How much would you pay to see a new movie?

We make that decision all the time. Pay $10 to see it at the theater? Pay $5 to see it on-demand? Pay $1 a night when the DVD comes to Redbox?

Now that question will be put to a real-life test for next week’s advance screenings of “Freakonomics: the Movie,” based on the best-selling 2005 book.

The “sneak preview” screenings in 10 cities Wednesday will be offered on a pay-what-you-want basis, with tickets being offered at 40 different price points, from a penny all the way up to $100.

To buy a ticket, you first have to complete a survey on how much you intend to pay. The anonymous data will be analyzed by “Freakonomics” authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt “to identify what factors and circumstances prompt movie-goers to pay more or less for their screening tickets.”

The gambit is a variation on pay-what-you-want music published by bands like Radiohead, or the honor-system bagel service that served as an introductory lesson in economic behavior in "Freakonomics."

In the case of the movie, it seems unlikely that many viewers will choose to pay the full retail price for a ticket, much less $100. It’s a classic case of asymmetrical information: With no reviews or even word of mouth available, there is no way to guess whether this movie will be any good. That is one reason sneak preview tickets often are given away for free.

But the little experiment could help build buzz for the film, which opens nationwide Oct. 1. And in a media-saturated world, that’s priceless.

It’s great when companies provide programs and perks friendly to working mothers. But while lactation rooms are nice, what women really need are keys to the corner offices of corporate America.

Working Mother magazine just unveiled its annual list of 100 best companies, and the top five have a pretty weak showing when it comes to women in key executive positions.

The high five are Bank of America, Deloitte, Discovery Communications, Ernst & Young and General Mills. But here’s the skinny: In a nation where women make up 50 percent of the work force, they comprise only 20 percent of senior management and board positions even at these highly rated firms. Only one of the top 10 employers listed - University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics - has a female CEO.

Bank of America has the strongest showing, with women representing about 38 percent of senior management by my calculations, although its board of directors includes only two women out of 15 seats. Meanwhile Discovery has only one woman among its nine top executives, and no female board members.

The top five companies actually do a bit better than U.S. companies overall. In 2009, Catalyst – a nonprofit group seeking to balance the corporate playing field for women – found that only 13.5 percent of executive officers were female; and almost one-third of corporations had no female senior executive.

It’s worth noting the progress made by employers to foster family-friendly policies. But what I hear from a lot of working moms is that even though employers tout flexible programs, it often is not easy to take advantage of them.

The Working Mother survey relies on information from the employers – not the employees – who nominate themselves for the list.

I don’t want to totally knock the survey, which has been conducted for 25 years. Many of these programs, such as flextime and elder-care services, whether used or not, were nowhere to be found a quarter of a century ago.

"The immense influx of women into the work force demanded changes in workplace culture as companies strove to keep working moms’ talent and loyalty," said Carol Evans, president of Working Mother Media. "Today, we celebrate our winners’ untiring commitment to their employees through an impressive array of programs."

I’d be doing a little more celebrating if women were also making the big decisions and the big bucks.

Few would argue with investment advice from Warren Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest people, who has often wisely said the most important investment anyone can make is in their own education.

But as parents send their children off to college this fall, a spate of research suggests it might not always be a good investment.

Take, for example, “Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids -- and What We Can Do About It,” published last month. Authors Andrew Hacker, a prominent sociologist, and New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus make the case that many universities are charging too much and offering too little to their students.

Adding to the depressing outlook for higher education is a column in last week’s Economist suggesting that American universities could go the same way as Detroit.

Citing the Hacker and Dreifus book, and also recent reports from the American Enterprise Institute and the Goldwater Institute, the article portrays universities as blighted by excessive administration, low productivity and rising prices -- just the sort of problems that brought down the once-dominant U.S. auto industry.

Despite the gloomy perspectives, it shouldn’t be forgotten that America’s universities are still the envy of the world, dominating global rankings. The preservation of that system is vital to maintaining America’s competitive advantage, which is built on innovation and fueled by the strong university system.

Enrollments are spiking as the jobless rate remains over 9 percent and many unemployed workers seek safe harbor in school. Hacker and Dreifus look at where students can get value for their money, and it’s often not in the most expensive, top-tier schools, where a four-year degree can cost a quarter of a million dollars.

For example, Western Oregon University, a former teachers’ college, does its job without any frills or pretense and with utter seriousness and dedication and costs are kept at a minimum, the authors note. The university even offers a “tuition promise” to entering freshmen: Their fees will remain constant throughout their four years.

