ECON 251 - Lecture 7 - Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Collateral, Present Value and the Vocabulary of Finance

While economists didn’t have a good theory of interest until Irving Fisher came along, and didn’t understand the role of collateral until even later, Shakespeare understood many of these things hundreds of years earlier. The first half of this lecture examines Shakespeare’s economic insights in depth, and sees how they sometimes prefigured or even surpassed Irving Fisher’s intuitions.

ECON 251 - Lecture 6 - Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest

Building on the general equilibrium setup solved in the last week, this lecture looks in depth at the relationships between productivity, patience, prices, allocations, and nominal and real interest rates. The solutions are given to three of Fisher’s famous examples: What happens to interest rates when people become more or less patient? What happens when they expect to receive windfall riches sometime in the future? And, what happens when wealth in an economy is redistributed from the poor to the rich?

ECON 251 - Lecture 5 - Present Value Prices and the Real Rate of Interest

Philosophers and theologians have railed against interest for thousands of years. But that is because they didn’t understand what causes interest. Irving Fisher built a model of financial equilibrium on top of general equilibrium (GE) by introducing time and assets into the GE model. He saw that trade between apples today and apples next year is completely analogous to trade between apples and oranges today.

ECON 251 - Lecture 4 - Efficiency, Assets, and Time

Over time, economists’ justifications for why free markets are a good thing have changed. In the first few classes, we saw how under some conditions, the competitive allocation maximizes the sum of agents’ utilities. When it was found that this property didn’t hold generally, the idea of Pareto efficiency was developed. This class reviews two proofs that equilibrium is Pareto efficient, looking at the arguments of economists Edgeworth and Arrow-Debreu.

ECON 251 - Lecture 3 - Computing Equilibrium

Our understanding of the economy will be more tangible and vivid if we can in principle explain all the economic decisions of every agent in the economy. This lecture demonstrates, with two examples, how the theory lets us calculate equilibrium prices and allocations in a simple economy, either by hand or using a computer. In future lectures we shall extend this method so as to compute equilibrium in financial economies with stocks and bonds and other financial assets.

ECON 251 - Lecture 2 - Utilities, Endowments, and Equilibrium

This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the last class, as well as many other markets, such as the Paris Bourse, online trading, the commodities pit, and a host of others.

ECON 251 - Lecture 1 - Why Finance?

This lecture gives a brief history of the young field of financial theory, which began in business schools quite separate from economics, and of my growing interest in the field and in Wall Street. A cornerstone of standard financial theory is the efficient markets hypothesis, but that has been discredited by the financial crisis of 2007-09. This lecture describes the kinds of questions standard financial theory nevertheless answers well. It also introduces the leverage cycle as a critique of standard financial theory and as an explanation of the crisis.

AFAM 162 - Lecture 25 - Who Speaks for the Race? (continued)

In this final lecture, Professor Holloway offers a survey of some of the main themes and ideas of the course, including citizenship, uplift and respectability, political radicalism, cultural politics, and racial symbolism. The final two questions he grapples with are 1) what does it mean to be “post-racial” and 2) how is race used in our society? In order to propose answers to these questions, Professor Holloway examines Barack Obama’s election; his 2008 inauguration; and his speech, “A More Perfect Union,” given during the campaign.

AFAM 162 - Lecture 24 - Who Speaks for the Race?

In this lecture, Professor Holloway discusses how race influenced public policy by examining some of the key cultural symbols of the past few decades, all in an effort to answer the question: how is race used in our society? Professor Holloway discusses Bill Clinton’s policies in particular, honing in on his ability to connect with the African American community, the controversy surrounding Lani Guinier’s cabinet appointment, and his National Dialogue on Race.

AFAM 162 - Lecture 23 - Public Policy and Presidential Politics (continued)

In this lecture, Professor Holloway discusses the connections between media and high politics during the late 1980s and 1990s and reveals the ways that race was replaced by a series of keywords–such as crime, drugs, and welfare–that acted as racial signifiers in our national discourse. An examination of the political rhetoric from the George H.W.

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