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Paul Solman Videos Chapter breakdown for Schiller The Economy Today 11e.
Note: Videos may be indicated for use in multiple chapters where appropriate.
CHAPTER 1
Series Introduction/Opportunity Cost 10:03
Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Paul Samuelson join the Boston College football
“Eagle” to explain what may be “the single most important concept in economics.”
The Production Possibilities Curve I 9:03
On the curve itself, textbook author Bradley Schiller demonstrates how the tradeoff
between guns and butter has reemerged in the case of Iraq and homeland security.
Pomona professor Cecilia Conrad also explains the law of increasing opportunity costs.
The Production Possibilities Curve II 4:24
We interact with the curve to show that an economy is always trying to produce ON the
curve, instead of inside it and that economic growth means pushing the curve
OUTWARD.
Capitalism vs. Socialism: The Cuba Quandary 10:01
The girls of Lenin High; baseball star Omar Linares, and a successful pig farmer help
illustrate how the market is making in-roads, and meeting resistance, on the island where
Russian communism squared off against US capitalism, nearly triggering World War III.
Appendix: The Basics of Graphing 7:18
We freeze college pole vaulters in mid-flight and stick them on a graph to show how
economics turns data into pictures.
CHAPTER 2
Productivity: The Bright Side 7:14
We introduce a productivity breakthrough – a self-cleaning public toilet just outside
Chicago. It’s a quirky way to show what productivity IS: economic growth per person:
getting more with less. The modern guru of economic growth, Nobel laureate Robert
Solow, helps explain the concept.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 17)
Private Property (and Pilgrims, Too) 9:39
A visit to the Plimoth Plantation to see why the Pilgrims seem to have abandoned
collectivism in favor of private property rights 400 years ago. As the Pilgrims learned the
hard way, when their very survival was at stake, private property and private enterprise
increased productivity and provided incentives for investment and development.
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Specialization 7:53
The world’s fist videotaped widget-making competition (as far as we know) anchors this
look at the key means to economic growth. And if the contest doesn’t convince, perhaps
University of North Carolina economist Mike Salemi will with his discussion of Italian
wines.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapters 3, 17, and 18)
CHAPTER 3
Rational Maximizing 11:25
Students haggling over the price of a used car, choosing the shortest line at a fast food
restaurant, and recounting their most irrational moment, plus comedian John Cleese
refusing to give money to orphans– all are featured in this exposition of economics’ two
key assumptions: that we humans are rational, and that we maximize our self-interest.
But are we? Do we?
Specialization (repeat)
The world’s fist videotaped widget-making competition (as far as we know) anchors this
look at the key means to economic growth. And if the contest doesn’t convince, perhaps
University of North Carolina economist Mike Salemi will with his discussion of Italian
wines.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapters 2, 17, and 18)
The Supply Curve 5:05
Flying cows have proved especially popular with viewers of these videos, especially
when, as here, they leave the auction room for the supply-and-demand graph to help us
explain a counter-intuitive idea in today’s world: why the supply curve slopes UPWARD.
(A few bonus memory devices thrown in as well.)
The Demand Curve 4:46
More memory devices, more mammary devices, as our flying cows help explain why the
DEmand curve DEcends.
Equilibrium 8:31
How supply and demand interact to drive the market to equilibrium. Nobel laureate
Robert Solow and our trusty cows lead us to the magic intersection.
Curve Shifting 10:05
How changes in supply and demand shift the supply and demand curves: MoRe to the
Right; Less to the Left.
