Millicent Fawcett podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode five. Better known as a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, Fawcett was also a serious economist who wrote one of the most widely used economics textbooks of the 19th century and was present at the founding of the British Economic Association in 1890. The episode recovers this side of her work and raises broader questions about the women who contributed to the development of economics but have been largely writt
Arthur Pigou podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode four. Pigou is responsible for one of the most important ideas in welfare economics: the Pigouvian tax, the argument that externalities should be corrected by taxing activities that generate negative external costs and subsidising those that generate positive external benefits. He was Marshall’s student and successor at Cambridge and shaped welfare economics into a coherent field. The episode connects his ideas to re
James M. Buchanan podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode three. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for developing public choice theory: the application of economic reasoning to political decision-making. The central insight is that politicians and bureaucrats are self-interested agents just like everyone else, and we cannot assume that government intervention will correct market failures if the institutions doing the intervening are themselves subject to incentive problems. The