Big Brains
170 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 358 ratingsTranslating groundbreaking research into digestible brain food. Big Brains, little bites. Produced by the University of Chicago Podcast Network & Winner of CASE "Grand Gold" award in 2022, Gold award in 2021, and named Adweek's "Best Branded Podcast" in 2020.
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Episodes
Does Welfare Reduce Crime? With Manasi Deshpande
August 18, 2022 12:00 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MBThere have been myths and tropes about welfare since it was created. We often hear critics say that welfare discourages people from working — but are these claims really true? This debate often plays out through theory and anecdotes, yet it’s rare to get good data about the true effects of welfare. A groundbreaking paper by University of Chicago economist Manasi Deshpande does just that. It’s a first-of-its-kind study that tells a clear story about the life-long effects of one kind of welfar...
The Crucial Race To Build A Better Battery With Shirley Meng
August 04, 2022 12:00 - 26 minutes - 24.8 MBBatteries have revolutionized our lives, especially the invention of rechargeable batteries, which have enabled us to have cellphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But as we transition to more forms of green energy, we're facing a serious dilemma: Will our current lithium-ion batteries be able to sustain us? Battery scientist Shirley Meng says we need to explore different metals and elements that could last longer and charge faster. Meng is a chief scientist at the Argonne National Labora...
Do Animals Dream? With David M. Peña-Guzmán
July 21, 2022 12:00 - 33 minutes - 30.8 MBDo animals dream? If you’re a pet owner, it may seem obvious that your furry friends dream. Most of us have seen dogs running in their sleep or cats meowing during a nap. But this is an academic podcast and really proving that animals dream isn’t so simple. In his new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, philosopher David M. Pena-Guzman of San Francisco State University argues the science shows that animals really do dream, and that those dreams are evidence of...
Extreme Heat Waves: Why Are They Surging? with Noboru Nakamura
July 07, 2022 12:00 - 22 minutes - 20.5 MBIt’s not your imagination, summers have been getting hotter and hotter with extreme heatwaves occurring earlier and more frequently. But why is this happening and can we better predict heatwaves in advance to give people time to prepare? In June of 2021, an unprecedented heatwave shocked the Pacific Northwest and Canada. It ended up being one of the most deadly extreme weather events in the region. But no one could figure out how it occurred, until one Professor of Geophysical Science at the...
Why Air Pollution Is Cutting Years Off Our Lives, With Christa Hasenkopf And Anant Sudarshan
June 23, 2022 12:00 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBWe can’t always see the consequences of air pollution around us, but it’s costing us years off our lives. According to a new Air Quality Life Index report from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), air pollution is taking 2.2 years off the average global life expectancy. In some of the most polluted regions in the world, residents are expected to lose an average five years of their lives, if the current high levels of pollution persist. While smog seem like a diffi...
How Tax Dodging And Corporate Secrecy Found A Home In Delaware, With Hal Weitzman
June 09, 2022 12:00 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBWhen you think about corporate secrecy, nefarious shell companies and conspiratorial tax dodging, the state of Delaware probably doesn’t come to mind. We often think of exotic places like Panama or Bermuda, but the research of University of Chicago Adjunct Professor Hal Weitzman shows how it’s all happening right here in the United States. In his new book, What’s The Matter With Delaware?, Weitzman goes down the complex Delaware rabbit hole to discover how this tiny U.S. state became the inc...
Why Countries Choose War Over Peace, With Chris Blattman
May 26, 2022 12:00 - 29 minutes - 27 MBWar is costly, deadly and destructive. So, why do we do it? In his new book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and The Paths to Peace, Prof. Chris Blattman of the University of Chicago lays out the five main reasons why countries go to war—and why building peace is actually a lot easier than we may think. Blattman is an economist and political scientist who studies global conflict, crime and poverty. As a seasoned peacebuilder, he has worked in a number of countries to help mitigate conflict bet...
