Category
Enrichment
Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be in the news all the time. Breakthroughs are announced regularly. Last year, it was an AI programme which beat the world champion at Go, a game...
Longer-Term Implications of Brexit
Ahead of the pressing of Article 50, in this lecture, Jonathan Portes, professor at King's College London and one of the most widely cited experts on Brexit and migration issues in British public...
How to take the perfect penalty
Game theory is explored in this short video from the FT on academic research into the strategies that might be optimum when taking a penalty kick! To fool the keeper, unpredictability is essential.
The Secrets to Fixing a Price
A weekend hat tip to Chris Larner for spotting this superb edition of The Bottom Line on BBC Radio 4. The discussion hosted by Evan Davis has some great links to price discrimination, information...
Mackerel as a Currency - the Secret Prison Economy
This is one of the most unusual demonstrations of the charcteristics and functions of money that I have come across. Ever. It looks at how in US prisons, mackerel - yes, you read that correctly -...
In Praise of Kenneth Arrow
Does winning the Nobel Prize in economics cause longevity? We might be forgiven for thinking so. Thomas Schelling died last year aged 95. The author of the famous textbook, Paul Samuelson, passed...
What the Great Depression reveals about our future
A hat tip to Gavin Simpson for flagging up this new piece by Larry Elliott on some of the lessons we can draw from the Great Depression.
I Daniel Blake
Ken Roach's immensely moving and powerful film I Daniel Blake provides a rich source of clips for the classroom. I for one will be drawing on it when discussing how we measure unemployment and the...
A Map of our Economy
ECNMY is a fresh-faced organisation that is working with a number of partners to increase economic literacy and help make the subject accessible to the non-technical audience.
Reforming Economics Education at University
Martin Sandhu reviews some new books on reforming economics education in the universities. So much depends on how economics is taught both in schools, colleges and on university campuses. I am...
Seven Amazing Optical Illusions
Courtesy of Richard Wiseman - which one is your favourite? Can you set some of these up in the classroom?
Slowing Down the Predatory Traders
A stunning Newsnight piece here on two of the "heroes" in Flash Boys written by Michael Lewis who have now started a new stock exchange to protect investors from being picked off by the speed...
The world if robots take our jobs
A canny conversation here between academics on the challenges and opportunities of the rapid adoption of robotic technologies and AI. Would make for a good bridging video clip in a lesson on the...
Favourite Behavioural Economics Valentines
Here is a selection of some of the many behavioural valentines posted on Twitter on the 14th February 2017. Spot the psychological biases in some of these!
KAL draws... predatory pricing
Unmissable! Cartoonist KAL illustrates dumping when a firm floods a market with cheap goods to undercut the competition. A perfect bridging video for the economics classroom!
Keynes's General Theory tops ranking of most influential scholarly books
This week we learned that John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) had been voted the most significant scholarly work for modern Britain.
Will China rule the world?
An introductory level analysis of the reasons for China's growth, with five Nobel laureates offering a perspective on why China has grown and whether it will become the world's biggest economic power.
The evolution of taxation by cartoonist KAL
This is a fantastic introduction to taxation as part of fiscal policy. On a sheet of graph paper, I'll first get my students to firstly design their own optimal income tax system (and contrast with...
Inequality and Hyper-Globalisation
Paul Krugman, Angus Deaton and Joseph Stiglitz look at aspects of inequality driven by globalisation and pervasive rent-seeking in this short video. Over the long run can we ever close the enormous...
Can Game Theory avoid wars?
Another in the UBS Nobel perspectives series: this time Robert Aumann and Roger Myerson look at the application of game theory to war, starting from the perspective that military preparedness and...