The rising cost of tuition is a huge and growing concern. Americans owe some $829.8 billion in student loans (both federal and private), more than they owe on their credit cards ($826.5 billion), according to an article in The Wall Street Journal published last month.

And they’re finding those loans harder to pay back. Defaults on federal student loans climbed in the fiscal year that ended in September 2008, federal data released this week show, to 4 percent from 3.7 percent for private, nonprofit schools, to 6 from 5.9 percent for public schools, and to 11.6 from 11 percent for for-profit schools.

The Wall Street Journal also has reported that U.S. employers are favoring graduates of big state universities over graduates of Ivy League and other elite liberal-arts schools when hiring to fill entry-level jobs. Of the top 25 schools as rated by these employers, 19 were public and only one was an Ivy League school (Cornell University).

So is higher education still a good investment? There’s a long list of successful Americans who never completed a college degree, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Share them below.

Call us recessionistas, frugalistas or just plain cheap: The weak economy has forced American shoppers to look hard for good deals.

But perhaps we are tiring of all the effort that goes into penny-pinching. Coupon use, which surged in 2009, appears to have flattened out, according to the coupon processing company Inmar.

Inmar tracks the use of traditional coupons clipped out of newspaper inserts or printed off the Internet and redeemed for consumer goods such as diapers and milk. The figures do not include hotel or restaurant coupons or discount vouchers of the type popularized by Groupon.

Use of coupons grew just 1 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared with a whopping 33 percent increase in the same quarter of 2009, according to the latest Inmar figures provided to Life Inc.

Coupon clipping faded during the early 2000s but enjoyed a huge resurgence in 2009. Americans redeemed 3.3 billion coupons for consumer goods that year, a 27 percent increase over the 2.6 billion redeemed in 2008.

That may partly have been because there were more coupons available. Inmar says 367 billion coupons were distributed in 2009, the most in at least 20 years.

This year, companies aren’t as coupon-happy, with the number of coupons available down 6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier.

When it comes to coupon use, consumers seem more interested in deals on bread and cheese rather than paper goods or sandwich bags. Coupon usage for food items grew 11 percent in the second quarter, while non-food items fell by 17 percent.

Thanks to MediaPost, which first reported the story.

Americans don’t need all the stuff we buy. Maybe our economy is better off without some of it too.

We need shoes for our kids and food for our dinner tables, sure. There’s also a whole swath of other stuff – ranging from Silly Bandz to designer sweat pants - that we buy just because we like it, or at least we like the feeling of purchasing it.

For many years now, conventional wisdom has been that while we may not need all this stuff, our economy does. Consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of gross domestic product, and millions of Americans are employed in retail and related occupations. One big reason we’ve been in the economic doldrums so long is that high unemployment, the credit crunch and the weak housing market have left many Americans without the funds to indulge in retail therapy.

But is that reliance on consumption a help, or a hindrance? Annie Leonard, in The Story of Stuff, makes a compelling argument about the costs of American consumption to the environment and other areas. And now Chris Meyer and Julia Kirby, writing in the Harvard Business Review blog, question whether our strong reliance on consumption is bad economic policy too.

Meyer and Kirby note that President Obama’s proposal to spend $200 billion on transportation infrastructure and tax credits for businesses could create some jobs and perhaps even get rid of some potholes.

But on a larger scale, they argue that it could also help build a long-term economic model that is less reliant on the more fickle nature of Americans’ spending habits.

The authors also offer this chilling set of statistics. In France and Germany, consumer spending makes up 57 percent of GDP. In China it is only 35 percent.

The country that most closely resembles the United States? Greece, at 71 percent.

The air is cooling and the leaves are turning … it’s that time of year when kids across the country are heading off to college.

And what exactly will they be doing once they settle into their dorms and figure out where their classes are?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, college kids will nearly as much time on leisure and sports as on traditional "educational activities," -- about 3½ hours each on an average day. Students also spend about 48 minutes each day on "grooming," the BLS reports.

But before we start grousing that college is all play and no work, consider this: Students also spend an average of nearly three hours a day doing work and work-related activities, according to the breakdown, based on data from the 2005-2009 school years.

And parents: There is no need to worry about sleep deprivation among your college-bound children: Students manage to fit in nearly 8½ hours of snoozing every day as well.

If there’s one thing politicians excel at, it’s bickering, and the hot topic this week has been what to do about Bush-era tax cuts.

President Obama wants to permanently extend the tax cuts for middle-class families while allowing them to expire for individuals making more than $200,000 and households making more than $250,000.