How Death In America Is Changing With Shannon Lee Dawdy
May 12, 2022 12:00 - 26 minutes - 24.2 MBWhat does our relationship with the dead tell us about the living? Anthropologists learn about ancient cultures by studying their burial sites, but could we do the same with contemporary America? Those are the questions that University of Chicago anthropologist and historian Shannon Lee Dawdy set out to answer in her new book, American Afterlives: Reinventing Death In The Twenty-first Century. What she uncovered was a discreet revolution happening around American death rituals and practices...
From Green Burials To DIY Funerals, How Death In America Is Changing With Shannon Lee Dawdy
May 12, 2022 12:00 - 26 minutes - 48.5 MBWhat does our relationship with the dead tell us about the living? Anthropologists learn about ancient cultures by studying their burial sites, but could we do the same with contemporary America? Those are the questions that University of Chicago anthropologist and historian Shannon Lee Dawdy set out to answer in her new book, American Afterlives: Reinventing Death In The Twenty-first Century. What she uncovered was a discreet revolution happening around American death rituals and practices...
Why We Need To Invest In Parents During A Child's Earliest Years, With Dana Suskind
April 28, 2022 12:00 - 25 minutes - 23.9 MBThe United States is an outlier when it comes to parents. Compared to similar countries, the U.S. has the largest happiness gap between the 63 million parents and the child-free. This statistic is not shocking when you consider how other societies support parents with things like paid parental leave and high-quality child care. In her new book, Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child's Potential, Fulfilling Society's Promise, Prof. Dana Suskind of the University of Chicago makes the case for ho...
The Troubling Rise Of Antibiotic-resistant Superbugs, With Christopher Murray
April 14, 2022 12:00 - 23 minutes - 21.6 MBFor nearly a decade, public health experts have been warning that bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics. In 2014, the World Health Organization even said the post-antibiotic era is near. Despite these warnings, the problem has only worsened: Antibiotic-resistant superbugs like MRSA are rising—and faster than expected. University of Washington Professor Christopher Murray co-authored a 2019 study in The Lancet, which found that antibiotic-resistant infections directly killed over a ...
Is Scientific Progress Slowing? with James Evans
March 31, 2022 12:00 - 29 minutes - 26.9 MBThere are far more scientists in today’s world, and they’re publishing research papers at a much faster pace. However, all of this growth hasn’t translated to more scientific progress. As University of Chicago Professor James Evans argues, scientists are overloaded by the flood of research papers they have to read, which is causing them to cite the same few papers over and over again. This dilemma is leaving newly published papers with less of a chance to disrupt existing work. Evans directs...
Could We Vaccinate Against Opioid Addiction? With Sandra Comer And Marco Pravetoni
March 17, 2022 12:00 - 24 minutes - 22 MBThe United States recently hit a grim milestone: More than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021. The majority of those deaths were due to synthetic opioids, which have become more widely available in recent years. While medical interventions exist, the rise of opioid addiction has been difficult to prevent, let alone cure. Now, there could be a new promising solution: a vaccine, developed by Prof. Marco Pravetoni of the University of Washington, who lead...
The Man Who Fought To Sanction Putin And Russian Oligarchs, with Bill Browder
March 02, 2022 12:29 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MBAs Vladimir Putin continues his invasion of Ukraine, Western nations have come together in unprecedented fashion to condemn his actions, in the form of economic sanctions against Putin and his Russian oligarchs. But how were these sanctions implemented so quickly, and what was the international legal infrastructure than enabled us to target the oligarch’s assets in the west? A major tool western nations have used to enact sanctions is called the Magnitsky Act. Two years ago, we interviewed ...
Why Big Ideas Fail To Scale—And How To Fix It With John List
February 17, 2022 07:00 - 28 minutes - 25.6 MBSolving problems like poverty, education inequality or discrimination require policy interventions that can scale, but they rarely do. Why do some scale, while others have little success? It's not luck, it's not skill, it's actually a scientific method—at least, that's how Prof. John List describes it. A world-renowned economist at the University of Chicago, List has helped scale some big policies and technologies as a former White House chief economist and the chief economist for both Uber ...
