Thomas Robert Malthus podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season three, episode five. Malthus is famous for his population theory: the idea that population tends to grow faster than food supply, leading to recurring cycles of famine and poverty. But the episode also covers his broader contributions, including his early theorising about demand deficiency, which anticipates Keynesian thinking in interesting ways. There’s good discussion of where Malthus was right, where he was wrong, and how his
Ibn Khaldun podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season three, episode four. Ibn Khaldun was a 14th-century North African scholar who is sometimes described as the first economist, several centuries before Adam Smith. His Muqaddimah contained ideas that now look remarkably prescient: an early version of the Laffer curve, a cyclical theory of economic history, and analysis of trade and specialisation. The episode is a useful corrective to the Eurocentric story usually told about the ori
Joseph Schumpeter podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season three, episode three. Schumpeter gave us ‘creative destruction’: the idea that capitalism advances through waves of innovation that destroy old industries while creating new ones, and that this process of disruption is the engine of long-run growth. He was also an early theorist of entrepreneurship and the role of the innovator. The creative destruction concept is increasingly useful in teaching on dynamic efficiency, competition