Economics Detective Radio
155 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 61 ratingsEconomics Detective Radio is a podcast about markets, ideas, institutions, and all things related to the field of economics. Episodes consist of long-form interviews and are generally released on Fridays. Topics include economic theory, economic history, the history of thought, money, banking, finance, macroeconomics, public choice, business cycles, health care, education, international trade, and anything else of interest to economists, students, and serious amateurs interested in the science of human action. For additional content and links related to each episode, visit economicsdetective.com.
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Episodes
The Hidden Rules of Ownership with Michael Heller
March 05, 2021 17:08 - 42 minutes - 96.7 MBMichael Heller joins the podcast to discuss his new book, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. This book explores the implicit social rules governing ownership. In brief, these rules are as follows: Attachment ("it's mine because it's connected to something of mine") Possession ("it's mine because I physically control it") First-in-time ("it's mine because I was here first") Labour ("it's mine because I worked for it") Self-ownership ("it's mine because it cam...
The Wealth of Nations with Sarah Skwire
February 04, 2021 23:10 - 49 minutes - 115 MBOn today's episode, I discuss Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations with Sarah Skwire. Sarah is part of the team tweeting through the book @AdamSmithWorks. We discuss the project and talk through the first few chapters of the Wealth of Nations.
The Kindness of Strangers with Michael McCullough
October 11, 2020 17:35 - 59 minutes - 138 MBToday's guest is Michael McCullough of the University of California, San Diego. We are discussing his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code. How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadi...
The Gender Salary Ask Gap with Nina Roussille
September 24, 2020 21:58 - 54 minutes - 83 MBToday's guest is Nina Roussille of UC Berkeley and we discuss her working paper, The central role of the ask gap in gender pay inequality. The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This paper studies the role of the ask gap in generating wage inequality using novel data from Hired.com, a leading online recruitment platform for full time engineering jobs in the United States. To use the platform, job candidates must post an ask salary,...
Arts and Minds with Anton Howes
August 31, 2020 16:18 - 1 hour - 156 MBAnton Howes returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation. From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember ...
Science Fictions with Stuart Ritchie
August 14, 2020 21:07 - 1 hour - 200 MBToday's guest is Stuart Ritchie, psychologist and author of Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless – or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extrat...
Social Security and Wealth Inequality with Sylvain Catherine and Natasha Sarin
July 20, 2020 17:00 - 52 minutes - 129 MBToday's guests are Sylvain Catherine and Natasha Sarin of the University of Pennsylvania. They discuss their research on wealth inequality, specifically with respect to social security's impact on calculated wealth inequality. When you account for the value of all future payroll taxes into Social Security and all future benefit payments from Social Security, the present value of that stream of payments accounts for a large fraction of the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households. Recent...
BONUS: The Passion Economy
July 08, 2020 15:00 - 9 minutes - 9.94 MBThis bonus episode features an interview from The Passion Economy, created by Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money. The clip features an interview with Coss Marte, an enterprising entrepreneur in an unorthodox business. The economy is bananas, even scary. But some people are thriving, and we're going to figure out how. Adam Davidson, "New Yorker" writer, longtime contributor to This American Life, and the creator of NPR’s "Planet Money," unearths stories from regular people. People who hav...
Angrynomics with Mark Blyth
June 29, 2020 17:40 - 50 minutes - 133 MBToday's episode features my conversation with Mark Blyth, co-author (with Eric Lonergan) of Angrynomics. Why are measures of stress and anxiety on the rise when economists and politicians tell us we have never had it so good? While statistics tell us that the vast majority of people are getting steadily richer, the world most of us experience day in and day out feels increasingly uncertain, unfair, and ever more expensive. In Angrynomics, Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan explore the rising ti...
Free to Move with Ilya Somin
June 04, 2020 22:39 - 1 hour - 150 MBIlya Somin of George Mason University joins the podcast to discuss his book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. Ballot box voting is often considered the essence of political freedom. But, it has two major shortcomings: individual voters have little chance of making a difference, and they also face strong incentives to remain ignorant about the issues at stake. "Voting with your feet," however, avoids both of these pitfalls and offers a wider range of choices. In ...