Could Personalizing Laws Make Society More Just? With Omri Ben-Shahar
February 03, 2022 07:00 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBBig data has created a world of personalization. We have personalized medicine, personalized education, personalized advertising. Now, one University of Chicago Law School scholar is asking: Why not personalized law? In his new book, Personalized Law: Different Rules For Different People, Prof. Omri Ben-Shahar lays out the case for why our idea of equality under the law actually leads to unequal outcomes, and why we should use data and algorithms to tailor our laws to individual people. As h...
How To Stick To Your Resolutions, With Ayelet Fishbach
January 20, 2022 09:00 - 28 minutes - 26.2 MBEvery year many of us set New Year’s resolutions, and almost none of us actually follow through on them. In a year when fulfilling our goals and resolutions feels more pressing than ever while our motivation may be at its lowest; let’s do what we do best: Turn to the research to get some concrete answers on how to follow through. Ayelet Fishbach is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of a new book, Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from The Science...
The Overlooked History Of Black Cinema, With Jacqueline Stewart
January 06, 2022 07:00 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBProf. Jacqueline Stewart’s career has examined the histories of overlooked Black filmmakers and Black audiences. Last year, the University of Chicago film scholar Stewart won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for “illuminating the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to cinema’s development as an art form.” Stewart also serves as the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies and is chief artistic and programming officer at the Ac...
Engineering A Cure For Cancer With Melody Swartz & Jeffrey Hubbell
December 23, 2021 07:00 - 26 minutes - 24.1 MBThe race to cure cancer has been running a long time, but two University of Chicago scientists are working to bring it closer to the finish line. Thinking like engineers rather than doctors, Profs. Jeffery Hubbell and Melody Swartz of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering are bringing new approaches to the field of immunotherapy—and helping us rethink cancer research. Swartz has even developed what she calls a cancer ‘vaccine’—a way to train the immune system to recognize cancer cell...
Confronting Gun Violence With Data, With Jens Ludwig
December 09, 2021 12:31 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBThere’s something strange happening with violent crime in America. Incidents are reaching levels they haven’t hit in decades, and nobody seems to know why. But, to go even deeper, what causes violent crime to happen at all—and what can be done to help prevent it? Prof. Jens Ludwig is an economist and urban policy expert at the University of Chicago and the Pritzker Director of the Crime Lab, which partners with policymakers in major cities across the country to help reduce gun violence and r...
Best Of: Why Talking to Strangers Will Make You Happier With Nicholas Epley
December 02, 2021 13:15 - 25 minutes - 23.3 MBIf you could have any superpower, what would it be? Most people say they’d want to read minds. But Prof. Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business says you already have that power: You just need to use it. We took some time off to enjoy the holiday and our families. And, like many of you here in the vaccine phase of the pandemic, we really cherished speaking to and connecting with people in person again. Which reminded us of an episode we did years ago about a simp...
Unlocking The Secrets Of Black Holes, With Andrea Ghez
November 18, 2021 07:00 - 28 minutes - 26.5 MBIf you know anything about black holes, it may come as a surprise to learn that there’s actually one lurking at the center of our galaxy. It was uncovered by UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez, and in 2020 she won a Nobel Prize for this discovery. But how do you go about finding something that emits no light? How do you see the unseeable? In this episode, Ghez explains how she proved this supermassive black hole was hiding in the Milky Way and answers all our pressing questions like, including:...
Do Your Genes Determine Your Success In Life? With Kathryn Paige Harden
November 04, 2021 07:00 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBExperts say we’re living through a renaissance in genetics research. The Human Genome project has explained our most fundamental genetics, CRISPR gene editing can be used to shape genetic code, and companies like 23 & Me can trace your ancestry from a single saliva swab. But all this new genetic information has people asking: How much do genetics determine our outcomes in life? We all understand that our genes determine our height, hair and eye color, but what about intelligence, educational...
How The UN Aims To Save Humanity, With Chris Williams And Luis Bettencourt
October 21, 2021 11:49 - 25 minutes - 23.4 MBIt feels like our world has never faced so many crisis all at the same time, and trying to solve them at once seems impossible. But, in 2015, the United Nations came together to develop a list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, a blueprint for addressing all of humanity’s problems—from poverty to climate change to peace and justice. And, amazingly, every UN nation signed it. So, how is it going? On this episode, we talk with Chris Williams, the director of UN Habitat; and Prof. Luis Betten...
