Billy Foster, PhD

Billy Foster

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Quotations

Adam Smith long ago taught us the difference between being pro-business and pro-free-market. Pro-business or corporatism means easy money, protection from competition, and bailouts at taxpayer expense. Pro-free-market means businesses are on their own in a competitive environment trying to serve consumers. We need to reject corporatism and embrace the free market. — Sheldon Richman, The Most Dangerous Derivative (2011)

This section is the home for videos I have created or use in my lectures.

Here I briefly explain what my research project is about and where it is headed.

Prof. Adam Martin explains how the drug war has altered incentives for both drug buyers and sellers, leading them to favor higher potency drugs. This is what economists call the potency effect.

Prof. Angela Dills discusses the economics of drug prohibition.

It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike.

In Fear the Boom and Bust, John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek, two of the great economists of the 20th century, come back to life to attend an economics conference on the economic crisis.

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation.