Over the years, we've interviewed Bob Shiller in a go-kart on the Jersey shore, on a cable car climbing the hills of San Francisco, at a failed condo project in Atlanta, Georgia.
Recently, we caught up with Shiller closer to home -- outside the admissions office at Yale University, where he's taught economics since 1982. Given our joint history of off-beat interview elements, he suggested we waylay a Yale campus tour -- guide and group -- to get their take on inflation. One soon materialized. It happened to be a tourguide's tour, a seasoned undergrad chaperone taking her newly recruited charges on a dry run.
So when touring parents ask why Yale costs $55,000 a year these days, what are the guides supposed to answer? And how, Bob Shiller, do you explain why the inflation rate of going to college is many times that of the overall consumer price index?
Is a College Diploma Worth the Soaring Student Debt? 16:00
Read the transcript: http://to.pbs.org/mPUW0m
As a growing number of students suffer the soaring costs of education debt many questions are being raised surrounding the value of a college education. Jeffrey Brown gets four views on whether today's diplomas are worth the bills.
Student Debt: Denying the American Dream, 6:07
Over the past 20 years, federal investment in higher education has decreased significantly. The maximum Pell Grant award used to cover over 60% of the average tuition and fees. Today, the average award covers just 33% of those cost. Student loans, both federal and private, represent a much greater percentage of a student's financial aid package. In the past year alone, we have seen the largest cuts in the history of the student loan program, totaling $12.7 billion and the average Pell Grant award has decreased approximately $120.
ANIMATED THEME INTROS TO 60s SITCOMS - Part 1 of 2, 7:21
ANIMATED THEME INTROS TO 60s SITCOMS - Part 2 of 2, 7:35
First I look at the Purse J. Geils Band HofB 4/28/09, 4:52
Liberty and Economics, 37:50
What kind of man was Ludwig von Mises? As this unique film shows, Mises (1881-1973) was a man who never stopped fighting for freedom: not when the Nazis burned his books, not when the Left blackballed him at universities, not when it seemed as if statism had won. With courage and genius, he fought big government until the day he died ... in 25 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 60 years of teaching.
Mises's battles against Communists, Nazis, and other socialists, are featured in this film, as are his ideas of Liberty. There is also the old Vienna he loved, the Bolshevik prime minister he dissuaded from Communism, and a cast of villains from Lenin to Hitler, as well as such supporters and students as Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Bettina Greaves, M. Stanton Evans, Mary Peterson, Joseph Sobran, and Yuri Maltsev.
Among his many accomplishments, Mises showed that socialism had to fail, that central banking causes recessions and depressions, that the gold standard is honest money, and that only laissez-faire capitalism is fully compatible with Western civilization.
Mises was the twentieth century's foremost economist, and one of its most important champions of Liberty. Here is a film that does justice to this extraordinary man, and to his equally extraordinary ideas.
