Economics & Society - Part One

I took somewhat of a break from all things research during the holidays. But recently I received a membership for Masterclass as a gift. I already feel like I am spending too little time trying to study too many things. However, Masterclass does have a class on Economics & Society taught by Paul Krugman.

So I will be going through these classes and writing a review/summary of what I learned. As I mentioned in my last post, these will be more loose in structure. The class has around 22 videos. While I won't try writing a post for each one, I won't try to make these too long either.

The Class

As I mentioned above, the class is 22 videos. Each one that I have seen so far is approximately 5-10 minutes long.

The class also comes with a workbook. For the first several lessons the workbook only serves as a summary of the lecture. With the addition of suggested further reading.

The Content

Having studied Economics, the first three videos lessons were fairly basic. The first video after the introduction discussed incentives. The third continued on this concept, as well as discussing the idea that every sale is a purchase. He used examples with landlords and rent to describe incentives. Current trade disputes with China and a babysitting co-op for the concept of every sale is a purchase.

What I enjoyed most about the videos is that they are more "bite sized" and each focus on only one or two concepts. They also include animations and visual aides to help you conceptualize the ideas. If you are new to Econ, you would be able to understand the concepts. If you have a solid background, you definitely won't get bored with the quick refresher.

Learn More

In the workbook, they provide links for material that follow up on the concepts covered in the video. For many of them, they are links to full articles explaining examples covered in the video.

There was also mention of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Even if you don't have an economics background, this title might sound familiar. I had always meant to read it at some point. And after starting my studies again, I may try to pick it back up.

Krugman also mentions economist David Ricardo. What I found interesting about him is that he came to conclusions without mathematical tools. After reading a summary of his work, I will definitely be looking into him further.

Final Thoughts

So far I am pretty excited for the rest of the course. There are lots of topics in later videos that seem to cover items I did not see in school. Things like current events, how economics relates to technological progress, and health care.

As always, please reach out if you have any questions, or want to me to follow up with anything I discussed in this post.