Early in this course, Professor Taylor mentions the often-quoted description of economics as the “dismal science.” He suggests that economics is “dismal” because economists always bring bad news: the trade-offs, competing interests, risks, and checks and balances that complicate life. He offers a couple of jokes to emphasize this point: “If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end-to-end, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion.” “Did you hear about the game of Trivial Pursuit for economists? It has 500 questions but 5000 answers.” There are no easy answers to economic problems.
My dim recollection of my undergraduate economics class is that of boredom, maybe dismal boredom.
Fast-forward over several decades of life experience and I find the information presented in these lectures to be extremely pertinent to society: supply and demand curves, environmental externalities, monopoly and antitrust, inequality, governance and the principal-agent problem, GDP and the quality of life, the four macroeconomic goals (economic growth, low unemployment, low inflation, and sustainable balance of trade), automatic stabilizers for taxing and spending, the federal reserve and monetary policy, trade deficits and foreign investments, pros and (mostly) cons of protectionism, etc. Although these videos were released in 2005, the basics do not change and the professor expertly explains what they are.
Overall, these lectures are interesting and not dismal.
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