Economic Rockstar

Connecting Brilliant Minds in Economics and Finance

053: Helena Norberg-Hodge on Localisation, Trade Treaties and the Economics of Happiness

by

Play in New WindowDownload

053: Helena Norberg-Hodge on Localisation, Trade Treaties and the Economics of Happiness

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures. A pioneer of the ‘new economy’ movement, she has been promoting an economics of personal, social and ecological well-being for more than 30 years.Helena Norberg Hodge

Helena is the producer and co-director of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness, and is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, described as “an inspirational classic”.

Helena has given public lectures in seven languages, and has appeared in broadcast, print, and online media worldwide.

She was honored with the Right Livelihood Award (or ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) for her groundbreaking work in Ladakh, and received the 2012 Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide”.

Economics:

In this interview, Helena mentions: localisation, globalisation, deregulation, finance, banking, money, real economy, price, demand, subsidies, tax, business alliances, lobbying, competition, trade treaties, unemployment, poverty, natural environment, growth, climate, energy consumption, comparative advantage and GDP.

Economists:

In this interview, Helena mentions: Alex Tabarrok, Adam Smith, David Riccardo,

In this episode you will learn:

  • how and why Helena decided to advocate for and promote localisation.
  • about Ladakh and how it was removed from the rest of the world.
  • how the global market was very destructive to the local market in Ladakh.
  • how globalisation destroyed the livelihood of farms and local businesses and created unemployment.
  • how the happiness and high self-esteem among the people of Ladakh was destroyed after a decade of economic development.
  • why extreme tensions between buddhists and muslims erupted after living in peace for over 500 years in Ladakh.
  • about Ladakh, where the Dalai Lama is the spiritual head.
  • how Ladakh has become a case study on how a local economy has been quickly affected by globalisation.
  • about the phenomenal work Helena is doing to highlight the changing lives and economy of Ladakh and other regions.
  • about the true meaning of the real economy and how cheap money and speculation is destroying it.
  • why the earth is so precious and must be protected before we see irreversible and horrific damage.
  • about the terrific work being undertaken by Local Futures to highlight the need for economic change to protect our earth.
  • why we need to make the local food market a global initiative.
  • how small towns and villages are taking initiatives to feed their community with fresh, organic foods.
  • how schools are integrating nature into their infrastructure to increase the well-being of staff and pupils.
  • how nature provides profound and important psychological healing benefits.
  • how diversifying and staying local can provide more diversified foods per unit of land and water than the large monocultures.
  • why farmers prefer to work closely with the customer than with large-scale supermarkets.
  • whether small farmers and businesses should create a group to represent the their interests and to lobby governments in much the same way as large companies like Volkswagen and Monsanto.
  • how to make small and local businesses more visible.
  • about Helena’s mantra for resistance and renewal – resisting trade treaties and renewing localisation.
  • about the law that was passed in Sweden to have trade treaties to be discussed in secret.
  • how, under the new trade agreements, multinational corporations can sue governments if they inhibit their profit-making ability of that governments country.
  • whether GDP is a good measure of progress and how Helena interprets its true meaning.

Quotes by Helena on the Economic Rockstar Podcast:

“The EU is essentially an economic union and it’s bringing with it a centralised bureaucracy” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

About Earth Being Our Only Economy:

“The earth is our only economy. There’s nothing we use that doesn’t come from the earth. Nothing, nothing. Every iPad, every shoe, every television. And that economy, the real economy, is diversity. It requires and can only continue to live by respecting the uniqueness of every leaf, of every human being. Everything that lives is unique and is changing from moment to moment.” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

“I describe Nature as the economy, but it’s also our Mother. It’s our spiritual home” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

Click To Tweet

“Usually when people talk about the economy, they’re just thinking about paper money. They don’t think about culture and farming as having anything to do with the economy.” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

“The global food economy, from beginning to end, is the biggest contributor to CO2 emissions, and it’s not just because of the factory farming with animals. It’s across the board.” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

About the Stock Market and Cheap Money:

