economic risks
sort by: Relevancy | Title try advanced search for more options
-
Kaplan talks about the different kinds of risks (market, financial and technical) that an entrepreneur faces when starting a company. The trick is to get the risk out as soon as possible. If your product is not obvious to the market you must go out into the market and explain it to them, he says. He shares the example of TiVo.
-
Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
Yale / History
Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission. The eventful year 1868 saw the impeachment of one president (Andrew Johnson) and the ...more
-
By 1950, in most of the underdeveloped world, mortality had fallen to about half its pre-modern rate. The birth rate, however, had remained high and, by 1950, was about twice the death rate. For the rest of the century, both rates fell dramatically and in parallel, maintaining the gap. The enormous excess of births over deaths in this period is known as 'the population explosion.' By 1990, the world population was growing at almost 90 mill...more
-
Census data is often politically influenced and hence inaccurate. The birthrate in developing countries is nearly twice that in developed countries. Most humans live in less developed countries, so the world birthrate is near the higher number. The world birthrate is two and a half times the death rate; we are not close to population stabilization. Almost everywhere, the death rate has been drastically reduced; further changes will not mas...more
-
Hoffman believes that out of three kinds of investment strategies, sure bets, low-risk management and high risk investments, entrepreneurship is the third kind. This style of investment is called accurate contrarian theories where raising sufficient money might help in mitigating risks, but does not ensure success.
-
Data shows, consistently, that poor people have more children than rich people; economically speaking, children are an inferior good. Children are production goods because they do work, consumption goods because they are enjoyable, and investment goods because they support parents in old age. Jobs in the modern sector require education and health. To pay for this, parents have to focus their resources on fewer children.
-
In many regions, the central cultural idea is that of a lineage, a family and its line of male ancestors and descendants. The prime duty in these cultures is to keep the lineage going. Religion is small scale with the ancestors performing many of the functions of gods. Denser populations and larger political entities lead to large-scale religion where conformity is stressed and cultural rules are codified in a book and not subject to discu...more
-
Threats to privacy: cookies, forms, logs, and data recovery. Security risks: packet sniffing, passwords, phishing, hacking, viruses and worms, spyware, and zombies. Piracy: WaReZ and cracking.
-
Professor Blight begins this lecture with an attempt to answer the question "why did the South secede in 1861?" Blight offers five possible answers to this question: preservation of slavery, "the fear thesis," southern nationalism, the "agrarian thesis," and the "honor thesis." After laying out the roots of secession, Blight focuses on the historical profession, suggesting some of the ways in which historians have attempted to explain the ...more
-
Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 1820 and 1860. Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopi...more
-
In this lecture, Professor Donald Kagan explores the rise, fall, and significance of tyrannies in the Greek polis. He argues that the various tyrannies in the Greek world had both negative and positive aspects, which need to be appreciated. For instance, on the one hand, tyrannies promoted economic, commercial and artistic advances. On the other hand, tyrannies ruled absolutely and curbed the freedom of the polis. Finally, Professor Kaga...more
-
Central Banks, originally created as bankers' banks, implement monetary policy using their leverage over the supply of money and credit standards. Since the Bank of England was founded in 1694, through the gold standard which lasted until the 1930s, and into modern times, central banks have pursued monetary policy to stabilize the banking system. Central banks monitor currency flows and inflation, acting when crises, such as bank runs, eme...more