Combating Our Global Water Crisis Using AI, with Junhong Chen
October 07, 2021 11:05 - 25 minutes - 23 MBThere are a lot of problems in our world today, but if our water systems aren’t working, everything else takes a backseat. From a lack of freshwater to droughts on the West Coast to contaminants like PFAS and lead in many of our homes, our water systems are in trouble. But one scientist sees a solution to our making our water system sustainable by using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Junhong Chen is a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago and the lead...
Revolutionizing Technology at the Nanoscale, with Paul Alivisatos
September 23, 2021 07:00 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MBSometimes, the biggest discoveries have to do with the smallest things. In this case, we’re talking nano. Specifically, nanocrystals. World-renowned chemist Paul Alivisatos has changed the field of nanoscience with these tiny crystals, but he’s also found ways to use them to create incredible new technologies in healthcare, energy, and electronic devices. As if that weren’t enough, Paul Alivisatos is also an eminent leader in academia. He was the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at the ...
The Science Behind Forming Better Habits, With Katy Milkman
September 09, 2021 07:00 - 27 minutes - 25 MBWhy is it so hard for us to form good habits—and so easy to form bad ones? Most people turn to the self-help section to find answers, but this is really a question for behavior science. Katy Milkman is a professor at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and co-directs the Behavior Change For Good Initiative with Angela Duckworth. Her best-selling book, How To Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be, explores that best research—fro...
The Secret Nazi Past and Billionaire Future of U.S. Space Innovation with Jordan Bimm
August 19, 2021 11:34 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MBMost people think they know humanity’s history of space exploration, from Sputnik to NASA to our recent shift toward privatized space travel. But what if there was a lost history of our origins with space science that would make us rethink the whole narrative? Jordan Bimm is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and a space historian. Bimm’s uncovered a forgotten chapter of space history that paints a much more milita...
How a Genetic Breakthrough Could Address Global Hunger
August 05, 2021 12:00 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBBy 2050 humanity is going to have to produce 50% more food in order to feed a growing population. That’s a lot, especially given that we currently have trouble feeding the current global population, and that food production is already responsible for about a third of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. But an incredible new genetic breakthrough may have just given us a way to address both those problems. Chuan He is a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of Ch...
Introducing: Entitled
July 29, 2021 12:07 - 41 minutes - 38 MBThe University of Chicago Podcast Network is excited to announce the launch of a new show, it’s called "Entitled" and it’s about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and UChicago Law School Professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights. We’re going to share the first episode of that show with you this week, and recommend you go subscribe! We’ll be back next week with a new Big Brains about an incredible s...
The Deadly Flaw In Our Judgment, With Cass Sunstein
July 15, 2021 11:53 - 25 minutes - 23.7 MBMany of the most important moments in our lives rely on the judgment of others. We expect doctors to diagnose our illnesses correctly, and judges to hand out rulings fairly. But there’s a massive flaw in human judgment that we’re just beginning to understand, and it’s called “noise.” In a new book, former University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein along with his co-authors, Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, take us through the literature on noise, explains how it shows up in our w...
A Scientist’s Beef With The Meat Industry, With Impossible Foods’ Pat Brown
July 01, 2021 12:00 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBEven if you’ve never eaten an Impossible Burger, you’ve probably heard of them. But you may not know the science and story behind those meatless products. Pat Brown is a University of Chicago alum, the founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, and a scientist at Stanford University. He says the meat industry is the “greatest threat humanity has ever faced,” and that “cracking the code” of plant-based food products could be our only hope for the future.
A Surprising Economic Solution To Climate Change With Michael Greenstone
June 17, 2021 12:00 - 25 minutes - 23 MBWhen was the last time you heard a positive story about climate change, a story about someone with a new idea or innovative solution to help reduce our carbon footprint? This is that story. Michael Greenstone is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Director of the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and former chief economist in the Obama White House. Now, he’s developed a new nonprofit called Climate Vault, which could be a powerful new tool in th...
