Muhammad Yunus podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season four, episode four. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize (not the Economics Prize, which the episode discusses with characteristic honesty) for developing microfinance through Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The idea that small loans to poor people, particularly women, could break cycles of poverty is both accessible and interesting economically. The episode covers the theory and the evidence, including the critics who argue that high inte
Amartya Sen podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season four, episode three. Sen changed how economists measure development: away from income alone and towards a broader conception of capability and freedom, which is the intellectual foundation of the Human Development Index (HDI). His empirical finding that no substantial famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy is one of the most striking claims in development economics, and the episode gives it proper attention. One of th
Hernando de Soto podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season four, episode two. De Soto’s central argument is that the world’s poor are not poor because they lack assets but because they lack the formal property rights that would allow those assets to function as capital. His concept of ‘dead capital’ (assets that exist but cannot be leveraged economically because they lack legal recognition) is a striking and counterintuitive framing of why development stalls. Bill Clinton called him ‘the