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CHAPTER 4
Externalities 11:45 An introduction to the idea of a negative externality, as it invades a
lively economics class at Northern Virginia Community College. Should Mahamood
Sylla be punished for his indiscretion? Should he be taxed? How much is your time
worth? All this and more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 28)
Pareto Optimality 6:54
To an economist, efficiency is that wonderful state in which the most voluntary trades
that can be made are made. But just because a market at equilibrium is efficient—that is,
produces the maximum economic surplus, is “Pareto Optimal” – doesn’t mean it’s fair.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 33)
CHAPTER 6
Productivity: The Dark Side 10:15
Those self-cleaning toilets you met in our first video on Productivity may make the world
a better place to live in. But who goes down the drain in the wake of productivity
advances? With side-trips to a corn broom factory in Alabama and a textile mill in South
Carolina, we hear economists debate workers on the effects of productivity.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 17)
CHAPTER 7
The Federal Reserve Bank’s Primary Role 8:32
Nobel laureates Robert Solow and the late Franco Modigliani take us onboard a yacht to
explain how the Federal Reserve Bank navigates between the two great dangers of the
“macro” economy, depicted graphically, with reference to Homer’s “Odyssey,” as the
twin monsters of inflation and recession.
CHAPTER 8
The Business Cycle 11:03
Professor John Sterman humiliates reporter Paul Solman, and a host of incoming MIT
business school students, by making them play “The Beer Game,” a roller-coaster ride
which illustrates dramatically, as perhaps nothing else can, the propensity of businesses,
industries and the entire economy to go through booms and busts.
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Macroeconomics: Fiscal Policy 9:27
Created to rescue the market system from the Great Depression, macroeconomics
promotes the use of two key government tools: monetary policy and fiscal policy. This
video shows the Depression, the supposedly booming Russian Communist alternative of
the 1930s, and how and why the US government used spending (fiscal policy) to jump
start the economy.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 11)
CHAPTER 11
Macroeconomics: Fiscal Policy (repeated)
Created to rescue the market system from the Great Depression, macroeconomics
promotes the use of two key government tools: monetary policy and fiscal policy. This
video shows the Depression, the supposedly booming Russian Communist alternative of
the 1930s, and how and why the US government used spending (fiscal policy) to jump
start the economy.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 8)
CHAPTER 14
Macroeconomics: Monetary Policy 13:14
An introduction to the Federal Reserve Bank and monetary policy: its historical origins;
why and how monetary policy is pursued. Former Fed board member Andrew Brimmer
leads the way through the 1960s, a bit of disco, the Vietnam War and a whole lot more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 15)
CHAPTER 15
Macroeconomics: Monetary Policy (repeated)
An introduction to the Federal Reserve Bank and monetary policy: its historical origins;
why and how monetary policy is pursued. Former Fed board member Andrew Brimmer
leads the way through the 1960s, a bit of disco, the Vietnam War and a whole lot more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 14)
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CHAPTER 16
The Oprah Curve 6:19
Feisty Northwestern economist Robert Gordon pops an “easy” quiz: How to draw what
he calls the Oprah Winfrey supply curve – to illustrate the concepts of elasticity and
inelasticity. But the University of Texas’ Dan Hamermesh thinks the Oprah Curve is
more complicated than Gordon suggests, and Nobel laureate Gary Becker of Chicago
finds a very different answer when he applies the quiz to himself.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 33)
CHAPTER 17
Productivity: The Bright Side (repeated)
We introduce a productivity breakthrough – a self-cleaning public toilet just outside
Chicago. It’s a quirky way to show what productivity IS: economic growth per person:
getting more with less. The modern guru of economic growth, Nobel laureate Robert
Solow, helps explain the concept.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 2)
Productivity: The Dark Side (repeated)
Those self-cleaning toilets you met in our first video on Productivity may make the world
a better place to live in. But who goes down the drain in the wake of productivity
advances? With side-trips to a corn broom factory in Alabama and a textile mill in South
Carolina, we hear economists debate workers on the effects of productivity.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 6)
Specialization (repeated)
The world’s fist videotaped widget-making competition (as far as we know) anchors this
look at the key means to economic growth. And if the contest doesn’t convince, perhaps
University of North Carolina economist Mike Salemi will with his discussion of Italian
wines.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapters 3, 2, and 18)
5
CHAPTER 18
Specialization (repeated)
The world’s fist videotaped widget-making competition (as far as we know) anchors this
look at the key means to economic growth. And if the contest doesn’t convince, perhaps
University of North Carolina economist Mike Salemi will with his discussion of Italian
wines.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapters 3, 2, and 17)
The International Monetary Fund: A Case Study 10:06
It begins with a Jamaican rap star, blasting the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank for their policies in Jamaica. It continues in the shantytowns of Kingston, where
IMF and World Bank policies play out. It ends with those organizations explaining
themselves. In between, a field trip to the island nation that’s had a hard time with
economic development.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 36)
Trade: Its Trials and Triumphs 14:05
Why economists tend to love free trade and workers so often don’t: because although
trade produces more total wealth, it also produces losers, who try to resist it. We meet the
outsourcing and the outsourced, those who defend the practice because its in our
collective self-interest and those who condemn it – because it condemns them to job loss
and more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 35)
CHAPTER 20
Elasticity 14:54
It was a freezing winter in New England and our aging correspondent, Paul Solman,
wanted to know why his heating bill was rising faster than his income. The answer, it
turned out, was the price inelasticity of both supply and demand for natural gas. Find out
why. [OR: But why?]