Obama is trading barbs with Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the top House Republican, who wants a two-year freeze on all tax rates, retaining the Bush-era tax cuts.

Of course, both sides argue that their plan is the best for the ailing U.S. economy, but what about your own economy?

The Tax Policy Center has come up with a handy calculator that allows you to see how your taxes would be affected based on three possible scenarios: going with Obama’s plan, keeping things the way they are or allowing the tax cuts to expire.

The tool allows you to select for age, income level, marriage status and children. For example, a married couple with two young children and an income of about $75,000 would pay $1,653 in federal income tax under current law, $1,008 under Obama's proposal and $4,290 if the tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Take a deeper dive into the calculator and you can customize based on everything from childcare expenses to charitable contributions. Or if you don’t feel like inputting all that data, the Tax Policy Center will give you sample figures based on the average amounts people in roughly the same income bracket reported on their tax returns.

Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, said the tool was designed to answer the question on many people’s minds: “What’s going to happen to me next year?”

(He also conceded that it was a good place to send reporters who keep calling and asking the center to run these types of calculations for them.)

The Tax Policy Center, a project of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, also has done extensive research on the larger economic effect any tax policy changes related to the Bush tax cuts. Wonky readers who want to know more than they ever thought possible about the implications of the tax cuts on both taxpayers and the government, this link is for you.

It has been the worst summer ever for breakfast lovers.

Eggs tainted by salmonella.

Bacon prices skyrocket.

Thomas’ English Muffins and Hostess are in a legal battle over “nooks and crannies.”

Sausage king Jimmy Dean dies.

And now coffee prices are rising.

Somewhere, Mrs. Butterworth is shedding a tear.

Should your employer pay someone to clean your bathroom?

If the employer is a university and the employee is a scientist, then the answer should be yes, according to a paper published in Academe, a magazine of the American Association of University Professors.

Yes, this is a serious policy recommendation.

Stanford University professor Londa Schiebinger and co-author Shannon K. Gilmartin analyzed how scientists at 13 top U.S. research universities spend their time and found that female scientists do nearly twice as much housework as their male counterparts.

The 10 hours-plus each week those women spend on cooking and cleaning could be better used toward important scientific work, the researchers argue.

Their solution: Universities should provide benefits that support housework, in the same way many employers provide health insurance, tuition reimbursement and childcare subsidies.

Schiebinger and Gilmartin concede that such a proposal may not be popular amid a deep economic downturn. But they argue that, in the long term, if universities subsidized housework it would benefit the country because these highly talented women would have more time to devote to science.

“The United States needs to capture the talents of its female scientific workforce for science,” the researchers write.

(The theory, of course, assumes that free time would go to lofty scientific endeavors, and not watching reality television.)

The paper, “Housework is an Academic Issue,” focuses solely on how female scientists share the burden of household work with their partners. But in general, even though women now make up about half the U.S. workforce, on a typical day women are still more likely to do household chores than men.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, on an average day in 2009, 51 percent of women did household work such as cleaning or doing laundry, compared with 20 percent of men. In addition, 68 percent of women cooked or cleaned up food on an average day, compared with 40 percent of men.

We'll start with the bad news: The competition for jobs remains extremely tough.

But here's the relative good news: It's been a lot worse.

There were 4.8 unemployed people for every job opening in July, according to calculations released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute. Put another way, that means there were 11.6 million more unemployed people than jobs available for them.

That sounds terrible, and by historical standards it is. But it's a marked improvement over last November, when that figure peaked at 6.2 job seekers for every job opening.

Still, the ratio of unemployed people to jobs available remains much worse than at the darkest period of the 2003 recession, when there were 2.8 job seekers for every job opening, according to EPI's calculations.

And back in the first half of 2007 - an era we can now only look back on with great nostalgia - there were just 1.5 job seekers for every job opening.

Are you seeing more job openings in your field these days, or does the job market still feel as bleak as last November?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

President Obama made a major speech in Cleveland Wednesday to promote his plans for getting the economy back on track and putting Americans back to work. The Associated Press reports that Obama’s plans call for about $50 billion in infrastructure spending, a permanent extension of research and development tax credits for businesses, plus tax breaks for spending on plants and equipment through next year.

The president may be getting the most publicity, but he’s far from the only one with big ideas for solving the nation’s major economic woes.

A number of economists have their own theories, and we’re guessing many readers also have some ideas for what the government could do improve the economy (but more on that in a minute).

Michael Mandel of Visible Economy thinks the government needs to do more to stimulate the kind of innovation-driven growth we saw in the 1990s, in the heyday of the technology boom.

