Here is a podcast on basic economics from Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse.

About the speaker:

Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. is the founder and President of the Ruth Institute — a project of the National Organization for Marriage — which seeks to promote life-long married love to college students by creating an intellectual and social climate favorable to marriage.

She is also the Senior Research Fellow in Economics at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

She is the author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, (2005) and Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn’t Work (2001), recently reissued in paperback, as Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

Dr. Morse served as a Research Fellow for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1997-2005. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester in 1980 and spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Chicago during 1979-80. She taught economics at Yale University and George Mason University for 15 years.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

• The study of economics is anti-postmodern – there is objective truth independent of what people think
• The study of economics believes in fixed principles of human nature
• Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses
• Economics studies how people exchange resources
• How both people who engage in a voluntary trade always believe that they will be better off
• How both people who engage in a voluntary trade both benefit from the exchange
• How incentives motivate people to act
• Understanding supply and demand
• Understanding how “free” government services are rationed
• Understanding opportunity costs
• How prices signal producers to produce more or less, and consumers to buy or not buy
• Market-driven prices versus price controls
• The role of substitution
• The necessity of allowing failure in a free market

The requirements of economic growth:

• private property
• contracts
• the profit motive
• competition
• free trade
• entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation
• the rule of law

If you want to learn more about basic economics, I recommend picking up a book or two by Thomas Sowell – the first book I usually give away is “Intellectuals and Society”, and then next “Basic Economics”.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, former professor of economics at Yale University and George Mason University, gave a lecture on basic economics.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

• The study of economics is anti-postmodern – there is objective truth independent of what people think
• The study of economics believes in fixed principles of human nature
• Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses
• Economics studies how people exchange resources
• How both people who engage in a voluntary trade always believe that they will be better off
• How both people who engage in a voluntary trade both benefit from the exchange
• How incentives motivate people to act
• Understanding supply and demand
• Understanding how “free” government services are rationed
• Understanding opportunity costs
• How prices signal producers to produce more or less, and consumers to buy or not buy
• Market-driven prices versus price controls
• The role of substitution
• The necessity of allowing failure in a free market

The requirements of economic growth:

• private property
• contracts
• the profit motive
• competition
• free trade
• entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation
• the rule of law

If you like this podcast, you can take a look at Thomas Sowell’s textbook on “Basic Economics“. Highly recommended!