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Friday, November 4, 2011

When Life Imitates Art

When I returned to teaching POLI 244 (Intro to IR) after my sabbatical, the advent of youtube proved to be way too tempting. I ended up using way too many clips in my class.  I have dialed it back some, but when a topic is as far outside of my comfort zone as International Political Economy is, then I over-indulge. 

I started class the other day with this classic clip:

This scene from Mary Poppins made sense long before this particular economic crisis, as it illustrates how collective behavior can lead to suboptimal outcomes--that fears about bank failure can cause a panic, producing bank failure.  This year, well, the joy of the "stability" of the British pound take on a special meaning with the Euro crisis revealing the wisdom of the Brits staying out of the Eurozone.

And then I was inspired to show the underwear gnome clip due to op-eds about solving the EU crisis through greater integration:


Alas, there may be lots of good policies to follow, but how to we get there from here?

Third, friends on FB had another clip that did a fair better job explaining the crisis than I ever could, so I showed this to my students:


Thus, the internet provided me with a heap of help this week.  I will be on safer ground next week when it comes to Terrorism and Ethnic Conflict--far simpler stuff.

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