“The market is really young lads sitting in front of computers speculating with huge amounts of money. And they inevitably have to and do favour the giant. They’re betting on the giants ‘horses’ like Monsanto, McDonalds and Walmart. And so this connection between that flood of cheap money created out of thin air, now has become a sort of a ‘blind machinery’ that is eating up the real economy, the earth, extremely rapidly and we’re going to see more horrific examples.” – Helena Norberg-Hodge

Other Quotes:

There is a growing local food market that is going global – Helena Norberg-Hodge

Click To Tweet

GDP is an outrageous measure of progress. It is simply a measure of commercialisation – Helena Norberg-Hodge

With Riccardo and the notion of comparative advantage, it sounds good on the surface. But let’s remember it was brought in in a time of slavery – Helena Norberg-Hodge

Where to Find Helena:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

039: David Zetland on Aguanomics, Water Scarcity, Water Wars and ‘Toilet-to-Tap’

by

Play in New WindowDownload

039: David Zetland on Aguanomics, Water Scarcity, Water Wars and ‘Toilet-to-Tap’

David Zetland is an assistant professor at Leiden University College, where he teaches various classes on economics. He was a PostdoctoralDavid Zetland Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at UC Berkeley (2008-2010) and a Senior Water Economist at Wageningen University (2011-2013). David blogs on water, economics and politics at aguanomics.com and gives many talks to public, professional and academic audiences.

David has two books The End of Abundance: economic solutions to water scarcity (2011)  and Living with Water Scarcity (2014). He received his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Davis in 2008. David lives in Amsterdam.

Influencers:

Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Nassim Taleb.

Economics:

In this interview, David mentions and discusses: scarcity, shortage, commodity, supply, demand, marginal cost, opportunity cost, unintended consequences, monopoly, common-carrier system, the water-diamond paradox, development economics, governance, probability, fat tails, Buddhist economics, the problem of over-consumption, non-satiation assumption, GDP, pricing, fairness and efficiency.

Economists:

In this interview, David mentions and discusses: Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Ernst Friedrich Schumacher.

The Water-Diamond Paradox (23rd minute in this Episode)

Find out:

  • if we should be worried more about a shortage of water or a scarcity of water.
  • if we should learn from the oil industry and develop the technology-equivalent of extracting oil from oil sands and desalinate the ocean water?
  • if we can tell whether we know the water footprint of a cow and if it’s different in California than Ireland.
  • why water is actually free and what you pay is for the delivery.
  • if there is an opportunity costs to acquiring water?
  • why people living in the slums of India pay up to 50 times the price for water than those who have cheaper piped water.
  • if a water monopoly is an effective market structure.
  • if price competition in the market for water would result in the over-use of water consumption.
  • about Scottish Water and how other utilities across the UK and adopting their distribution and pricing structure.
  • about the water-diamond paradox.
  • why David decided to do a PhD in economics after failing to get rich in the dotcom era.
  • how David came to get his family name ‘Zetland’.
  • about the coming ‘Water Wars’ and how it has already started.
  • about Sao Paulo’s troubled water situation and how it’s creating gang warfare on the streets.
  • who we should assign the property rights to water.
  • about Chile‘s exemplary assigning of water property rights.
  • what David proposes to be the most effective way of managing water.
  • how Singapore are becoming independent in creating their supply of water and are no longer depending on imports from Malaysia.
  • how Singapore are building technologies to recycle water from waste.
  • why the ‘toilet-to-tap’ water recycling initiative has failed in the US but is working in Singapore.
  • how marketing recycled water works in Singapore and not in the US – one known as ‘New Water’ and the other ‘Toilet-to-Tap Water’.
  • why Singapore treats water as a national security issue.
  • why it will take 20 years to build a desalination plant and why San Diego will need 15 of these plants to serve the water needs of the locals.
  • about the new Irish water utility, Irish Water, and how the management decided to ‘award’ themselves bonuses even before the Irish people payed for their water.
  • about ‘Buddhist Economics’ and the assumption of non-satiation.
  • what David would suggest if he was an Economic Advisor to any country regarding water policy.

