The Economic Lowdown

Ever feel as if you are paying the price for someone else's "deal"? Perhaps you are choking on the pollution from a foundry where cheap widgets are made. That spillover affect is called an externality. There are positive ones, too.

In Episode 10, young people who are looking for that first job can learn about the basics of the labor market in this country. A brief explanation is given of the roles played by education, supply, demand, productivity and government regulation.

Money has taken many forms through the ages: shells, wheels, beads and even cows. All forms, though, have always had three things in common. Find out what in this eight-minute podcast. You will also learn how commodity money differs from representative money and how both differ from today's fiat money.

The eighth episode of our podcast series answers a crucial economic question: Where do prices come from? Listeners discover that supply and demand work together like the two blades of a scissors to determine the market equilibrium - and the prices of the things you buy.

The seventh episode of our podcast series discusses the supply side of the market - the law of supply, slope of the curve and the difference between a change in supply and a change in quantity supplied.

The sixth podcast in this series examines the law of demand. Those who love candy bars will find this lesson especially easy to digest. A demand curve is simply defined, as are the sorts of changes that might affect that curve-all in less than seven minutes.

The fifth episode covers the basics of unemployment - how it is defined, how it is measured, and how it is categorized into three types. A "game show" quiz winds up the nine-minute lesson.

The fourth episode of our podcast series, The Economic Lowdown, discusses three aspects of inflation: what it is, what causes it and how it is measured. The episode also addresses related topics such as deflation, disinflation and the role of the Federal Reserve in monitoring inflation.

Adam Smith described self-interest and competition in a market economy as the "invisible hand" that guides the economy. This episode of "The Economic Lowdown" explains these concepts and their importance to our understanding of the economic system.

The second episode of our podcast series, The Economic Lowdown, discusses the building blocks of the economy, the factors of production.

In this first episode of The Economic Lowdown, we will introduce three topics in economics: choice, scarcity and opportunity cost.