Economics is for Everyone! • 2016 • RSA

58:35

In the second of this three-part series, Jacques reveals how fear remains one of the most powerful drivers of our spending. Visiting a neuroscience lab, Jacques hears from a consumer psychologist about how our brains are much more responsive to negative than to positive stimuli. He also meets some experts who have turned this knowledge into an art form, helping manufacturers make billions from our anxieties and insecurities. At the remote chateau of French anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, Jacques learns how our sense of fear drives us in ways many of us do not understand - and how Rapaille's insights have helped companies sell us everything from SUVs to cigarettes. At the Beverley Hills pad of multimillionaire marketer Rohan Oza, he hears how Oza's connections to celebrities helped propel VitaminWater into the soft drink stratosphere, despite the fact that the product's health claims have been called into question. Jacques also confronts the men who say they are combating our most deep-seated fear - of age and decline. In Las Vegas, he mingles with the doctors and businessmen attending a global conference aimed at selling us ways to stay young and healthy, challenging them to justify their claims for the anti-aging business that has made them rich.

2/3 • The Men Who Made Us Spend • 2014 • Economics

58:37

The programme explains how we changed our attitude to risk, learnt to live with debt and, above all, how governments stepped back from regulating any of it. At the heart of the story is Alan Greenspan, who for 20 years was one of the most powerful people in the world. In October 2008, weeks after the catastrophic collapse of Lehman Brothers, the man whose ideas influenced the world admitted he might have been 'partially' wrong.

2/3 • The Love of Money • Economics

3:11

We have taken huge steps towards tackling some of the biggest threats on humanity throughout history, and in many ways our lives have never been better! So where do we go from here? Author and historian Rutger Bregman argues that in order to continue towards a better world, we need big ideas and a robust vision of the future. Revolutionary ideas, that were once dismissed as a utopian fantasy, became reality through people believing there was a better way – but what if our progress is hindered by our own dim view of human nature?

RSA Shorts • 2018 • Economics

10:05

What is UBI? How would free money change our lives.

In a Nutshell • 2017 • Economics

110:01

This documentary seeks to be the ultimate Odyssey of exploration into Cannabis and its uses starting from the formation of the Endocannabinoid system in the simple sea squirt, through to its early uses, the plant's medical benefits and landing at the modern legalisation movements across the Globe. Where the billions generated in tax could be re-invested back into hospitals, roads, fire departments, scientific research, community projects and the list goes on.

2018 • Economics

58:28

Robert Peston travels to China to investigate how this mighty economic giant could actually be in serious trouble. China is now the second largest economy in the world and for the last 30 years China's economy has been growing at an astonishing rate. While Britain has been in the grip of the worst recession in a generation, China's economic miracle has wowed the world. Now, for BBC Two's award-winning strand This World, Peston reveals what has actually happened inside China since the economic collapse in the west in 2008. It is a story of spending and investment on a scale never seen before in human history - 30 new airports, 26,000 miles of motorways and a new skyscraper every five days have been built in China in the last five years. But, in a situation eerily reminiscent of what has happened in the west, the vast majority of it has been built on credit. This has now left the Chinese economy with huge debts and questions over whether much of the money can ever be paid back. Interviewing key players including the former American treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Lord Adair Turner, former chairman of the FSA, and Charlene Chu, a leading Chinese banking analyst, Robert Peston reveals how China's extraordinary spending has left the country with levels of debt that many believe can only end in an economic crash with untold consequences for us all.

This World • 2014 • Economics