Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).

First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by bailing out an important bank (“Can you say ‘too big to fail?’” DeLong asks.)

After a short detour into economic theory (Irving Fisher’s Quantity Theory of Money) to explain the amount of spending in an economy, DeLong goes on to narrate more recent history: the dotcom bust, the hubris of Alan Greenspan and our current dilemma.

Note to you econ nerds out there: can anyone explain why DeLong thinks that expanding the money supply and getting treasury interest rates “closer to normal levels” is a good idea? To my untutored mind this looks like a prescription for inflation.

Technical note: to download this talk, it helps to have a download utility like DownloadHelper (see How to download streaming audio and video/ Part 1).

Related posts:

• Slouching Towards Utopia?
• Great Recessions-Lessons Learned from Japan
• The best financial crisis lectures yet
• What would John Maynard do?

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.

So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).

Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling examples.

For instance, the Kuuk Thaayorre people of northern Australia don’t have words for our concepts of relative location: right, left, forward and back. Instead, when they refer to a location, they always use cardinal directions like north and south. So, they say things like “there is an ant on your southeast leg.” Not surprisingly, these people always know which way is north, even without technology like a compass. That’s a handy skill for a nomadic forager to have.

She has also studied the way languages with grammatical gender influence how people think about everyday objects. For example, the noun “bridge” is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish. When asked to describe a bridge, German speakers are more likely to use adjectives like beautiful and elegant, while Spanish speakers are more likely to use words like strong and sturdy.

It’s not that languages determine what we think, she notes. People after all create languages. Instead, it’s a two-way street: thought creates language and language creates thought.

(Listening hint: skip the first eight minutes of the interview, which is a long-winded introduction by interviewer Joshua Landy, a Stanford professor of French.)

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):

“De omnibus dubitandum.”

Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you wake. Every day of the semester say it before you go to sleep.”

What does it mean? Doubt everything. “And that includes me, because I’m going to lie to you a lot all semester long. Or, at least, somebody will accuse me of that I guarantee.”

A folio from P46, an early 3rd century collection of Pauline epistles. Image credit*

With his Texas twang and exhortations such as these, Martin’s speaking style has a passing resemblance to the cadences of a televangelist. Indeed Martin, a self-described “former fundamentalist” repeatedly emphasizes that it’s perfectly legitimate to read the New Testament through the eyes of faith.

But he has a different mission. He wants to teach his students to read the New Testament critically, as historical documents with a context and an agenda. He shows the class how it’s done in lecture 5, The New Testament as History, in which he contrasts the itinerary of Paul’s ministry in Acts of the Apostles with Paul’s own account of his travels in his letters. Then he asks the students to explain the many conflicts and contradictions.

Who is more likely to be telling the truth, Martin wants to know. Is it Paul or the author of Acts? They can’t both be right. And its the job of the doubting historian to try to pull apart each side’s likely motives to get at the truth.

Related posts:
How the Biblical texts became Holy Scripture
Web resources on early Christianity
Dreaming of the Apocalypse
The World of the Hebrew Bible

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.

How to find the good stuff on iTunes U

Some of you have asked how I find the good stuff on iTunes U. After all, a lot of colleges offer mainly PR fluff, like virtual campus tours and welcoming speeches by the dean of students.

So, here are my secrets. Every few days I do some of the following.

1. Survey the main iTunes U page. Apple changes the “featured” content on a regular basis, and I click on whatever catches my fancy. I also keep on eye on the “top downloads” list for interesting candidates.

2. Check out the major course collections (Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to see if there’s anything new.

3. Look at the Universities and Colleges page. Apple flags any newcomers, so it’s easy to click on the link, and see if the school is offering anything interesting.

4. Check out the categories list on the main iTunes U page. When I choose a category, say history, iTunes takes me to a subject page that includes a “new and notable” list. Sometimes this leads to a great find. It’s also good to scan the “top downloads” list for more interesting candidates.

5. For current affairs, look at Fora.TV and UChannel.  For general browsing, check out UCTV and WGBH.

6.  If I’ve encountered an interesting lecture or interview in my recent listening, I use the iTunes search box to look for more lectures by the same person.

So there you have it. Happy hunting, and let me know if you find something great.

Related posts:
Guide to iTunes U

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.

These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).

