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Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform

Yale, , Prof. W. Rae

Updated On 02 Feb, 19

Overview

Exploding Words - Thomas Malthus and Inevitable Poverty - Counting the Fingers of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand - Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and an Economic System Incapable of Coming to Rest - Property, Freedom, and the Essential Job of Government - Rise of the Joint Stock Corporation - Can You Sell a Scheme for Operating on Beating Hearts and Make a Business of It - Mortal Life Cycle of a Great Technology - Guest Lecture by Jim Alexander: Managing the Crooked E-Institutions and Incentives in Mortgages and Mortgage - Backed Securities - Accountability and Greed in Investment Banking - The Mortgage Meltdown in Cleveland - The Political and Judicial Elements of American Capitalism - Mass Affluence Comes to the Western World - Braudel's Bell Jar - The Case of Mister Balram Halwai-Microfinance in South India-plight of the Bottom Billion - Policy Targets for Capitalist Development - Marrying the Devil in Texas - Capitalist Enterprise and Clean Water for a Bolivian City

Includes

Lecture 2: Thomas Malthus and Inevitable Poverty

4.1 ( 11 )


Lecture Details

Capitalism Success, Crisis and Reform (PLSC 270)

Professor Rae shows how countries over the last two centuries have experienced improved life expectancies and increased incomes per capita. Dynamic graphical representation of this trend reveals how improved life expectancies tend to predate increases in wealth. Malthus "iron law of wages" and diminishing returns are explained. Questions about why the industrial revolution occurred in England at the time that it did are then posed. Professor Rae then shows the importance of the "world demographic transition" to economic history and contemporary economics. All countries tend to follow similar demographic patterns over the course of their economic development. Countries tend to have high birth and death rates in Phase I, falling death rate and high birth rate in Phase II, falling birth rate to meet the death rate in Phase III, and low birth and death rates in Phase IV. These demographic patterns are associated with different levels of capital and labor. While all countries follow this demographic transition, they do so at different times, and world trade is a way of "arbitraging" between different stages in the world demographic transition.

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website httpopen.yale.educourses

This course was recorded in Fall 2009.

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Sam

Excellent course helped me understand topic that i couldn't while attendinfg my college.

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Dembe

Great course. Thank you very much.

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