The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Economics, Web/Tech | ≅ 3 Comments
A recent Frontline documentary, Digital Nation: A Life on the Virtual Frontier, asks just this question–particularly with regard to education. Subjects include attention span, multi-tasking, and the doubts of one-time technology evangelist Douglas Rushkoff. But while some see technology as an obstacle to clear thinking and human interaction, others see it as essential to contemporary [...]
≡ 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: Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
Russ Roberts, the George Mason University economist and host of EconTalk (iTunes – RSS Feed – Web Site) recently teamed up with John Papola, a television exec, to produce “Fear the Boom and Bust.” It’s a rap song/video with intellectual substance that follows this premise:
John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of [...]
≡ 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: Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Paul Samuelson, America’s first Nobel laureate in economics, died this weekend at age 94. In 2003, Samuelson wrote a short essay called How I Became an Economist. What caught my eye is the last line: “Always, I have been overpaid to do what has been pure fun.” We should all be lucky enough to achieve [...]
≡ 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: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here we are. One year after the fall of Lehman Brothers. And here we have Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, talking about his next book – The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010) — that looks at those people who actually understood that Wall Street was going to blow up. Most of the banking [...]
≡ 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: Economics, e-books | ≅ 3 Comments
Chris Anderson, the Wired Magazine Editor who is best known for The Long Tail, has published his latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. You can buy it on Amazon, or read a free version on Scribd. As you may know, this book has already generated some controversy. To begin with, Anderson has had [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
It’s not often than a song gets written for an economics professor. It’s so bad that it’s actually good. Add that to the soundtrack for the Collapse.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
Once the Fed’s toolbox proved unable to stop the cascading global financial meltdown, the US government turned to the one strategy that it had left. It dusted off the old economic playbook of John Maynard Keynes and began introducing massive stimulus plans and other forms of government intervention. Since our collective fate now depends on [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
Last week, we created a handy list of blogs & podcasts that regularly cover the financial crisis. And so it seemed worth flagging the latest episode of This American Life. It’s called “Bad Bank” (MP3 – iTunes – Feed). It just came out this weekend. And it takes a close and entertaining look at what [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics, Most Popular | ≅ 8 Comments
There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes, and they won’t be going away any time soon. Most of us can’t afford to ignore what’s happening here. So, below, I have highlighted a number of blogs and podcasts that help make intelligent sense of this economic debacle. Here they [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Jared Diamond became a household name with his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs & Steel (2003). Later, the UCLA geographer climbed the charts again with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). Now, based on this last book, he’s putting odds on whether the United States will survive this crisis, and he’s putting [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 3 Comments
The new Treasury Secretary unveiled his plan this morning, and apparently the markets hate it, which pretty much guarantees that we’ll be living with our financial mess for a good while longer. As we know, this crisis could have been avoided. But greed got the better of us. So, I wonder what readers think when [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
NPR’s Planet Money podcast has done an excellent job of tracking the ongoing global financial crisis. In its latest installment (Stream – iTunes - Rss Feed), they get down to an important question: Does history offer solutions to the current crisis? And if so, does it make sense to look back at the Depression of 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 [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Paul Krugman is mainly known in the States as an economist who writes frequently for The New York Times. Meanwhile, few really know much about his serious academic work. Now that’s he’s been awarded the Nobel Prize, it’s worth giving you a quick feel for it. Here’s Krugman giving you the gist in his own [...]
≡ 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 [...]
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