Geography C110 - Berkeley Lecture series

There is a Geography course on Berkeley's Webcasts called Economic Geography of the Industrial World (link) by Professor Richard A. Walker. The list of subjects look very promising. It looks very economic also, but in the first lecture Walker emphasizes the geographical nature of the course. This means, less equations than to be expected in economics and more importance attributed to geographical notions such as regions, resources and so on.

The first lecture is also an expose about crisis and Walker claims he has been able to explain and even predict the most economic crises of the last decades. His analysis, if not convicing, at least shows how regions are important. The housing crises, now and the one of the early nineties, he demonstrates, occurred in very specific and even roughly the same areas and left the rest of the country rather unaffected. What he goes on to explain about price and credit developments not only sounds completely economic, but also the dynamic doesn't seem to me entirely alien to what economic models show.

So it is going to be really interesting to see how this claim of geography on economic issues will develop. The course is easy to follow, even if you miss out on the graphs Walker shows. I am definitely goign to sit this one out until the end. When relevant, I will write more reviews.

More geography:
Global Geopolitics,
Geography of World Cultures,
Natural Resources and Population,
Plate Tectonics.