John Forbes Nash Jr. podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season two, episode four. Nash’s life is often reduced to A Beautiful Mind (great film), but this episode tells the full picture. It gets into the actual economics: game theory, Nash equilibrium, and what happens when rational individuals interact strategically. The Nash equilibrium concept is directly applicable to A-level oligopoly content: it is a natural way to model price-fixing, arms races, and strategic interdependence between fir
Sir Arthur Lewis podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season two, episode three. Sir Arthur Lewis was the first Black economist to win the Nobel Prize (jointly with Ted Schultz in 1979), and his two-sector model of economic development is foundational to how economists think about structural transformation: the movement of surplus labour from agricultural to industrial production as countries develop. The episode covers the Lewis model in enough depth to be useful, and there’s good biograph
Elinor Ostrom podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season two, episode two. Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and her work directly challenges one of the most famous ideas students encounter on the spec: the tragedy of the commons. Through decades of fieldwork she showed that communities frequently develop their own rules and norms to manage shared resources sustainably, without needing either privatisation or government regulation. It’s an important correct