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Thinking like an Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making
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Taught By Professor Randall Bartlett, Ph.D., Stanford University,
New Releases Smith College Course No. 5511

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Average Customer Rating:
4.9 out of 5
9 of 9 (100%) customers w ould recommend the
course to a friend.
Read review s Write a review

Better Living Economic forces are everywhere around you. You're made aware of
Professional that whenever you reach for your wallet, apply for a loan, shop for
health care, or try to figure out the best credit card to carry.
Course Lecture Titles
High School
12 Lectures
View All Courses But that doesn't mean you need to passively accept whatever
30 minutes / lecture
outcome those forces might press upon you. Instead, you can learn
how to use a small handful of basic nuts-and-bolts principles to turn 1. The Economist's Tool Kit6
those same forces to your own advantage. Principles (info)
Find a Course 2. The Economist's Tool Kit3
Making a few simple adjustments to the way you see things and act
Keyword or Course # Core Concepts (info)
on themlearning to "think like an economist"can give you
3. The Myth of "True Value" (info)
newfound power and confidence in a surprising range of financial
4. Incentives and Optimal
and personal situations that make up your daily life. You can find Choice (info)
LEARN MORE ABOUT yourself making better decisions that not only save time and money,
5. False Incentives, Real Harm
The Great Courses but also produce optimum results in other ways important to you.
(info)
What are The Great Courses? And you can also sharpen your understanding of world and national
6. The Economics of Ignorance
About Our Sales events.
(info)
Lifetime Guarantee 7. Playing the OddsReason in
In the 12 fast-moving and crystal-clear lectures of Thinking like an
Recommendations a Risky World (info)
Economist: A Guide to Rational Decision Making, award-winning
8. The Economics of Information
Professor Randall Bartlett of Smith College presents some of the
(info)
fundamental principles and concepts that shape the lenses through
9. A Matter of TimePredicting
which economists view the world. He then shows you how to use
"Whether they're Future Values (info)
these simple analytical tools to understand what you see through
commuting to work or those lenses.
10. Think AgainEvaluating Risk
in Purchasing (info)
hammering out miles on
By learning to identify the many varied situations in which 11. Behavioral EconomicsWhat
the treadmill, people Are We Thinking? (info)
economics affects your life and how to wield the tools that can help
have made these you make the wisest choices in those situations, you'll enhance not 12. Acting like an Economist (info)
professors part of the only your understanding of daily life but your own success in living it.

fabric of their lives."
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
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A Tool Kit for Changing How You Look at Daily Life
Many of the concepts in Professor Bartlett's tool kit may be familiar.
People respond to incentives.
There's no such thing as a "free lunch."
There are at least two sides to every interaction.
Everything affects everything else.
Any action can bring with it significant unintended consequences.
In this world of complex interrelationships, no one is really in control.
However, when used in the context of three core concepts of economic rationality,
marginal analysis, and optimization that Professor Bartlett clearly lays out, his tool kit
can make this perhaps the most practical, life-enhancing economics course you'll
ever take.

It's an approach that makes Thinking like an Economist a real-life how-to guide that
sets aside those often-dry economics textbooks and reveals just how often the
seemingly remote forces discussed in their pages are in fact at play in your own life
often in situations in which you may never have dreamed they'd be present.

While most of us can readily appreciate the role those forces play in expected areas
the ones in which monetary values are obviously at workmany of us often give
little notice to the full reach of those economic principles into almost every other
aspect of our lives, from the safety of our environment to the amount of candidate
information we really need in order to cast a wise vote.

After a dozen lectures with Professor Bartlett, things will look very different. You'll see
how basic economic ideas like incentives, risks, rewards, and rationality are not just
the province of professional economists, government policymakers, or your local
bank's loan officer, but instead lie at the root of nearly every decision you must make
in your daily life.

Those decisions can include

choosing wine from a restaurant menu,

buying an extended warranty on that new television set,
deciding how to get to work each morning, or
nearly anything else you might imagine.

Real-Life Examples Clarify Each Key Idea

Using examples drawn from his own life and likely echoing yours, Professor Bartlett
shows you how to

see the world as an economist sees it,

examine the rationality of individual decisions, and
evaluate the outcome of those decisions in terms of both personal benefit and
social efficiency, which can sometimes differ.

Professor Bartlett has designed Thinking like an Economist to require no previous

economics education. And he has scaled his examples to include not only those
situations common to us all, but also to those felt across entire countries and even
the world, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the debate about global warming and
the most practical ways to respond to it.

An engaging and remarkably clear teacher, Professor Bartlett has for years attracted
a widespread audiencefrom both on and off campusfor his annual lecture
series on financial literacy. This course will help you grasp why those lectures are
so popular, and why the lessons taught in them are so valuable to you.

About Your Professor

Dr. Randall Bartlett is Professor of Economics and Director of the Urban Studies
Program at Smith College, where he has taught for 30 years. A graduate of
Occidental College, he earned both his master's degree and doctorate from
Stanford University and taught at Williams College and the University of Washington
before joining the Smith faculty.

A highly skilled teacher, Professor Bartlett has twice won all-college teaching
awards at Smith and was the 2003 recipient of the college's Distinguished
Professor Award. He has served at both the department and college levels as a
teaching mentor to junior faculty and has been instrumental in developing a number
of important programs at Smith, including founding and directing the Phoebe Reese
Lewis Leadership Program and serving as the first director of the Public Policy
Program. He also presents each fall a wildly popular financial literacy lecture series
that is attended not only by students, faculty, and staff, but also by members of the
community of Northampton.