Robert Pollin at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst thinks that the government should help make it easier – and cheaper – for small businesses to get credit. That’s been tougher since the credit crunch that began in the fall of 2008. (President Obama also is still hoping to get the Senate to pass a bill that would give tax breaks to small businesses and make it easier for them to get loans.)

James Galbraith at the University of Texas at Austin has a number of pretty radical proposals, including temporarily allowing people to collect full Social Security earlier and offering Medicare benefits at a younger age.

Mark Weisbrot of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research argues that stimulus - and lots of it – is needed to counter the unemployment problem, which he believes is a much greater threat to the economy than the deficit.

Commentators at the libertarian CATO Institute argue that perhaps the best prescription for the ailing economy is no stimulus at all. Daniel J. Mitchell writes: “The best that can be said about the new White House proposals is that they’re probably not as poorly designed as previous stimulus schemes.”

Do you think any of the stimulus proposals out there – including Obama’s – would improve your economic situation? What do you think should be done to get the economy back on track? Join the discussion below.

Perhaps they should rename Motor City "Stress City."

In a nation stressed out by everything from unemployment to pollution, Detroit has the dubious honor of being the most stressed-out metropolitan area in the country, according to an analysis of government data by Portfolio.com and bizjournals.

The report, released Tuesday, cites Detroit's laundry list of woes - high unemployment rate, high crime and poverty levels and low number of sunny days - as the perfect mix of ingredients for an unusually high stress level.

Other highly stressed-out cities include Los Angeles, Cleveland, Riverside, Calif., St. Louis, New York City and New Orleans, according to the study.

Of course, millions of Americans probably don't need a study to tell them that they are more stressed out these days, thanks to the weak economy and a host of other woes.

Are you living in a stressed-out city? Click here to see if your metro area is among the top 50.

As America ages, will we eat out less?

That’s the prediction of market researchers NPD Group. In a new report, the researchers say that overall restaurant visits will grow by 8 percent over the next 10 years. But the overall population is expected to grow faster, meaning that the number of visits per person will decline.

It’s not as though we are going to start cooking all our meals at home -- far from it. NPD still predicts that Americans will eat out nearly four times a week, or a whopping 191.5 times per year on average.

But that is down from 197.1 times in 2009 and 205.6 times per year in 2004.

Check out the full report here.

Such numbers shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Although Americans love their restaurants, eating out was one of the first splurges to be cut when the economy began to tank back in 2007.

Readers, are you eating out less than you used to?

It's not clear just how many jobs the government has created or saved with a massive stimulus effort. But government itself is now a source of job losses.

Since the end of the last recession in 2001, government has been a major source of job growth. Over the past nine years roughly two million workers have been added to the payrolls of federal, state and local governments.

Now, with the impact of the stimulus fading, and state and local governments coping with huge budget shortfalls, government payrolls are shrinking. After a brief uptick this year from the hiring of temporary Census workers, government payrolls at all levels are down by about 230,000 from a year ago.

The hope is that the government stimulus spending, together with the plunge in interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve, will give the economy enough of a boost to get private sector employers hiring again. But while the economy is growing slowly, it's not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with population growth. In August, only 67,000 new jobs were added to private payrolls.

"That's is not enough to get the economy really moving and bring down the unemployment rate," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial.

Overall, combined federal, state and local payrolls shrank by 121,000; most of the jobs lost were temporary Census workers. State governments cut 14,000 jobs for the month, while local government payrolls were up by 4,000. Since August 2008, state and local governments have eliminated 242,000 jobs.

Federal aid to states has eased some of the pressure, but wide budget gaps will likely force continued layoffs in the months ahead.

Since the financial meltdown in 2008, some 46 states and the District of Columbia have been shrinking payrolls for public services, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which tracks state budgets. Service cutbacks include health care (31 states), services to the elderly and disabled (29 states and the District of Columbia), K-12 education (33 states and the District of Columbia) and higher education (43 states), among others.

Due largely to high unemployment and falling home prices, state governments face a combined budget shortfall of some $180 billion, which will force further job cuts, according to CBPP estimates.

Another round of federal aid to the states might help head off some of those job losses. But with Congress facing voters angry about the swollen federal budget deficit, those spending proposals face strong opposition.

That could change after the midterm elections, especially if the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high. Even if Republicans take control of the House and Senate, they'll face pressure for more aid from state governments controlled by both parties.

Some economists think that as the job market begins to show signs of life and discouraged workers come back into the work force, the jobless rate could jump back up above 10 percent.