Climate, Disease, and the Fall of Rome with Kyle Harper
May 22, 2020 17:26 - 1 hour - 56.3 MBHistorian Kyle Harper joins the show to discuss his book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. We discuss the fall of the Roman empire and the new scientific discoveries that have shed more light on its nature and causes. Kyle's work looks at the epidemics and climatic changes that hit the empire, contributing to its disintegration. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate o...
Market Urbanism with Scott Beyer
May 14, 2020 19:01 - 53 minutes - 49.7 MBToday's guest is Scott Beyer, a columnist who writes about urban issues. He is the creator of the Market Urbanism Report. Our discussion addresses some common concerns about housing markets. For instance, why do new luxury homes sometimes sit empty? What's the deal with Houston's land-use laws? And what can we do about the urban housing crisis?
Under the Influence with Robert H. Frank
May 08, 2020 18:43 - 1 hour - 57.5 MBToday's guest is Robert H. Frank of Cornell University. Our topic is his latest book, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work. Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street—our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourag...
Ten Percent Less Democracy with Garett Jones
March 23, 2020 20:59 - 57 minutes - 53 MBGarett Jones returns to the podcast to discuss his book, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less. During the 2016 presidential election, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders argued that elites were hurting the economy. But, drawing together evidence and theory from across economics, political science, and even finance, Garett Jones says otherwise. In 10% Less Democracy, he makes the case that the richest, most democratic nations would be ...
The President's Economic Advisers with Simon Bowmaker
March 16, 2020 20:37 - 40 minutes - 37.8 MBToday's guest is Simon Bowmaker. The topic is his book, When the President Calls: Conversations with Economic Policymakers. The book features 35 interviews with economists who worked for the President of the United States. What is it like to sit in the Oval Office and discuss policy with the president? To know that the decisions made will affect hundreds of millions of people? To know that the wrong advice could be calamitous? When the President Calls presents interviews with thirty-five ...
Maritime Policy and the Merchant Marine with Josh Hendrickson
February 27, 2020 20:32 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBToday, Josh Hendrickson joins the show to discuss his paper, "U.S. Maritime Policy and Economic Efficiency." The paper discusses the controversial Jones Act, and how it (and similar policies) were designed to maintain a sovereign merchant marine for use in times of war. Te abstract reads as follows: Critics argue that maritime policy is protectionist legislation that restricts competition and reduces economic efficiency. In this paper, I argue the contrary. I begin with the premise that th...
Cities and Growth with Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga
January 30, 2020 01:27 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBToday's episode features Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga on their new working paper, "Urban Growth and its Aggregate Implications." This paper builds a detailed theoretical model that includes urbanization, agglomeration economies, inter-city migration, congestion externalities, and land-use restrictions. We develop an urban growth model where human capital spillovers foster entrepreneurship and learning in heterogeneous cities. Incumbent residents limit city expansion through planning regu...
The Age of Mass Migration and the 1920 Border Closure with Leah Boustan
December 21, 2019 02:01 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MBToday's guest is Leah Boustan of Princeton University. Our discussion centers around her recent working paper, "The Effects of Immigration on the Economy: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure." In the 1920s, the United States substantially reduced immigrant entry by imposing country-specific quotas. We compare local labor markets with more or less exposure to the national quotas due to differences in initial immigrant settlement. A puzzle emerges: the earnings of existing US-born workers ...
Emissions Cheating, Air Pollution, and Health with Hannes Schwandt
November 26, 2019 21:01 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBToday on Economics Detective Radio, I discuss health economics with Hannes Schwandt of Northwestern University. Hannes is the co-author, along with Diane Alexander, of "The Impact of Car Pollution on Infant and Child Health: Evidence from Emissions Cheating." Car exhaust is a major source of air pollution, but little is known about its impacts on population health. We exploit the dispersion of emissions-cheating diesel cars which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars a...
Open Borders with Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith
November 11, 2019 17:47 - 57 minutes - 52.7 MBBryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith both return to the podcast to discuss their new, non-fiction graphic novel, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. American policy-makers have long been locked in a heated battle over whether, how many, and what kind of immigrants to allow to live and work in the country. Those in favor of welcoming more immigrants often cite humanitarian reasons, while those in favor of more restrictive laws argue the need to protect native citizens. But e...