The author of numerous articles on economics and public life, Professor Bartlett
has also written three books, including his most recent, The Crisis of America's
Cities, which explores the problems and prospects of urban America.

Should I Buy Audio or Video?

The DVD version features 3-D graphics, film footage, and more than 300 images to
enhance your experience.

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Customer Ratings & Reviews Summary

Average Custom er Rating: 4.9 out of 5

9 of 9 (100%) customers w ould recommend the course to a friend.
Write a Review

Product Reviews Review This Product Choose a sort order

Overall Rating
Course Content Superb! Buy It! Date: December 17, 2010
Professor
Professor
Presentation "This truly is a superb course. I commend it highly, even to those who have no
Course Value interest in Economics. Why? It's a brief but superlative example of what a
great course ought to be in my opinion. The vast majority of listeners with no
talkin background in economics could benefit from this course.
(read all my reviews)
The professor does a great job of boiling down the essential elements of
Location: USA
information re economics and what economists do. There is no
pretentiousness or geeky economist talk in the course.

The course cites examples of the types of practical problems economists

address throughout their careers. In so doing I believe it dispels some of the
myths many of us might have about what economists actually do.

Buy it. You'll enjoy it and benefit from it.

p.s. ... my son is a Dean's List student Economics major in his senior year at
college. He said he wished all of his professors were as clear as this
professor is."

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report Inappropriate Review)

Overall Rating
Course Content Best 6 hours I've spent Date: December 4, 2010
Professor
Presentation "The emphasis of this course is on the major principles used by economists,
Course Value but they are valid general means of general decision-making.

The first three lectures introduce the main economic principles and core
cliv concepts and the concept of value.
(read all my reviews)
1. People respond to incentives
Location: Plano, TX
2. There is no such thing as a free lunch--there is always at least a lost
opportunity cost
3. There are always at least 2 sides to every interaction
4. The law of unanticipated influences--there are always ripple effects that can
grow to be large effects
5. The law of unintended consequences--people's reaction to an action may
cause very different results
6. No one is, and no one ever can be, in complete control--primarily a result of
the previous two principles.

A. Rationality--people should choose the option with the highest net payoff to
them (where "payoff" is not just monetary gain)
B. Marginal analysis--the value to someone of one additional unit of
something changes depending upon how much they have
C. Optimization--a trade-off between two things is optimized when the
marginal value of the two is the same

There is no such thing as a "true value" of something. It has a different value

to different people and to the same person under different circumstances. It is
because of this that people are willing to buy and sell things (the seller would
rather have x dollars than the item and the buyer would rather have the item
than x dollars). These are both rational decisions as each person is getting
more value than they give up. Efficiency is the economics term for the net
effect of trades to society. Some may be better off by more than some may be
worse off, but it is invalid to compare the change in value for one person
places with another (how much better does one person have to be in order to
compensate for someone else being worse off?). The only unambiguous
social gain is at least one person is better off (by their won judgment) and no
one is worse off. This is called a Pareto optimum (named after an Italian
sociologist) and is an "efficient" result.

The next couple of lectures on incentives and externalities should be required

listening for everyone. An externality is when an action creates a benefit for
(beyond any payments) or imposes a cost on someone else not making the
decision about whether to do the action. The "tragedy of the commons" is an
example of a negative externality. Someone choosing not to pollute makes the
decisions based upon their own personal change in value (which can include
feeling good for "doing the right thing"), but the rest of society also benefits (a
positive externality). When those making the decisions do not have incentives
which accurately reflect the true costs to all of society (including externalities),
then the result may not be efficient.

The next three lectures discuss the value of information (how much ignorance
is rational) and uncertainty, including information asymmetry (when one side
knows more than the other side about the item). We need to be conscious of
when others may have different incentives than we do to share information.

The lecture on the time value of money was straightforward and covered not
just the discounted present value of money, but also the time preference
(people generally prefer good things happen sooner and bad things happen
later).

The last three lectures cover example of applying the principles already
 learned."

3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report Inappropriate Review)

Overall Rating
Course Content A Great Short Course Date: November 11, 2010
Professor
Presentation "I bought this course DVD as part of a set with "The Art of Critical Decision
Course Value Making." Having taken exactly one (1) economics course many years ago as
an undergraduate and thoroughly bored by it all, I didn't expect much from this
Czechm8 12 lecture course. I was wrong.
(read all my reviews)
I was pleasantly surprised at the content and presentation. The best part was
Location: Baltimore
Dr. Bartlett's distillation of the economist's toolkit consisting of the 6
foundation principles and 3 core concepts in the first disc, and then applies
those principles to real life situations later on this course.

This is another diamond in the rough from the Great Courses. I highly
recommend this selection."

2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report Inappropriate Review)

Overall Rating Pretty Good Overall Date: October 23, 2010

Course Content "This was a good overview of practical economics for the individual. One thing
Professor to point out, though, is that at the beginning it focuses more on public policy,
Presentation
with personal economic decision-making coming later in the course. This is
Course Value OK because the public policy part was very interesting. The big revelation for
me was how letting everyone act in their self-interest does not always end up
Lemuel in the best outcome. There were a number of real-life examples of situations
(read all my reviews)
similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma to illustrate the point. I knew this from
Location: Akron, OH
common sense, but hearing it presented in a systematic fashion was very
helpful."

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report Inappropriate Review)

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