Solving The Biggest Mysteries Of Our Universe, With Dan Hooper
June 03, 2021 12:00 - 29 minutes - 27 MBWhy does our universe work the way it does? What are its laws? How did it start with the Big Bang‚ and how will it end? Scientists like Prof. Dan Hooper from the University of Chicago use something called the Standard Model of Physics to explain our universe, but there’s one big problem: The model has black hole-sized gaps in it. What is dark matter? What is dark energy and why does it make up 70 percent of our universe? Where is all the anti-matter? Hooper says it will probably take a p...
Why You’re Likely Paying An Unfair Share of Property Taxes, with Christopher Berry
May 20, 2021 10:30 - 29 minutes - 27.2 MBWhen’s the last time you thought about property taxes? We mostly accept them as a part of society, and assume that they’re being calculated fairly. But a leading University of Chicago scholar says that assumption is wrong. A breakthrough study from Prof. Christopher Berry has shown that, on average, homeowners in the bottom 10% of a jurisdiction pay an effective tax rate that is double of what’s paid by the top 10%. Essentially, the poorest homeowners are subsidizing the richest, with disp...
Taking Aliens Seriously, with Avi Loeb
May 06, 2021 10:00 - 32 minutes - 30.2 MBThe possibility of alien life has captivated the human imagination for decades and has been at the center of some of our most popular fictional stories. But one scientist has made a controversial claim that aliens are no long a fiction but a reality. Avi Loeb is a theoretical physicist and former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University. For the past few years, he’s argued that an alien artifact, called Oumuamua, passed by Earth in 2017. As you can imagine, a Harvard profe...
The ‘Five Horsemen of the Techpocalypse’ with Kara Swisher
April 22, 2021 11:31 - 23 minutes - 21.7 MBThe so-called “Big Tech” industry has dramatically improved our daily lives, but at what cost? Few people have gotten a closer look at these companies than Kara Swisher, writer for The New York Times and podcast host—and she says we need to wrestle more with that question. Recently she shared her expertise with University of Chicago students as a fellow at the Institute of Politics. She taught a seminar called “The Five Horsemen of the Techpocalypse,” which examined Microsoft, Apple, Amazo...
Fighting Poverty And Pandemics, with Nobel Economist Michael Kremer
April 08, 2021 11:51 - 31 minutes - 29 MBThe solutions to global poverty can appear obvious, even if they’re difficult to implement. But, as University of Chicago economist Michael Kremer has discovered, interventions that may seem like common sense can actually be wrong. In 2019, Kremer won a Nobel Prize for his work studying ways to alleviate global poverty. A pioneer in the use of randomized control trials in economics, Kremer has examined poverty interventions like scientists do medical treatments—putting interventions throug...
Why Life After Incarceration Is Just Another Prison, with Reuben Jonathan Miller
March 25, 2021 11:00 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBFor the more than 20 million people with a felony record, incarceration doesn’t end at the prison gate. They enter what University of Chicago scholar Reuben Jonathan Miller calls the “afterlife” of mass incarceration. Miller, an assistant professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, is the author of a new book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration—an intimate portrait that draws on his sociological research and personal experie...
Anthony Fauci On What We Need To Get Over COVID-19
March 08, 2021 12:00 - 28 minutes - 26.5 MBAnthony Fauci has spent the past year trying to curb the worst health crisis the world has seen in a century. In a recent University of Chicago event, Fauci reflected on how the COVID-19 pandemic has been a “painful learning experience” for he and other health officials. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, please enjoy Fauci’s conversation with Prof. Katherine Baicker, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, who presented him with the 2020 Harris Dean’s Award. Subscribe to Bi...
The Ethics of COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution, with Laurie Zoloth
February 25, 2021 12:00 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBThe coronavirus pandemic has raised countless ethical questions: How do we balance restricting freedoms with protecting others, how do we ethically distribute vaccines, should we force people to get vaccinated—or should we ask healthy people to get infected with COVID-19 in the name of science? There’s no one better to discuss these dilemmas with than Laurie Zoloth. She’s a Professor of Religion and Ethics at the University of Chicago, one of the leading thinkers on bioethics, and serves o...