The American Civil War with Jeffrey Hummel
October 13, 2019 16:47 - 57 minutes - 53.4 MBToday's guest is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel of San Jose State University. He is the author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War. This book combines a sweeping narrative of the Civil War with a bold new look at the war’s significance for American society. Professor Hummel sees the Civil War as America’s turning point: simultaneously the culmination and repudiation of the American revolution. Links: The Curious Task from the Institute for Liberal Stu...
Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism with Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode
September 20, 2019 20:06 - 51 minutes - 47.8 MBToday's guests are economic historians Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode. Both of them have research related to the slave economy of the Antebellum South. Our main topic is a paper they co-authored, Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism. The "New History of Capitalism" grounds the rise of industrial capitalism on the production of raw cotton by American slaves. Recent works include Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, and Edward Baptist's The Half...
Slavery and Capitalism with Phil Magness
September 12, 2019 19:43 - 54 minutes - 50.5 MBPhil Magness returns to the show to discuss his work on slavery and capitalism, particularly as it relates to the New History of Capitalism (NHC) and the New York Times' 1619 project. Phil recently wrote an article entitled, "How the 1619 Project Rehabilitates the 'King Cotton' Thesis." In it, he argues that the NHC has unwittingly adopted the same untenable economic arguments made by slaveowners in the antebellum South: that slave-picked cotton was "king" in the sense of being absolutely in...
Radio Spectrum and Property Rights with Thomas Hazlett
September 07, 2019 16:16 - 57 minutes - 53.3 MBToday's guest is Thomas Hazlett, former chief economist of the FCC and author of The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. Perceptive listeners may recall that Ed Lopez mentioned Hazlett's work in our interview on political change. Hazlett's work concerns the legal institutions surrounding the radio spectrum. Popular legend has it that before the Federal Radio Commission was established in 1927, the radio spectrum wa...
The Poverty of Slavery with Robert Wright
August 30, 2019 16:35 - 47 minutes - 44 MBToday's guest is Robert Wright, author of The Poverty of Slavery. The New York Times' 1619 Project has prompted renewed discussions on slavery and the New History of Capitalism literature. This episode is the first in a series addressing these topics. We discuss the prevalence of slavery in the developing world today, the arguments for and against reparations, and the rent-seeking behaviour of slaveowners in the Antebellum South. This ground-breaking book adds an economic angle to a tradit...
Cities, Markets, and Urban Planning with Alain Bertaud
August 23, 2019 01:53 - 57 minutes - 53.4 MBToday's guest is Alain Bertaud, author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Alain discusses his extensive experience in urban planning: When he was first trained as a planner, urban planning was thought of as an offshoot of architecture. In this conception, cities are just large buildings that need to be laid out and designed by a skilled architect. Through his experience, Alain came around to thinking of cities not as large buildings to be designed, but as markets. He argue...
Drinking Through the Unfree World with Ben Powell
July 27, 2019 16:54 - 57 minutes - 53.2 MBBen Powell joins the podcast today to discuss his new book, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, coauthored with Robert Lawson. The book is a combination of economic analysis and Anthony-Bourdain-style travel diary. Do We Have to Say It Again? Socialism Sucks! Apparently we do. Because today millions of Americans—young and old—are flocking to the socialist banner and chanting, “What do we want? Socialism—the economic system that has impoverished p...
Political Change with Ed Lopez
July 19, 2019 01:03 - 1 hour - 60 MBToday's guest is Edward J. Lopez of Western Carolina University. We discuss his book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change, which was co-authored with Wayne Leighton. Does major political reform require a crisis? When do new ideas emerge in politics? How can one person make a difference? In short: how and when does political change happen? Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers tackles these big questions, arguing that ideas an...
Markets for Rebellion with Vincent Geloso
July 12, 2019 01:18 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBVincent Geloso returns to the podcast today to discuss his paper, "Markets for Rebellions? The Rebellions of 1837-38 in Lower Canada". The paper discusses the idea that political upheaval and even violent rebellion can be more likely in areas with a high degree of market access. In 1837-38, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada rebelled. The rebellion was most virulent in the latter of the two colonies. Historians have argued that economic consideration were marginal in explaining...
Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan with Jennifer Murtazashvili
July 07, 2019 16:35 - 55 minutes - 51.2 MBTooday's guest is Jennifer Murtazashvili of the University of Pittsburgh. We discuss her book, Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan. Despite vast efforts to build the state, profound political order in rural Afghanistan is maintained by self-governing, customary organizations. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority ...
Political Capitalism with Randall Holcombe
June 28, 2019 18:08 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MBToday's guest is Randall Holcombe of Florida State University. Our discussion today focuses on his book, Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power Is Made and Maintained. Problems associated with cronyism, corporatism, and policies that favor the elite over the masses have received increasing attention in recent years. Political Capitalism explains that what people often view as the result of corruption and unethical behavior are symptoms of a distinct system of political eco...
Free Trade and Prosperity with Arvind Panagariya
June 21, 2019 16:36 - 59 minutes - 54.9 MBToday's guest is Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University. We discuss his book, Free Trade and Prosperity: How Openness Helps Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty. Free Trade and Prosperity offers the first full-scale defense of pro-free-trade policies with developing countries at its center. Arvind Panagariya, a professor at Columbia University and former top economic advisor to the government of India, supplies a historically informed analysis of many longstanding but flaw...
Highway Expansions, Tolls, and Congestion with Robert Krol
June 09, 2019 20:37 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBToday's guest is Robert Krol of California State University. Our topic is a recent policy paper he wrote for The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University entitled Can we Build our way out of Urban Traffic Congestion? This paper examines the impact of highway expansion on congestion. Because highway expansion lowers travel times, expanded highways attract additional vehicle traffic—so-called induced travel. The empirical evidence indicates that the magnitude of induced tra...
Elinor Ostrom, Polycentric Governance, and Policing with Vlad Tarko
May 12, 2019 18:40 - 56 minutes - 52.5 MBToday's guest is Vlad Tarko of Dickinson College. We discuss the life and work of Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Vlad is the author of Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography. We discuss Elinor Ostrom's work on polycentric governance, the management of common-pool resources, and policing. We also discuss the continuing work scholars are doing in this research area, including Vlad's new book Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Politica...
Challenging the State Lottery System with Matthew Curtis
April 14, 2019 16:09 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBMy guest today is Matthew Curtis, founder of the startup Vice Lotteries. Vice Lotteries is a new startup that aims to challenge state governments' legal monopolies over lotteries. State lotteries are amazingly and bizarrely unethical. They drain billions of dollars out of communities, primarily poor ones. Lottery spending has increased substantially over the past decades, with the average lotto player spending $600 per year, and many spending significantly more than that. Vice Lotteries ...
Why Students Switch Majors with Jamin Speer
April 04, 2019 20:26 - 50 minutes - 46.3 MBToday's guest is Jamin Speer of the University of Memphis. We discuss his paper, "Are Changes of Major Major Changes? The Roles of Grades, Gender, and Preferences in College Major Switching" co-authored with Carmen Astorne-Figari. The choice of college major is a key stage in the career search, and over a third of college students switch majors at least once. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of major switching, looking at the patterns of switching in both academic and non-academ...
Re-thinking the so-called Housing Bubble with Kevin Erdmann
March 17, 2019 15:48 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBKevin Erdmann of the Mercatus Center returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy. From the publisher's website: The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Shut Out demonstrates that high home price...
Kidnapping for Ransom with Anja Shortland
February 17, 2019 18:00 - 47 minutes - 44.1 MBToday's guest on Economics Detective Radio is Anja Shortland of King's College London, discussing her new book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business, where she brings an economist's perspective to the shady world of the kidnapping for ransom business and to the professionals who specialize in getting hostages home safely. The book's description reads as follows: Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap ri...
The Skyscraper Curse and Business Cycles with Mark Thornton
February 08, 2019 18:19 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MBMark Thornton returns to the podcast to discuss his new book The Skyscraper Curse (available digitally for free). The book discusses the connection between record-setting skyscrapers and economic recessions. Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction: The Skyscraper Index expresses the strange relationship between the building of the world’s tallest skyscraper and the onset of a major economic crisis. This relationship only came to light in 1999 when research analyst Andrew Lawrence p...
