Video and Audio Lectures in Principles (General)

This video from TED.com features a 19 minute presentation by Paul Collier about The Bottom Billion. Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor. Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion shows what is happening to the poorest people in the world, and offers ideas for opening up opportunities to all. Users can download the audio or video to their desktop or watch it online.

This 22 minute audio podcast from the University of Cambridge explores the credit crunch from an interdisciplinary perspective. With contributions from John Coates, a neuroscientist and former Wall Street Trader, Martin Daunton, an economic historian and Alan Macfarlane, a social anthropologist. It looks at how the crude use of historical analogies can cloud our understanding of the credit crunch, how hormones can affect the decision-makers who control the global financial system and how the breakdown in trust is threatening the world's financial stability. Users will need a Flash based audio player to listen to the podcast online or they can download it in a variety of formats.

10 lectures by US economists downloadable as streamed video or MP3 audio presentations, with accompanying PowerPoint slides and related papers that pursue the issues in more depth. Two lectures are on growth (Dean Baker, Mark Weisbrot), others on US labour markets (John Schmitt), women in the labour market (Heather Boushey), trade (Mark Weisbrot), intergenerational mobility and life chances (Heather Boushey), the Federal Reserve, asset bubbles and intellectual property (all Dean Baker). The lectures are US-focused and reflect the sometimes market-critical perspective of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a think-tank founded by Baker and Weisbrot in 1999 with an advisory board including Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Solow (not to be confused with the UK-based Centre for Economic Policy Research).

Commanding Heights is a three-part television series and a content-rich companion website. This extensive site offers resources for students, teachers, and the public-at-large. It was produced by PBS, the US publicly-funded broadcasting service. The site provides a guide to globalisation, trade and economic development. There is a timeline of key events since 1911, and a storyline of the three two-hour episodes of the TV programme. There are transcripts of interviews with people who are involved with or comment on economics, e.g. Naomi Klein. The Ideas section of the site looks at theories or phenomena like Reaganomics, the British Welfare State, the Chicago School, Marxist economics and Keynesian Economic Theory. The Resources page has a list of websites and a bibliography of books, for further research. An online educators' guide is available on the site, with a short video describing the site's key features.

Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy in Berkeley’s Goldman School and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, delivers the keynote address at the Fall 2008 Teaching Conference for new Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). It this 40 minute video, Reich talks about teaching, the role political views should or should not have in the classroom and takes questions from the floor on a variety of teaching topics. Useful for lecturers looking for a some tips on classroom practice. Requires a Flash player.

This is a programme from Book TV, a series on the US public service station C-SPAN. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times talks about the global financial crisis and suggests ways to turn things around. During this event, hosted by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, Mr. Wolf talks about his book with Francis Fukuyama and takes questions from the Johns Hopkins audience. Martin Wolf is associate editor and chief economics commentator for The Financial Times. Mr. Wolf is a professor of economics at University of Nottingham and the author of "Why Globalization Works." Users will need RealPlayer software in order to access this programme.

This is a video of a panel discussion that took place on September 25, 2008 in the Sanders Theater at Harvard University. A range of Harvard academics including Robert Kaplan, Gregory Mankiw, Elizabeth Warren and others discuss how to understand and interpret recent developments in the U.S. and world markets. A video table of contents allows users to go directly to the contribution of one of the speakers.