Why David Studied Economics:

When I was between 25 and 30 years old, I travelled to 65 countries and when I came back to the States I was looking around and figuring out what to do. I tried to get rich in the dotcom era and that totally failed and I started to work with a bunch of academic mathematicians and they were really kinda cool people. But they were pretty cool and I thought ‘well this is interesting. Maybe I should go and do something academic’. I went back to grad school to get a PhD and I wanted to do development economics. My research project, which was to go and study cocaine production in South America, sounded to my advisors a littlest dangerous. Then one of my advisors said that there was this really strange case in Southern California where San Diego is in a big fight with other water utilities and maybe you should look into that. So that ended up being my dissertation – David Zetland.

David’s Advice to a Country Implementing a Water Policy:

“You have to take care of your environment. Then you have to commodify all the rest of the water. But all that revenue really should go to the citizens of that country. Other than that, I’m open to any other discussion about what’s a better system in terms of balancing between efficiency, which is pricing and fairness which is the distribution of those revenues” – David Zetland.

‘Water Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink’: The Right to Water – It’s a Necessity After All

The ‘Right to Water’ is an important part of the conversation but it tends to confuse things. People need water for drinking, cleaning, washing and so on. But is there a right to water to put on your garden? Is there a right to water to wash your car? Do farmers have a right to water that goes on their fields if that means the river is going to be dry? So, there comes a point where the ‘Right to Water’ runs out and we have to start talking about water as a scarce good or an economic commodity. That’s the separation you need to start with.

Shortage is worse than scarcity because you can’t get any of what you want, even if you have time or money – David Zetland

David Zetland’s book ‘Living with Water Scarcity’ is about learning how to manage water scarcity, the same way we have learned to manage land scarcity, time scarcity and money scarcity. Water scarcity is not confined to any particular region or country. This is a global phenomenon. We can generalise water scarcity in terms of the lack of water available. But there exists specific concerns such as the scarcity of clean water, which is becoming a problem in northern European countries and eastern United States, where there’s lots of water but a lot of it is polluted.

Ireland's Anti-Water Charges Protest 2014

Ireland’s Anti-Water Charges Protest 2014

The irony for people living in Ireland, for example, is that the country is surrounded by water but yet availability of fresh, clean water can be scarce in some regions. There are a few towns and villages in Ireland who have been buying bottled water or are on boiling notices due the presence of cryptosporidium in their water. Water shortages is not necessarily an immediate concern for Ireland. However, California, on the other hand, is experiencing their 4th year of drought. This is something that is being experienced in many regions around the world, but ‘California has more reporters hanging around’ and other regions’ grief remain unreported.

The ‘Water Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink’ problem leads people to think that we should desalinate the ocean and get all the water that we want from the ocean. This, however, would be a great physical and expensive task to undertake and the conversation on desalination tends to stop. Should we learn from the oil industry and develop the technology-equivalent of extracting oil from oil sands and desalinate the ocean water?

Adam Smith explained the value in exchange as being determined by labor: ‘The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it’.

David frames this as ‘Technologies and Techniques’; techniques meaning how we use technologies and how we use water. “In the case where you have scarcity, you could say we’re going to build a desalination plant, drill a deeper well, build aqueducts, take shorter showers or stop watering our lawns. We should try and help people use as many ways as possible instead of focusing on one particular silver bullet.”

Who’s the Straw that Broke the Camels Back?

Numerous groups are pointing the finger at each other and casting blame each others way for causing pollution, drought and water scarcity. Besides the natural precipitation, farmers use half as much water as people in the city, such as industries and municipalities. In California, farmers use four times as much water as cities, say in the UK. Farmers obviously use water in various forms, but they’re not necessarily using more than the cities.

Then there’s the big discussion about who should be allowed to or who has the right to us water and that’s where the politics and mudslinging comes in. However, the level of precipitation is different in Arizona and California, as well as in Spain and Cyprus, compared to regions in Ireland and the UK.