Marginal Cost=Marginal Benefit 6:37
We bring great economist Alfred Marshall back to life to explain his great contribution –
marginal thinking – by analyzing how and why a boy decides to stop picking and eating
blueberries.
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CHAPTER 22
What Does "Profit" Mean? 7:14
Highly ranked Babson Business School's annual entrepreneurship contest introduces such
sure-fire start-up ideas as KisMET, a restaurant for romantic dating in the new “eat-ertainment” industry (we’re not making this up) and Goscha Golf. The winner? The student
business with the best chance of making a profit. But profit in economics, it turns out, has
several definitions. Watching this piece is a way to learn and remember them all.
“Pure” or “Perfect” Competition 10:15
This is the textbook definition of market competition, illustrated by three would-be new
businesses, including GI Dynamics, makers of an alternative to liposuction and gastric
bypass (the Slender Sleeve). (There’s also the History Shoppe and a chemical company.)
When you examine real companies, we discovered, "pure competition" is pretty much an
abstraction. On the other hand, it's a useful one.
CHAPTER 27
Competition and De-regulation 11:53
With the help of Cornell economist Alfred Kahn, the man who opened up the airline
industry to competition, we weigh the costs and benefits of deregulation. No more
powder rooms on Pan American flights; no more Pan American. But a lot more people,
flying a lot more places, for a lot less money.
CHAPTER 28
Externalities 11:45
An introduction to the idea of a negative externality, as it invades a lively economics
class at Northern Virginia Community College. Should Mahamood Sylla be punished for
his indiscretion? Should he be taxed? How much is your time worth? All this and more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 4)
7
CHAPTER 33
The Oprah Curve (repeated)
Feisty Northwestern economist Robert Gordon pops an “easy” quiz: How to draw what
he calls the Oprah Winfrey supply curve – to illustrate the concepts of elasticity and
inelasticity. But the University of Texas’ Dan Hamermesh thinks the Oprah Curve is
more complicated than Gordon suggests, and Nobel laureate Gary Becker of Chicago
finds a very different answer when he applies the quiz to himself.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 16)
Pareto Optimality (repeated)
To an economist, efficiency is that wonderful state in which the most voluntary trades
that can be made are made. But just because a market at equilibrium is efficient—that is,
produces the maximum economic surplus, is “Pareto Optimal” – doesn’t mean it’s fair.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 4)
CHAPTER 35
Trade: Its Trials and Triumphs (repeated)
Why economists tend to love free trade and workers so often don’t: because although
trade produces more total wealth, it also produces losers, who try to resist it. We meet the
outsourcing and the outsourced, those who defend the practice because it’s in our
collective self-interest and those who condemn it – because it condemns them to job loss
and more.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 18)
CHAPTER 36
The International Monetary Fund: A Case Study (repeated)
It begins with a Jamaican rap star, blasting the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank for their policies in Jamaica. It continues in the shantytowns of Kingston, where
IMF and World Bank policies play out. It ends with those organizations explaining
themselves. In between, a field trip to the island nation that’s had a hard time with
economic development.
(This video is also appropriate for use with Chapter 18)
8