The Doomsday Clock’s ‘Historic Wake-Up Call,’ With Rachel Bronson
February 11, 2021 12:00 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBThe Doomsday Clock has been set at 100 seconds to midnight—as close to total destruction as we were in 2020. But after a year of increasingly dangerous weather and wildfires, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, why didn’t the clock move? Rachel Bronson is the president and CEO of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the clock. We sit down with her to talk about the thinking behind this year’s clock, climate change, pandemics and the ever-increasing threat of ...
Unraveling the Mystery of Life’s Origins on Earth, with Jack Szostak
January 28, 2021 12:00 - 21 minutes - 19.7 MBWhat are the biggest questions in science today: Can we cure cancer, solve the climate crisis, make it to Mars? For Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, the biggest question is still much more fundamental: What is the origin of life? A professor of genetics at Harvard University, Szostak has dedicated his lab to piecing together the complex puzzle of life’s origins on Earth. The story takes us back billions of years and may provide answers to some of our most mysterious questions: Where did we com...
The Urgent Need to Reinvest in American Research, with Barbara Snyder
January 14, 2021 12:00 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBOur podcast is all about research. Every episode we investigate what scholars have discovered and why it matters. But we’re going to get meta on this episode and look at what makes this research possible—and the dangers of taking it for granted, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. Barbara Snyder, JD’80, is president of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization composed of America’s leading research universities. On this episode, she lays out the case ...
Getting Out Of The Lab With John List
December 22, 2020 17:00 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MBOur team is taking some time off to be with their families for the holidays. But, just in case you have a long flight, car ride, or maybe need something to do in-between Zoom calls, we’re re-sharing one of the most enlightening and engaging conversations we've ever had on this show to get you through it. Please enjoy, and we’ll see you with all-new episodes after the holidays.
How Alternate Reality Games Are Changing The Real World with Patrick Jagoda and Kristen Schilt
December 10, 2020 17:00 - 32 minutes - 29.5 MBWhat is the most popular form of media today: Movies? Music? Books? Nope, it’s video games. With 2.5 billion gamers today, games are set to be the type of media that most defines our world. And two scholars at the University of Chicago are re-thinking how to leverage them in a way to address some of the world’s biggest issues. Prof. Patrick Jagoda and Assoc. Prof. Kristen Schilt are designing alternate reality games that allow players to become active participants not just as players, but ...
The Science of Empathy, with Peggy Mason
November 25, 2020 17:00 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MBWith so many contentious issues in our deeply polarized world, the real or virtual Thanksgiving dinner table may be a hard place to find a lot of empathy this year. As we take a week off to reconnect with our families, we wanted to re-share this enlightening episode with Professor of Neurobiology, Peggy Mason, all about how empathy works and how we can make our empathy stronger.
Big Brains Presents: The "Capitalisn't" Podcast
November 20, 2020 17:00 - 47 minutes - 43.4 MBThis week, we’re featuring another University of Chicago Podcast Network show. It’s called Capitalisn’t. Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court has many focusing on question about how the new court will judge cases on social issues like abortion, but we rarely hear enough about the economic cases the court deals with. It turns out, the Supreme Court actually has a huge influence on our economy, not just social issues. On this episode of Capitalisn't, their team interrogates ...
What Remains Unanswered After The 2020 Election, with William Howell and Luigi Zingales
November 11, 2020 17:53 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBIt’s hard to think of a presidential election that has raised as many questions as 2020. What do these results tell us about the views and desires of the American public, what the polls got right and wrong, and how all of this will affect our economy? To find some answers, we turned to two leading UChicago scholars—and fellow University of Chicago Podcast Network hosts to discuss what comes next, following the historic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Big Brains host Paul M. Rand w...
When Governments Share Their Secrets—And When They Don't, with Austin Carson
October 29, 2020 11:30 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBWhen should a government choose to reveal a secret—or conceal it? Your knee-jerk reaction may be to say they should never hide anything from the public. But political scientist Austin Carson of the University of Chicago says his research complicates that answer. Carson has spent his career reading massive amounts of declassified material. What he’s found shows how governments can use secrecy to deescalate conflicts and maintain peace. But he says balancing this utility of secrecy with demo...