Wed, 8 July 2020
This 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 have cracked the code to success in our new economic reality. |
Mon, 29 June 2020
Today'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 tide of anger, sometimes righteous and useful, sometimes destructive and ill-targeted, and propose radical new solutions for an increasingly polarized and confusing world. Angrynomics is for anyone wondering, where the hell do we go from here? In the course of our conversation, Mark mentioned a talk he gave called The Mustang and the Volvo describing the different economies of America and Europe. |
Fri, 22 May 2020
Historian 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 of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes readers from Rome’s pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted. Harper describes how the Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague. |
Sun, 14 April 2019
My 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 aims to create a more ethical alternative to state lotteries, allowing people to have the fun of gambling without losing significant amounts of money. From the Vice Lotteries website: Vice Lotteries was founded with one purpose: Allow our customers to enjoy gambling while saving money. With Vice Lotteries, you can enjoy the tremendous pleasure of tossing the dice without losing your ability to afford all the other things in life that you love. However, it is currently illegal to run a private lottery. Before Vice Lotteries can start operating, they need to win one of the multiple lawsuits they are filing in state courts to challenge state lotteries.
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Sun, 17 March 2019
Kevin 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 prices have been largely caused by the constrained housing supply in a handful of magnet cities leading the new economy. Links: My previous interview with Kevin, from 2017 Kevin's policy brief for Mercatus, arguing that housing was undersupplied during the so-called "housing bubble" Kevin's blog, Idiosyncratic Whisk
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Sun, 30 September 2018
Today 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 evaluating their effectiveness. Thus we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment instructions impact subjects' understanding and retention. We report a one-shot individual decision task in which mistakes can be unambiguously identified in behavior and find that mistakes are prevalent in our base-line treatment which uses plain, but relatively standard experimental instructions. We find combinations of reinforcement methods that can eliminate half of subjects' mistakes, and we find that we can induce a similar reduction in mistakes via enhancements to the content of instructions. Residual mistakes suggests this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.
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Sat, 16 June 2018
Fabio Rojas returns to the podcast to discuss his work researching social media. He has three main papers on the subject. The first is "More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior," which shows how Twitter activity predicted the outcomes of the 2010 and 2012 US congressional elections. The second is "The social media response to Black Lives Matter: how Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use" which tracks the spread of the #BlackLivesMatter movement through social media. The third is "Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility" which shows how Twitter users treat each other differently based on how they perceive each other's gender. We discuss these three papers and more on this episode of Economics Detective Radio.
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Sun, 27 May 2018
Today's episode features Zachary Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. We discuss freedom of speech, FIRE's work to protect it on college campuses, and its importance for maintaining a liberal society.
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Fri, 4 May 2018
This week's episode is a little different. There's an ongoing controversy related to a two-time guest of this show, Robin Hanson. I talk through the scandal, giving a whole decade of background so you can understand where this scandal comes from. There are many links for this episode. Here they are in the order they are discussed: Robin Hanson's books, The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain. "Unequal Beauty Silence" October 19, 2009 "Pretty Smart Healthy Privilege" September 26, 2014 "Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing" August 7, 2013 "Two Types of Envy" April 26, 2018
"Why Economics Is, And Should Be, Creepy" May 2, 2018 |
Fri, 27 April 2018
Andrea Matranga of the New Economics School in Moscow joins the podcast with a fascinating question: Why did humans adopt agriculture in the times and places they did? His research paper, The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture, offers a potential solution. Here's the abstract: During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. Hunter-gatherers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the resulting predictions against a global panel dataset of climate conditions and Neolithic adoption dates. I find that invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions. Figure 2 in the paper illustrates the locations and times of the adoption of agriculture: Andrea looks at both these adoption dates and the rapidity of the spread of agriculture from these locations and compares them to the climatic seasonality of those locations, finding a strong connection between seasonality and adoption of agriculture. He argues that the need to store food caused people to become sedentary as opposed to nomadic, and once they were sedentary the opportunity cost of farming was greatly reduced.
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