction” that the student handbook says a full A is supposed to represent" (Furman and Laibson).
Perhaps we should look into why they received A without actually actually crossing the required threshold, rather than imposing arbitrary percentage limits. From the other side, if they do all demonstrate "extraordinary distinction", why should 29% of them suffer and not receive an A? I don't think the problem here is the number of students receiving A's, but instead what an A actually means.