Emmer wheat: one of the first domesticated crops. Image credit*

This is one course you’ll definitely want to grab from the UCSD podcast website before it disappears at the end of the fall 2009 quarter (mid-December). Carter clearly loves her subject and radiates infectious enthusiasm. Although these lectures are in audio format, her sprightly, happy voice makes me feel like she is smiling, and I have the urge to smile back.

Here are the main theories that Carter discusses:

Shortage model: In this theory, climate change causes a shortage of food. At the end of the ice age, when the climate dries, people congregate in oases where food is available. As the oases become crowded, some smart people innovate, and voila, you have farming.

Abundance model: In this model, agriculture grows out of an abundance of food. There is so much food around, people accidentally start domesticating crops and animals.

Competition model: This model supposes that people developed agriculture because they liked to drink alcoholic beverages. (All of the early domesticated crops could be fermented.) This theory proposes that particularly ambitious people worked at producing extra grain so they could have alcoholic beverages to trade.

You’ll have to listen to the lectures to get the whole scoop, but I can give away a bit of the ending. Carter does not buy any of these theories in their entirety, but thinks that each makes an important contribution in our understanding of the agricultural revolution.

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.

Archaeologist Isabelle Pafford teaches new course

University of Santa Clara archaeologist Isabelle Pafford is back with a new course about heroic narratives, Heroes & Heroism (iTunes). The course covers heroic figures in ancient works like the Iliad, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Bhagavad Gita, and explores the historical background behind these tales.

Pafford has many fans among my readers who have praised her speaking style and dry sense of humor. For myself, I find her pacing a bit slow, so she is not one of my favorite lecturers. However she does an admirable job in covering her material and is very well organized.

The lectures are best experienced with a device that has a video screen such as a computer or a video-capable portable player because the audio files include Pafford’s slides, which add immensely to the experience. For instance, in lecture 2 Pafford illustrates the rich culture of the Mycenaeans with a photo of the intricate artwork produced in that culture. You can then see the stark contrast with the simple pottery of the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean culture.

Related posts:

• More Roman history from Isabelle Pafford
• Two views of ancient Rome

Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.

UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download link) of his current course Citizenship and Public Service (feed).

Americans see the government as “essentially vampirish,” Walker thinks, because in the very earliest days of colonial history, Britain viewed the colonies as a resource to be exploited for the benefit of the mother country. Thus, edicts from London were always suspect and to be avoided if possible.

In the same lecture, in which he talks about republican traditions in Britain, France and America, he talks about public attitudes towards government. In other industrial countries he says, the public is much more favorable towards government. As an example, he cites France, where the civil service is a profession held in high public esteem as the provider of essential public services.

This lecture is part of Walker’s larger survey of the political philosophy of public service, from the ancient Greeks and Chinese to the present. Walker has a gift for explaining sometimes dense and difficult philosophic ideas with concrete and often entertaining examples. While some of this material is tough slogging, it’s worth the effort for the ample food for thought it provides.

10 new free courses at Yale

Yale’s excellent Open Yale Courses website just got even better. Ten new free courses are now available for your viewing/listening pleasure. The offerings now total 25, with 21 cross-listed on Apple’s iTunes U.

Some of the new courses:

• Introduction to New Testament History and Literature, Spring 2009
• The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food, Fall 2008
• Global Problems of Population Growth, Spring 2009
• Dante in Translation, Fall 2008

For more info, here’s the Yale press release.

Thousands of free books in your pocket

Over the past few months I have become quite addicted to my silvery iPod Touch, Apple’s palm-sized iPod with a 3 x 5″ video screen. My iTouch was a freebie bonus when my husband bought an iMac and the big surprise for me was how much I enjoyed reading books on its tiny screen.

While it’s not as pleasant as reading a real paper-and-ink book, it’s surprisingly close, especially when I dim the screen so that it has less glare.

Why do I love it? Let me count the ways.

1) The first big draw is convenience. On a recent vacation I carried 10 books on my iTouch, allowing me to read during the usual travel delays, and during the frequent pauses in our sightseeing when my husband needed to stop and take a photograph. It’s also remarkably easy to read in bed on the iTouch, and I don’t even need a lamp.

2) Then there’s the instant gratification. If you are connected to a wireless network, you can get just about any public domain book (in the United States published before 1923) for free within a minute. This is great for following the reading for lots of online humanities courses. For example, I quickly located a free version of Hard Times by Charles Dickens to read in conjunction with Margaret Anderson’s great course European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present (website).

