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econtalk
I listen to a few podcasts, when I'm driving or walking around the city, doing laundry or working in the yard. Among them I find econtalk to be informative and engaging, due in part to the in-depth and calm discourse of the interview format between the diverse assortment of guests and host Russ Roberts. That might be clear enough based on the number of entries in this blog with comment on one or another episode, so I'm taking this space to organize, summarize and identify a few highlights.
Most of the interviews feature theory and practice of economics at the micro and macro levels, with several recent episodes covering the current financial mess, prior developments, and its fallout. While many episodes deal with the crisis, he also discusses a broad range of other historical and sociological topics.
Roberts approaches the discussion from his Hayekian perspective (an admitted bias) - observing where order spontaneously develops, where uncertainty in outcome represents risk, the importance of local knowledge in guiding social interaction, where individualized knowledge of market participants can not be aggregated, monetary policy contributions to the business cycle, and the effects of monetary and non-monetary incentive regimes. His guests represent a much broader range of starting points. In addition to economists from various academic institutions (including Keynesian Steve Fazzari), guests have included Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants, Out of Control), Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness), Eric Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), former Fed bank presidents, Steve Meyer (former Capitol Records marketing executive), investigative journalist Brian Deer, and the sales manager where Roberts bought a car. His guests always get the last word.
I came upon econtalk sometime early 2009, so encountered contemporary observations and retrospective episodes about the recent financial crisis and aftermath. Roberts' economics training was evidently not in finance, so in listening to those episodes one can experience in parallel his eduction on the interconnections and historical details leading to the collapse, as well as observations on the policy decisions made since then in the US and elsewhere. Roberts is an empiricist, so there is often the circling around to locate what evidence supports different positions.
I used facebook originally to capture occasional remarks about the various subjects, but decided to collect and elaborate on them here, to provide an idea of the range of topics and see if any pique your own interest. I divided the selection among the following loose categories:
- The recent financial crisis: gory details, crisis rap, bailouts, stimulus, May 2010 summary, more bailouts, February 2009 summary, credit default swaps, stimulus multipliers
- Specific business areas: bitcoin, intellectual property, profit-making and non-profits, music, cars
- Other topics in economics: special interests, regulation, knowledge and power, black swans, trade, market failure, ideas and growth, gold
- Topics in history: technology, prohibition, optimism, socialist killers, the singularity, liberalism
- Other topics in social science and philosophy: education, pseudoscience, skepticism, justice, tragedy, moral sentiment, psychiatry, cultural norms, the open source movement
Roberts is Professor of Economics and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I sometimes hear him on another podcast, NPR's Planet Money. Evidently he also appears on occasional NPR news shows.
econtalk can be found at http://www.econtalk.org, and on iTunes. The web site page for each episode includes a summary and links to references (as well as extensive commentary from listeners).
I started this summary over a year ago, back when there were maybe half as many entries as I eventually have linked. I kept finding interesting subjects, so would add a new entry every so often. Hope you find something in here of interest.