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Keywords: Consumption
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the "good life" through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. Explores how such things as department stores, advertising, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This class examines how and why twentieth-century Americans came to define the “good life” through consumption, leisure, and material abundance. We will explore how such things as department stores, nationally advertised brand-name goods, mass-produced cars, and suburbs transformed the American economy, society, and politics. The course is organized both thematically and chronologically. Each period deals with a new development in the history of consumer culture. Throughout we explore both celebrations and critiques of mass consumption and abundance.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Surveys research which incorporates psychological evidence into economics. Prospect theory. Biases in probabilistic judgment. Self-control and mental accounting with implications for consumption and savings. Fairness, altruism, and public goods contributions. Financial market anomalies and theories. Impact of markets, learning, and incentives. Some evidence on memory, attention, categorization, and the thinking process.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Based on literature review, variables and relative dimensions were determined for the designs of both questionnaire and the research framework of the study. The study tried to find correlation relationship between variables and dimensions of export of higher education of China. Findings regarding education authority, environment of educational services, and advantages and disadvantages of educational services of China were further discussed.
- Subject:
Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
Connexions
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Choice of material has implications throughout the life-cycle of a product, influencing many aspects of economic and environmental performance. This course will provide a survey of methods for evaluating those implications. Lectures will cover topics in material choice concepts, fundamentals of engineering economics, manufacturing economics modeling methods, and life-cycle environmental evaluation.
- Subject:
Science and Technology
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This is a course in intermediate macroeconomics with an emphasis on real world applications. There are two main objectives for this course. First, to develop simple models that can be usefully applied to generate realistic explanations about the behavior of important macroeconomic variables such as output and income, employment and unemployment, interest rates, the government budget balance, exchange rates and the current account balance, and inflation. Second, to apply these models to understand and interpret current and historical macroeconomic developments—including monetary and fiscal policy choices—and to make predictions about future macroeconomic events, primarily in industrialized countries.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Explores the changing map of the public and the private in pre-industrial and modern societies and examines how that map affected men's and women's production and consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, is another major theme. How did an ideal of the "domestic" arise in the early modern west, and to what extent did it limit the economic position of women? How has it been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period? Focuses on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, but some attention to how these issues have played themselves out in non-Western cultures. This course will explore the relation of women and men in both pre-industrial and modern societies to the changing map of public and private (household) work spaces, examining how that map affected their opportunities for both productive activity and the consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, will be the third major theme of the course. We will consider how a place and an ideal of the "domestic" arose in the early modern west, to what extent it was effective in limiting the economic position of women, and how it has been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period. Finally, we will consider some of the policy implications for contemporary societies as they respond to changes in the composition of the paid work force, as well as to radical changes in their national demographic profiles. Although most of the material for the course will focus on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, we will also consider how these issues have played themselves out in non-western cultures.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Students are introduced to the idea that energy use impacts the environment and our wallets. They discuss different types of renewable and nonrenewable energy sources, as well as the impacts of energy consumption. Through a series of activities, students understand how they use energy and how it is transformed from one type to another. They learn innovative ways engineers conserve energy and how energy can be conserved in their homes.
- Subject:
Science and Technology
- Grade Level:
Primary
- Collection:
TeachEngineering
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: In this class, food serves as both the subject and the object of historical analysis. As a subject, food has been transformed over the last 100 years, largely as a result of ever more elaborate scientific and technological innovations. From a need to preserve surplus foods for leaner times grew an elaborate array of techniques -- drying, freezing, canning, salting, etc -- that changed not only what people ate, but how far they could/had to travel, the space in which they lived, their relations with neighbors and relatives, and most of all, their place in the economic order of things. The role of capitalism in supporting and extending food preservation and development was fundamental. As an object, food offers us a way into cultural, political, economic, and techno-scientific history. Long ignored by historians of science and technology, food offers a rich source for exploring, e.g., the creation and maintenance of mass-production techniques, industrial farming initiatives, the politics of consumption, vertical integration of business firms, globalization, changing race and gender identities, labor movements, and so forth. How is food different in these contexts, from other sorts of industrial goods? What does the trip from farm to table tell us about American culture and history?