Quotes from David in this Episode:

“These pro-poor policies can end up being so anti-poor. It’s terrible, it’s actually almost a crime” – David Zetland

Click To Tweet

on how cheap water in India results in water utilities not having the infrastructure to deliver water to the slum areas. These people end up paying up to 50 times for their water from tankards. This water is dirty and people, particularly children, queue up for hours to collect and carry this water to their homes which can often be on the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.

“The customer is vulnerable to being exploited by the monopoly and the monopoly is vulnerable to being exploited by the customer. And that’s where regulations come in” – David Zetland on the need for regulation in the market for water.

Why is water, which is something we need to live, so cheap, whereas diamonds, which are a pure frivolous luxury, so expensive? – David Zetland on the Water-Diamond Paradox.

Water Wars in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Sao Paulo’s reservoirs have fallen to such low levels that their supply fails to meet with their expected demand. There were a lot of ways in which Sao Paulo could’ve dealt with this risk, such as fixing their leaky networks. They cannot get water from somewhere else. You’ve got a limited amount of water and 10 to 20 million people who need water to drink. The utility can shut off the water supply at various locations if they like and that raises the question of rich versus poor. That kind of decision is not going to please anybody. There have been protests over this.

David’s assessment of this is that if Sao Paulo wants to avoid a war on the streets, they need to shut of everybody’s water and have tankard trucks distributing water in Jerry cans in the corners – one man, one bottle. And that’s because you’d be addressing the concern of social equality and human rights.

Israel is not going to invade Turkey for their water. You can’t win that battle. You can’t bring back the water – it’s too heavy.There won’t be wars of plunder, there’ll be just conflicts over who’s going to get the water. Water gangs will form and they will take your water.


Recommended Books:

  • Check out David’s review of ‘Small is Beautiful’ by E. F. Schumacher.
  • Find out here why David decided to give his book away for FREE.

Where to Find David Zetland:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

037: Noah Smith on Austrian Theory Being a ‘Bad Joke’, Heterodox Models and Efficient Markets

by

Play in New WindowDownload

037: Noah Smith on Austrian Theory Being a ‘Bad Joke’, Heterodox Models and Efficient Markets

Noah Smith is Assistant Professor of Finance at Stony Brook University, New York where he is also a member of the Center for Behavioral Noah SmithFinance research team. Noah’s research Interests include Experimental Finance, Behavioral Finance and Macroeconomics Noah was panel discussant for the Institute for New Economic Thinking Task Force and has received numerous research awards and fellowships. 

Noah is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View where he writes extensively on economics and finance related topics. He also writes at his fantastic economics blog Noahpinion.

Noah received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan, graduating in 2012. His dissertation examined expectation formation in financial markets. Noah majored in physics as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and spent three years working in Japan, where he still returns from time to time to do research.

Everyone who meets in the public sphere, unless you’re extremely dry and technical, is going to piss people off. Econ is one of those fields where everyone has their own opinion and position and their models that they like. Traditionally, it was this very closed discipline. Econ was for economists and they didn’t often interface with the outside world except through official policy advice and the occasional op-ed. People start talking in the public sphere and I think that disturbs a lot of people. So all the blogs are bad boys really – Noah Smith.

Economics:

GDP, inflation, Central Bank, consumption, microeconomics, macroeconomics, behavioral economics, DSGE, game theory, decision theory, supply, demand, time series, interest rates, linear regression, forecasting, Quantitative Easing, money, gold, Federal Reserve, efficient markets hypothesis, extrapolative expectations, hedge funds, adverse selection, random walk, fat tails and volatility.

Economists:

Paul Samuelson, Brad DeLong, Steve Keen, Greg Mankiw, John H. Cochrane, Jack Schwager, Josh Angrist, Steve Pischke, Ed Phelps, Robert Lucas, Ed Prescott, Paul Volcker, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Hyman Minsky, Andrei Schleifer, Alok Kumar, Kelly Schuh,  Jonathan Burke, Burton Malkiel, Marcus Brunnermeier, Mark Thoma, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

Find out:

  • whether economists suffer from ‘Physics Envy’.
  • if we should remove mathematics from economics.
  • how math took over economics.
  • if there is a connection between economics and physics.
  • how economics is becoming a more data-driven field.
  • about the micro foundations to macro theory and why these models don’t work.
  • why theory and math-focused economics papers are waning in the academic publishing field.
  • how to approach teaching micro and macro when the theoretical models may not explain much.
  • about whether Economics is moving away from the orthodox method of teaching toward a heterodox method.
  • about the difference between Heterodox and Orthodox teaching in Economics.
  • why Noah considers Austrian Economics to be a bad joke.
  • where Noah falls within the economic spectrum.
  • why Noah believes that heterodox economics is not the future.
  • Noah’s recommended economics blogs to follow.
  • why the Efficient Market Hypothesis is a good starting model for finance students to understand.
  • and much much more

Physics Envy and the Mathematisation of Economics:

At one point economics was a literary discipline. It was philosophical. It was people writing down verbal description of how they thought things worked. Then people started writing down equations. At first it was just a couple of people doing it who were obscure and then, with Paul Samuelson, they really started putting everything in terms of equations and mathematising everything. It was at that point people started to mention that economists had ‘Physics Envy’ because physicists write everything in equations. Maybe that was true as Samuelson had also studied Physics. This was probably a misnomer.

There were new mathematical tools and people were just trying to apply them to things. Math really took over economics and the style of math they did was sometimes similar to physics. Mathematicians are very rigorous. They start with axioms and they have this really formal proof structure. A physicists approach to working with equations is a lot more ad hoc and informal. So in economics, you see both styles. Noah doesn’t think there’s a lot of connection between economics and physics. He also doesn’t believe there is any particular pieces of math in economics that were inspired by physics.

Math helps you organise your thoughts. It makes your economic theory more internally consistent because math always has to work out perfectly and all the logic has to work out. But in practice it rarely does that. What usually happens is that people usually end up sticking in the assumptions they need to get the conclusions they want to see in the theories. So there’s essentially no discipline provided by math on theory, but math is useful when you want to get actual numbers.

Economics is becoming a more and more data-driven field. Now that we have information technology, we have so much data. We have macro data and industry-level data that we can keep track of with electronic records. Government can easily keep track of statistics on all kinds of variables on the economy. We have a lot more financial data. It is easier to get people surveyed so you have a lot more survey data. So you have huge amounts of data that is easily transferable and easily manipulatable in statistics programs. Economists are basically rolling in data. What we’ve seen from that is that data and empirics has become so much central  to the economics field in recent years. The number of published papers that are data and empiric-focused has soared, whereas the percent that is just theory and math-focused has gone down in the last twenty years.

On Teaching Micro and Macro When Theoretical Models Fail:

Economics is not data-free. You can use data to help you teach. But in terms of giving students a hands-on thing where they can predict some outcome something, well for lower-level students, there’s not much you can do. But for upper-level students there are some things you can do with linear regression that help you make a prediction or forecast. Certainly with graduate-level students you can do things with time series econometrics. Then you can have them make forecasts and see how well their forecasts come out. There’s things you can do but it doesn’t work as beautifully as it does in Physics – Noah Smith

Noah Smith on Why He Considers Austrian Economics to be a Bad Joke and Why Heterodox Economics is Not the Future:

The idea that economics is substantially divided between the orthodox and the heterodox is wrong. That’s just not the way it is. There’s only a very few people in the world who call themselves heterodox. For any science you’re going to get some people somewhere who are doing something totally different. There’s probably somebody out there using physics models that look nothing like quantum mechanics or Newton’s Laws or any of the core physics models we think of as real physics. There’s probably someone out there doing some model of a type you and I never heard of and will never hear of. And that’s basically what the heterodox economics guys are.

The people who call themselves heterodox in economics, include some people who are nakedly political. All they really are is political, well I could say hacks but they’re not paid by parties, but they’re trying to make economics into a politicised discipline. So, the most prominent group of these is people who call themselves Austrians.

There were these guys, called the Austrians, who wrote some ideas down. All of those ideas were later taken up by the mathematical economists and put into math language. Most were tested in some way. They were developed further on. But then what happened was there was a tribe of people who declared that all the mathematical economics was bullshit and that what we had to do was pay attention to the wisdom of the ‘Old Masters’. So they spend a lot of time reading the old wisdom of Mises and Hayek and those guys. And the only way this group could survive when economics itself had moved on was to take donations from political people who agree with their politics.