3) There’s even more instant gratification. If I’m curious about new book, I can often download a free sample chapter from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Then I have to exercise my willpower not to press the “buy now” button too often.

So, how do you get free books for your iPod Touch or iPhone?

First, download the big 3 e-reader apps (all free): Stanza, Kindle for iPhone, and Barnes and Noble eReader. They each have their pluses and minuses, and give you access to different ebook collections. Here’s a quick summary.

Lexcycle Stanza (website)
Stanza is my favorite e-reader for free books because it taps into Project Gutenberg, the granddaddy of the web’s public access book sites which has been digitizing public domain books since 1971.
Pros: Stanza is highly customizable, allowing you to easily change type size, font and line spacing. It’s very stable (it doesn’t crash at odd moments) and unlike its two more famous rivals, it lets you search the text.
Cons: For current titles, Stanza doesn’t have the breadth or the discounts of its rivals. Lexcycle has recently been acquired by Amazon, so that may change.

Kindle for iPhone (website)
This is a free software version of Amazon’s popular Kindle hardware e-reader.
Pros: Kindle is a very robust application. In three months of daily use, it hasn’t crashed once. And it gives access to the huge collection of ebooks offered by Amazon, including lots of bestsellers at the rock-bottom price of $9.99. It also offers free public domain books, but they’re not easy to find on Amazon.com.  Try this handy list, or this list of public domain bestsellers.  Or you can search for “public domain kindle books”  on Amazon and add the title or author you are seeking.
Cons: This application has a couple of glaring faults. First, it has no search function. You’d think this would be a no-brainer way of adding value to computerized books, but Amazon’s application has no search. This was especially a drawback when I used my iTouch to carry a guidebook during a recent trip to Paris. Second, the ebook index did not work. Yes, you can see a term in the index, but you can’t jump to the right place at the book. Instead, you only have the table of contents to help you navigate your way through the book.

Barnes and Noble eReader (website)
The B&N eReader is the new guy on the block, trying to catch up to Amazon’s big lead.
Pros: B&N has made a deal with Google, giving it its eReader access to the free public domain books in Google’s gigantic digitization project. If you can’t find a book on Project Gutenberg, you can probably find it with the B&N eReader.  If you want to find the free editions on B&N’s website, search for the title or author in ebooks, and then sort the results by price.
Cons: Unlike its two rivals, the B&N eReader is flaky and prone to crashing. I have had to uninstall and reinstall it several times. Also, the digitized books in Google’s collection often have lots of typos, probably caused by Google’s automated scanning and a lack of proofreading. Finally, like the Kindle application, the B&N eReader lacks a search function. B&N’s software engineers ought to be sweating over an improved version if they really want to compete with Amazon.

Music at McGill U

Do you want to hear great musicians and musicologists talk about the music they love? Check out Music (website, iTunes), a video podcast from Montreal’s McGill University.

Unlike a lot of academic podcasts, these videos have great production values: beautiful camera-work and high fidelity sound. You can listen to members of McGill’s faculty and guest lecturers talk about music and then perform excerpts to illustrate their points.

Beethoven in 1818. Image credit*

Here’s the quick rundown on a couple of the lectures.

Beethoven’s Late Piano Works (website), Anton Kuerti.
Renowned pianist Anton Kuerti talks about Beethoven’s continuing efforts to grow as a musician, even late in life. Kuerti also makes the point that Beethoven, master musician though he was, did not excel at writing melodies. Instead he showed his virtuosity by taking very short motifs and spinning out inventive variations.

What is This Thing Called Jazz? (website), Gordon Foote.
Music professor and jazz musician Gordon Foote leads an entertaining session that explains and illustrates musical forms like 12-bar blues and 32-bar jazz.  You’ll never hear jazz quite the same way again.

Technical note: because the downloaded video files are very large, you might want to convert them to audio MP3 for listening on a portable player. You can convert to iPod-size video within iTunes (right-click on the file name and choose “create iPod version”), however the iTunes conversion process is very slow. For faster conversion, and conversion to MP3, check out the freeware Any Video Converter. (see How to download streaming audio and video/ Part 2).

*Image credit: Wikipedia. Public domain.