≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Loudon Wainwright III has released a new album, Songs for the New Depression, that fittingly features “The Krugman Blues,” an homage to the Princeton, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, who has documented America’s economic spiral in The New York Times. You can watch the Krugman Blues above, and get the full album at Wainwright’s web [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Online Courses, Yale | ≅ 1 Comment
Robert Shiller, who predicted the stock market crash earlier this decade and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, has a unique understanding of the financial markets and behavioral economics. In this free course provided by Yale University, Shiller demystifies the financial markets and explains “the theory of finance and its relation to the [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
Peter Singer, an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton, created the animal rights movement back in the 1970s, and, more recently, launched a campaign to end world poverty. One can’t contemplate poverty without also considering greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Interviewed in 2009, Singer suggests that greed drives us biologically (as [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Books, Business, e-books | ≅ 4 Comments
Click here to listen to this post as audio. (Right-click to download.)
As some of you already know, back on December 27th, I released a sample of my first short story collection A Long Way from Disney on Amazon’s Kindle store and used social media strategies to market it. I did this for various reasons, but [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
What if people behaved like banks? Or, more precisely, what if individuals holding “underwater” mortgages stopped following the social norms of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘promise-keeping’ and instead acted like capitalist players in a free market? Most would dump their sinking mortgages and walk away. That’s the finding of Brent White, a law professor at the University of [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Leave a Comment
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When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off. They took very complex problems and made them understandable, often demystifying difficult concepts in a reliably engaging way. Now, they’re at it [...]
≡ Category: Business, Math, Physics, Science | ≅ 5 Comments
This comes to us via a tip from Twitter. The Khan Academy has now posted on YouTube over 800 videos (find a complete list here) that will teach students the ins-and-outs of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finance, physics, economics and more. The clips have been recorded by Salman Khan, a Harvard Business School and MIT grad. [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Business, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
Ok, sorry to belabor this. Earlier today, I mentioned that you could download the audiobook of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price at Audible for no cost. It turns out that the Audible offer isn’t available to a worldwide audience. It may just be available to US residents. The good news is that [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Business, Economics | ≅ 4 Comments
A quick update: Yesterday, I mentioned that you can grab on Google Books and Scribd a free e-book of Chris Anderson’s latest work, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Today, I discovered that you can also download an audiobook version of Free over at Audible.com. It will cost you nothing. But you will need to [...]
≡ Category: Business | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Silicon Alley Insider tells you how…
≡ Category: Audio Books, Business | ≅ 1 Comment
The audio book version of Seth Godin’s latest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, can be downloaded for free from Audible.com. Godin is the best-selling author of entrepreneurial business books and writes a popular blog on “marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.” In print, the book usually costs $13.57 and runs 160 [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs | ≅ 2 Comments
British historian Niall Ferguson has achieved the academic holy trinity, holding positions at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Only 44 years old, he has 9 books to his credit (including a new one: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World), and you’ll often find him writing in the public press. In the [...]
≡ Category: Business, Economics, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 3 Comments
Thomas Friedman has a new book out, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And it gets into the whole question of what a “green revolution” is really all about. New books mean book tours, and here we have an outtake from a spirited talk he recently gave in Northern California. You can watch the full talk on [...]
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How does the new winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics think the US government should manage the big looming recession? And does the New Deal offer a model for confronting this new jam? Have a listen: iTunes – Rss Feed – MP3.
≡ Category: Business, Economics, Online Courses | ≅ 3 Comments
Here’s a course for our historical moment….
Behavioral economics—”the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets”—is a relatively new discipline. This approach to economics, which marries psychology and economics and discards the assumption that every economic actor is rational, was developed partly by Richard Thaler, Director of the Center [...]
≡ Category: Business | ≅ Leave a Comment
This is worth a quick mention: If you’re trying to make sense of our rapidly changing (and these days deteriorating) economy, then you’ll want to spend some time with NPR’s Planet Money. The podcast has been taking an expert look at the day-to-day breakdown of the financial system and government efforts to bail it out. [...]
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NPR’s Fresh Air has been doing a very good job of demystifying the financial crisis. Here, we have an interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist, Gretchen Morgenson. As you’ll see, the program (iTunes - RSS Feed - Stream Here) does an excellent job of connecting many small dots, explaining precisely how the recklessness of Wall Street threatens to spill [...]
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In March 2000, Yale economist Robert Shiller published Irrational Exuberance and warned that the long-running parabolic stock market was a bubble. Weeks later, the market cracked and Shiller was the new guru. Fast forward a few years, Shiller released a second edition of the same book, this time arguing that the housing market was the [...]
≡ Category: Books, Business, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick fyi: BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has released a new collection of essays called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. As he summarizes it, the book features “28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the [...]
≡ Category: Business, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Given the sudden national obsession with the price of oil & gas, it seems worth flagging this bit of video put together by two professors from Duke University. Some may find their perspective on gas mileage rather obvious, others not. Either way, it can’t hurt to get their point across.
Separately, here’s a quick piece on [...]