So they politicise themselves in order to survive. And in the wilderness where they deserve to be, their method of analysis they use are a joke. A lot of mainstream normal economics might also be a joke but the Austrian stuff is definitely a joke. And the problem is with the addition of politics to the mix, it really becomes a bad joke.

Most of what they do is advocating through their version of free markets or advocating for various conservative policies and politics. And that’s what they spend most of their time doing. It’s clear that what they really want to do is just turn economics into a mouthpiece for conservative ideas.

I haven’t spent hundreds of hours reading Mises because that would be robbing me of many many valuable hours of my life-span and I’m mortal and my life-span is ticking away and I can’t spend my time reading Mises. I’ve read a little bit. It was obviously silly. It was like reading Jacques Derrida.

It’s so dense and confusing and self-referential and full of neologisms and just, frankly, badly written that what it descends into this infinite recursion where you have people who read the ‘Old Master’ and write some interpretation of the ‘Old Master’ and then someone reads what that person wrote and mis-interprets that and then writes their own interpretation of that. Then you just have this infinite recurring commentary where nobody really knows what the hell anyone else is talking about and they all just sort of talk about their own distorted, twisted perception of what these other people talk about. It gives no insight and no understanding. People ‘parrot’ the words of the ‘Old Masters’ without understanding what the ‘Old Masters ‘ were necessarily meant or what those ideas would even imply.

If you criticise the ‘Old Masters’ or criticise this paradigm of relying on the ‘Old Masters’, They say “Oh, you have to go read everything the ‘Old Masters’ wrote before you are qualified to comment on this. How dare you comment on this when you haven’t read this and this and this. I’ve spent time reading this.” What do you say to that. That’s not scientific. That’s scholastic.

Sometimes you look at Minsky and you look at Hayek and you say these guys aren’t saying such different things after all actually. But the thing is you have the right-wingers in the modern day who think that Hayek and Mises are gods and left-wing guys who think Minsky is a god and they fight like cats and dogs.

The mere fact of these kind of battles is one thing that convinces me that so-called heterodox economics is not the future at all.

Austrians have a lot of blogs. They have a big mouth-piece; much bigger than their academic footprint. Austrians took a huge hit in 2011 and 2012. Those are absolute critical years for this sort of ‘pop-Austrianism’ that has become very popular on sites like zerohedge. All the Austrians are saying is the Fed is printing all this money doing Quantitative Easing. There’s going to be big inflation. And this never happened. That was like a thunderbolt that really discredited Austrians. They were saying things were going to happen by gold now. There was a gold bubble and gold is quite a bit off its peak. A lot of people lost some of their savings on that. People are not happy to lose their savings. If you bought gold collectibles in 2011, well you were a sad puppy when it crashed. That’s God’s punishment. That’s the market’s punishment anyway. It’s the markets punishment for making bets on silliness.

Where does Noah Fall within the Economic Spectrum:

I really don’t know. I suspect something that would look like demand is responsible for most recessions. And I suspect something that they call a limit cycle is going on where something in a boom actually causes a bust to become more likely. So booms lead to busts. Austrians said that, absolutely. The ‘Old Masters’ definitely said that and Minsky said that too – Noah Smith

Recommended Blogs:

Recommended Book:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

030: Kim Holder on Rockonomix and Teaching Economics Through the Lens of Sport, Music and Movies

by

Play in New WindowDownload

030: Kim Holder on Rockonomix and Teaching Economics Through the Lens of Sport, Music and Movies

Kim Holder is founder of Rockonomix and is an economics educator from the University of WesternKim Holder Georgia and teaches principles of macro and micro. Kim is passionate about economics, music, media, pop-culture and sports and loves using technology and social media in the classroom to get her students excited about learning. Kim is founder of Rockonomix, an inter-university contest held in the USA that encourages students to compose economic-themed lyrics to a popular song.

