11. Producer Choice
By understanding producers and the way they work, we will be better at predicting the outcome of various events in the economy.
10. Optimal Consumption
A brief look at marginal utility and how economists can predict the choices a consumer will make based on the utility they perceive from a product.
9. Consumer Choice
The better we can understand why people behave the way they behave, the better we are at predicting what will happen to the economy.
8. Complements & Substitutes
A deeper look at what demand actually means, how the demand for one product can influence the demand for another product, and how the number of consumers can also affect a product’s demand.
7. Market Dynamics
Outlines what causes consumers to want to buy a product after price is not considered. Demand, supply, and what happens after these variables are changed is discussed, along with the questions we must ask in order to predict what will…
6. Equilibrium
How do businesses balance the amount of a product they offer with the price people are willing to pay for the product? Professor Antony Davies explains how supply and demand act against each other to create equilibrium price.
5. Supply and Demand
What is to blame for the rising cost of gasoline? It’s all a simple matter of supply and demand.
2. Profit, Loss & Discovery
How the market process generate improvements in the human condition. In particular, how profit & loss serve to help people channel their activities in creative and socially useful directions.
1. The Price System
Why are prices so important? This video explains the role prices play in generating, aggregating, and transmitting knowledge throughout the economic world and how a market can adjust prices as conditions change.
21. The Bourgeois Virtues
Deirdre McCloskey talks with Russ Roberts about how markets affect the ethics of individuals, and refutes the commonly-held belief that capitalism can be ethically damaging by examining the works of Adam Smith and historical examples of ethics growing alongside free…
20. Keynesian, Monetarist, and Austrian Perspectives
What did Keynesian and Austrian economists predict about the housing bubble and the recession to come? This video shows the predictions of economists from both Keynesian and Austrian perspectives, thus highlighting the differences between the two schools of economics.
19. Austrian Theory on Business Cycles
Cowen’s evaluation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, which focuses on how interest rates and government policy can incentivize investors and entrepreneurs to focus resources in areas which otherwise would have been avoided.
18. Keynesian Theory on Business Cycles
Cowen’s evaluation of Keynesian Theory, which claims that economic slumps are a result of falling aggregate demand, or the sum of consumption, investment, and government spending.
17. Monetarist Theory on Business Cycles
Tyler Cowen evaluates the economic theory popularized by Milton Friedman that claims that money supply fluctuations drive the rate of inflation and deflation by looking at historical and practical examples of its usage.
16. The Compleat Summers
This article in the Wall Street Journal describes the economic decisions made throughout the 1990s made by Larry Summers, then President-Elect Obama’s choice for who would be in charge of the National Economic Council. The Compleat Summers (Text)
15. How is Government Special
Mark LeBar examines government’s special nature, and in considering why government institutions are so special we can decide what the limits of government should actually be.
14. I, Pencil
Something as seemingly simple as a pencil is created through unimaginable knowledge that no single person can possibly have, making a case for a society that lets all creative energies flow freely. I, Pencil (Text)
13. The Use of Knowledge in Society
Hayek argues that an decentralized market is the most efficient market available because no one actor could possibly know everything that is otherwise communicated through prices. The Use of Knowledge in Society (Text)
12. The Nature of the Firm
Mike Munger discusses why organizations use firms despite the efficiency of markets and how those firms help make economic decisions.
11. Can Order be Unplanned?
Many of the societal norms we all follow today were not the product of deliberate planning, but a product of spontaneous order. Tom W. Bell uses the works of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek to explain spontaneous order and how…
10. Institutions and Incentives
How do incentives affect individuals and the choices they make? A discussion on how institutions influence the decisions that all individuals make through the incentives they offer.
8. Incentives Matter
It’s easy to understand that incentives influence policy-making decisions, but determining all the ways that a policy could influence individual behavior is more difficult. Professor Angela Dills explains the importance of looking at not only the obvious incentives that arise…
7. Thinking at the Margin
Professor Mario Villarreal-Diaz uses marginal analysis, or examining the benefits of choosing one option compared to the costs of that option, to explain why diamonds cost more than water, and how we use both marginal analysis and opportunity cost to…
6. Opportunity Cost
Mario Villarreal-Diaz explains the important concept of opportunity cost, which is what is given up when one choice is pursued over another.
5. Subjective Value
Don Bordeaux explains that a product’s value does not lie in the amount of money or resources that went into creating it, but rather the subjective value that a consumer puts on that product.
4. The Broken Window Fallacy
A short video explaining why destruction does not create economic prosperity.
3. Economics for Real People
A comprehensive, ground-up introduction to deductive economic science. Not charts and graphs, but the fundamental principles of the study of rational human behavior from the basic actions of a single individual to the complex world of money and markets.
2. The Armchair Economist
An introduction to the often counter-intuitive science of basic economic thinking. Why do seat-belts kill? Why does popcorn cost more at the movies?
1. What is Seen and What is Unseen
"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must…