Military History and the Remplacement Militaire with Louis Rouanet
January 27, 2019 18:53 - 41 minutes - 38.7 MBToday's guest is Louis Rouanet from George Mason University. Our discussion focuses on an economic history paper he co-authored with Ennio Piano (a previous guest of the show), "Filling the Ranks: The Remplacement Militaire in Post-Revolutionary France." Many economists have analyzed the efficiency of a volunteered army relative to a conscripted army. However, they have rarely studied the working of real-world alternative, market-based, military institutions where military obligations are ...
Classical Economics and the New Poor Law with Gregory Clark
January 18, 2019 19:00 - 54 minutes - 50.1 MBToday's guest is economic historian Gregory Clark, and our topic is England's New Poor Law of 1834. Gregory and his co-author, Marianne E. Page, wrote a paper on the topic entitled "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?" Spoiler alert: It didn't. The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Be...
Institutional Cryptoeconomics with Mikayla Novak
January 13, 2019 04:05 - 58 minutes - 54 MBToday's guest is Mikayla Novak (Twitter, SSRN) of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University. Her work focuses on some innovative new and potential uses for blockchain technology. As we all know at this point, the first use of blockchain technology was to create decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But a blockchain is a much more general technology than this: it is a decentralized ledger that is resistant to tampering by any one individual. As such, it is ...
The Revolt of the Public with Martin Gurri
January 05, 2019 18:48 - 51 minutes - 47.5 MBToday's guest is Martin Gurri (Twitter, blog), author of The Revolt of the Public. We discuss his book, which deals with the impact of information technology on political trends and populism. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.” Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The ...
Rent Control and the Housing Debate with Ash Navabi
December 22, 2018 17:03 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBToday on the podcast, Ash Navabi returns to discuss his recent work on housing and rent control. Ash published an opinion piece entitled "Why low-income earners should actually welcome Ontario's reversal on rent control." In that article, Ash pushes back on the kneejerk reaction to the Ontario government's reversal of its rent control policy on new units: There's no question that there are problems with affordability and livability in certain areas of Ontario, but implementing rigid rent c...
The Minimum Wage and Labour Market Dynamics with Jonathan Meer
December 14, 2018 17:38 - 53 minutes - 62 MBToday's guest is Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M. We discuss his work on the minimum wage. The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will att...
Seigniorage in the Civil War South with Bryan Cutsinger
December 07, 2018 21:41 - 1 hour - 57.4 MBToday's guest is Bryan Cutsinger of George Mason University, discussing his paper, "Seigniorage in the Civil War South." During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniora...
Climate Change, Carbon Taxes, and Geo-Engineering with Bob Murphy
November 09, 2018 19:47 - 56 minutes - 52.3 MBToday's guest is Bob Murphy of Texas Tech University. We discuss his work on climate change and the social cost of carbon. Bob started working on issues related to climate change when he started working with the Institute for Energy Research. We discuss the implications of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to evaluate the impact of climate change, the pivotal role played by discount rates in evaluating any kind of climate policy, the pitfalls of carbon taxation, and the opportun...
Experimental Economics and the Importance of Instructions
October 01, 2018 03:17 - 34 minutes - 32.1 MBToday I discuss one of my own papers: "Instructions" by Freeman, Kimbrough, Petersen, and Tong. This research project on experimental instructions has been ongoing for years, but it was recently conditionally accepted for publication. I tell the story of how the research came together and detail some of the results. A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently-reported variety of practices and limited research...
Individual Choice and Social Welfare with Viktor Vanberg
September 21, 2018 17:17 - 52 minutes - 48.8 MBToday's guest is Viktor Vanberg of the Walter Eucken Institute. We discuss a recent working paper of his entitled Individual Choice and Social Welfare: Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy. What we call an economy, i.e. the nexus of economic activities and relations within some defined regional limits – e.g. a local, a national or the world economy –, has always been subject to measures taken, or constraints imposed by political authorities. How economies work is inevitably, and to...
Why Hayek Matters with Pete Boettke
September 01, 2018 15:32 - 1 hour - 60.3 MBToday's guest is Peter Boettke of George Mason University and we're discussing his recent book in the Great Thinkers in Economics series: F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy. This book explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Friedrich Hayek. Set within a context of the recent financial crisis, alongside the renewed interest in Hayek and the Hayek-Keynes debate, the book introduces the main themes of ...