Find Out:

  • how Kim Holder uses music to assess her students taking micro and macro classes.
  • about Kim’s passion for economics and how she uses sports to explain economic concepts.
  • how you can become an ‘Economic Rockstar’ in the annual Rockonomix contest.
  • how to motivate students to study economics.
  • how selfies and memes can make students aware of economics around them.
  • about Kim’s decision to study economics because of true love.
  • about Kim’s summer course ‘Economics Is Everywhere’ which introduces you to micro and macro, as well as personal finance.
  • about the Centre for Economic Education at University of West Georgia and how it is for the wider community and not just for students.
  • how K-12 teachers can avail of the workshops put on by the Centre for Economic Education at University of West Georgia.
  • about Pop Econ and why more should be done to introduce it to students at a principles of micro and macro level.
  • why students should be pushed to seek out economic themes in movies.
  • how to use Twitter for the classroom and the best practices to communicate with students.
  • what Kim’s top 3 movies are that contain economic themes.
  • the importance of financial literacy for students who are faced with taking out college loans.
  • how Kim Holder escaped poverty through education.

Economics:

In this interview, Kim mentions and discusses: Microeconomics, macroeconomics, health economics, substitute goods, complementary goods, GDP and monetary indicators.

Economists:

In this interview, Kim mentions and discusses: Kenneth Arrow, Dirk Mateer and Brian O’Roark.

Favorite Economist:

  • Kenneth Arrow

Affirmation:

“Enjoy the journey”

On Potential:

People have a lot more potential than we give credit for. There’s just something small that’s holding them back. It might be money. It could be the absence of schools in the local area. It could be personal circumstances. Kim Holder.

On Economics:

Econ is very distinct from the other business disciplines because it’s more of a philosophy or a way to view the world than just a specific tool. Economics is a little bit business, a little bit social science, a little bit science. It has something of everything in it and that’s kind of my personality. Kim Holder.

About Rockonomix:

The following is an excerpt taken from Kim Holder’s Rockonomix website. I couldn’t explain it better than the actual founder, Kim:

Many of today’s students arrive in class with headphones on, listening to the latest hit song or watching the newest viral video. They often question learning material that they can simply “Google” and struggle with applying textbook concepts to the world around them. As educators, we are continually struggling to find ways to reach each of these students by engaging them in the learning process. Rockonomix, a student-produced music video parody project, helps motivate student learning by using popular media to reinforce basic economic principles.  Here is our story of how we brought Rockonomix to our students.

 As a brand new lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of West Georgia in the fall of 2010, I was faced with the daunting task of engaging new business students as well as those in the general population who were completing either their required economics sequence or part of the core requirements. I developed a number of activities designed to help students learn to “see” economics in their everyday lives in order to help solidify the concepts that we learned in our lectures and readings. These smaller projects helped prepare students for the end of semester finale known as Rockonomix, a group based project where students are asked to write new lyrics to a popular song and produce their own original music video.

Since my introductory courses tend to contain a mix of students with a variety of skill sets, majors and interest levels, this project allows each student the unique opportunity to highlight talents that are not readily apparent in the traditional classroom. In addition, student feedback at UWG has been overwhelmingly positive with many indicating that they now view the subject of economics in a different way, that the assignment motivated them to read their textbook and actually learn the material so that they could write their song lyrics, and that linking economic concepts to music helped them remember difficult key concepts.

To increase student interest and collaboration across campuses, we have created the National Rockonomix Contest. Currently in its second semester, the national competition allows students from different universities across the country to compete with each other for the best overall video.  This additional level of interactivity has added a unique dimension to student submissions and pushed them to produce works that are truly amazing works of economic art!

 Kim Holder

Vote now for your favorite student music video.

Favorite Internet Resource:

  • YouTube: 
  • The Critical Critics: A website dedicated to the critical review of movies.
  • St Louis Fed: The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis was established in 1914, after the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913.

Kim’s Top 3 Economic-Themed Movies:

  • Moneyball
  • In Time
  • Hunger Games

Recommended Book:

Where to find Kim:

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download