LESSON EIGHT: Upward Facing Dogma

MAKE AN OBSERVATION: Apparently, demonstrating the correctness of heliocentric theory is as easy as taking measurements of the variable binary star RZ CAS, which is visible with a decent pair of binoculars. An amateur astronomer has done all the calculations at http://www.student.oulu. fi/~ktikkane/AST/helioc.html. Check his work or take a few hundred years of scientists’ word for it. 

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Night Sky on the App Store

Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Night Sky. Download Night Sky and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

​DO MORE GAZING: Don’t know your Ursa from your Big Dipper? Try Google Sky or The Night SkyTM app available on iTunes or Android. Avoid the lengthy late-night observations and keep your day job. 

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TAKE A LESSON FROM UNCLE MILT: A bunch of economists get together in the 1970s to talk about inflation and it looks and sounds like something out of Mad Men. Fashion mis- cues and bad jokes about wives spending habits abound (there were, apparently, fewer female economists than ad executives), but Milton Friedman’s theory on the money supply mirrors that of Copernicus: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Enjoy the madness. 

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​BECOME A DESPICABLE MINION: No, not a Federal Reserve Governor, Mr. Clifford is back with a look at monetary policy via the movie Despicable Me. . 

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PUT THE FED IN FOCUS: Get an introduction to modern mone- tary policy from the folks at the Federal Reserve. Learn about monetary policy and how Fed officials attempt to use or abuse it to achieve various economic outcomes. Read up and take the quizzes. 

Monetary Policy Basics

First, a senior official of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York discusses developments in the financial and foreign exchange markets, along with the details of the activities of the New York Fed's Domestic and Foreign Trading Desks since the previous FOMC meeting. Senior staff from the Board of Governors (BOG) present their economic and financial forecasts.

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GO TO IT: Got all that? Then give your money supply management skills a try and unleash your inner Yellen, Bernanke, or Greenspan. You’ll note that events such tightening labor markets and tax refund checks have rather large effects on inflation. Again, not everyone believes Nic’s (or Milton Friedman’s) theory that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. 

Chair the Fed: A monetary policy game

Think you have what it takes to run our country's central bank? See if you can achieve full employment and low inflation as Chair of the Fed.

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Cabaret (1972)

Directed by Bob Fosse. With Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Joel Grey. A female girlie club entertainer in Weimar Republic era Berlin romances two men while the Nazi Party rises to power around them.

ENJOY A KIT KAT: Check out Cabaret, Liza Minnelli’s 1972 musical turn as a young American performer at the Kit Kat club in pre-World War II Berlin. The film received rave reviews, won more Oscars than any film not to win best picture (thanks to The Godfather) and probably saved the career of director Bob Fosse. What does a film version of a Broadway musical have to do with monetary policy? The Weimar Republic, which was in its death throes during the setting of the film’s plot, had the most famous bout of hyper-inflation in modern history. A decision to devalue the currency in the 1920s to pay off debts from World War I was catastrophic, leading to political and social disruption and the rise of the Nazis. Lest you think there are no real- world repercussions to the performance of monetary policy.