- Subject:
Science and Technology, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Natural Resources and Population – Spring 2008. Ever since publication of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, the English-speaking world has equated population growth with apocalypse, even though Malthus’s theory was debunked well before his own demise in 1834. This course begins from the proposition that human-environment relations are always social relations: how natural resources are produced, distributed, valued, consumed, conserved and degraded are historically- and geographically-specific questions whose answers cannot be reduced to “the earth’s carrying capacity.” To be sure, the world’s population has never been larger, and its environmental prospects have never been so dim as at present. But the “ultimate” outcomes of population growth and natural resource development (or depletion) are neither preordained nor very predictable. The question is how to understand these relations as simultaneously social and ecological. We will begin with an overview of recent research into human effects on the environment, followed by a closer look at Malthus’s famous essay and its place in classical political economy. Then we will examine several ways that current scholars approach human-environment interactions, as well as several case studies. We will see that environmental issues are always intimately related to political and economic ones—colonialism, capitalism, the state, science, and so forth—and that to abstract “the natural” from “the social” is at best naïve and at worst dangerous.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Survey of modern macroeconomics at a fairly advanced level. Topics include neoclassical and new growth theory, consumption and saving behavior, investment, and unemployment. Use of the dynamic programming techniques. Assignments include problem sets and written discussions of macroeconomic events. Recommended for students planning to apply to graduate school in economics. Credit not given for both 14.05 and 14.06.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Consumption and savings decisions under certainty and uncertainty. Aggregate savings, wealth, and fiscal policy. Portfolio choice and asset pricing. Investment and finance decisions. This course covers issues in the theory of consumption, investment and asset prices. We lay out the basic models first, and then examine the empirical facts that motivate extensions to these models.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Examines alternative conceptions and theoretical underpinnings of the notion of "sustainable development." Focuses on the sustainability problems of industrial countries (i.e., aging of populations, sustainable consumption, institutional adjustments, etc.); and of developing states and economies in transition (i.e., managing growth, sustainability of production patterns, pressures of population change, etc.). Explores the sociology of knowledge around sustainability, the economic and technological dimensions and institutional imperatives. Implications for political constitution of economic performance.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This course examines alternative conceptions and theoretical underpinnings of the notion of "sustainable development." It focuses on the sustainability problems of industrial countries (i.e., aging of populations, sustainable consumption, institutional adjustments, etc.); and of developing states and economies in transition (i.e., managing growth, sustainability of production patterns, pressures of population change, etc.). It also explores the sociology of knowledge around sustainability, the economic and technological dimensions and institutional imperatives along with implications for political constitution of economic performance.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: Assessment of current and potential energy systems, covering extraction, conversion and end-use, with emphasis on meeting regional and global energy needs in the 21st century in a sustainable manner. Examination of energy technologies in each fuel cycle stage for fossil (oil, gas, synthetic), solar, biomass, wind, hydro, nuclear, and geothermal energy types, along with storage, transmission, and conservation issues. Focus on evaluation and analysis of energy technology systems in the context of political, social, economic, and environmental goals.
- Subject:
Science and Technology
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: People use energy in all aspects of their lives for cooking, lighting and entertainment. Much of this energy use takes place in buildings, such as our homes. To save money and reduce the impact on our environment, many people are reducing their energy use. One way is to hire engineers to perform home energy audits to understand the ways we use energy and identify ways we can conserve energy. In this activity, students act as energy conservation engineers and identify the ways energy is conserved or wasted. They also learn many ways to personally conserve energy everyday.
- Subject:
Science and Technology
- Grade Level:
Primary
- Collection:
TeachEngineering
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