"That is a very likely prospect," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics. "That means that policymakers can't stand still. The Federal Reserve has to do more, and the president does as well.

Speaking to reporters hours after the August jobs numbers were released, President Obama called on Congress to provide additional tax credits to small businesses that create new jobs. But while there are "better days ahead," it will take some time before they return, he said.

"As I've said from start, there's no quick fix to the worst recession we've experienced since Great Depression," Obama said.

Feeling like you just can’t work any harder?

That may be true. According to the latest government data, your boss may have reached the limit on how much more work he or she can pile on your plate.

The folks down at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who track this sort of thing reported Thursday that the productivity of the American work force fell by 1.8 percent in the second quarter -- ending a string of five quarters of rapid growth.

Of course your boss expects you to be productive at work. But economists use a very specific definition of what that means. Simply put, productivity measures how many hours it takes to create the next dollar of economic output. If you made ten widgets yesterday and today you made 11, you've just gotten more productive.

There are several ways you could do that. Your boss could buy computers and equipment to help automate your job -- or eliminate it. (The latest gains in U.S. productivity were accompanied by more businesses investing in new equipment.) You could get more training or come up with a more efficient way to make widgets. (Those gains typically occur over many years.)

Or you could just work harder. That’s what happened in many offices, factories, schools, hospitals and other workplaces when the recession sidelined 8.4 million people, leaving their former co-workers scrambling to make the same number of widgets with a lot fewer people. It’s the quickest way to boost productivity, but it’s not sustainable.

The productivity pause could be good news for people looking for work. If employers finally have squeezed as much productivity out of their workers as they can, they’ll have to start hiring again to boost widget production. But that will happen only if final demand for widgets goes up. The latest figures show overall demand rising – but very slowly.

The drop in productivity is bad news for corporate profits, though. If you can make more widgets without boosting your payroll, the money from those sales goes straight to your bottom line. But if you hire more workers to make more widgets, your profits don’t grow as quickly.

Mark Hurd probably wishes he knew about this one.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO was undone last month by a falsified expense report after the company’s board of directors looked into a sexual harassment allegation against him.

But now comes word of the Sales Receipt Store, which for $39.99 will design, print and deliver a fake store receipt “from any store worldwide, for any goods and services, for any amount.”

The company, which also features fake ATM receipts and fake doctor’s notes, also offers free templates so you can print your own fake receipts, and its website helpfully points out how to add logos and barcodes to “make your fake receipt look real.”

We are not passing judgment on whether this is legal or not, although it almost certainly violates your company’s expense report policy. But it sure could come in handy when you have a few too many and lose the receipt for that $400 “morale building” dinner.

Thanks to MediaBistro for pointing this out.

For decades, women have been trying to close the wage gap with men, who still earn more than their female peers with the same level of education. But one group -- young, single women with no children -- has closed that gap and is pulling ahead of their male counterparts.

An analysis of census data by consumer research firm Reach Advisors found that women between the ages of 22 and 30, without children, had bigger paychecks in 2008 than their male peers in 47 of the 50 largest U.S. cities. Their wages were 8 percent higher, on average, but varied considerably from one city to the next.

Atlanta, Ga., offered the best financial opportunity for these women, who took home 121 percent of the average wage for their peers. Young, single women were also substantially better-paid in Memphis, New York, Sacramento and San Diego.

There are several forces at work behind this reversal in the wage gender gap, according to James Chung, president of Reach Advisors. But the common theme is education, he says.

Some of the biggest gains for young single women, for example, came in cities where demand for so-called “knowledge workers” is highest. Education is also playing a role in this gender gap reversal in cities where ethnic majorities represent the majority of the population, said Chung.

“Hispanic and African American women and are about twice as likely to get college degrees as Hispanic and African American men are,” he said. “That’s part of why it really pops in cities with majority minority populations.”

In other cases, the wage gender gap is closing because the wages of young, single men are falling.

“When we looked at smaller markets with the highest reverse gender gap, they’re the ones that have seen a decimation of the blue-collar job base,” said Chung. “So in other words it’s harder for men to make solid incomes without solid educations.”

For women in every other demographic group, the wage gap still tilts decisively toward men.

Chung says the wage gap reversal for this young, single, childless cohort has a variety of economic implications. Better-educated, better-paid women who delay having children, for example, could help boost the pace of household formations, which has stagnated since the recession began.

The results of the research were also reported by Time.com and the Wall Street Journal, which also has a table of cities where young women outearn their male counterparts.