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
E.F. Schumacher podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode two. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (subtitled ‘Economics as if People Mattered’) was a landmark critique of the assumption that growth and scale are always desirable. His concept of intermediate technology: practical, locally appropriate tools rather than the most advanced Western technology: was influential in development economics. The episode positions him as a forerunner of ecological economics and the wellbein
Simon Kuznets podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode one. Kuznets has at least two curves named after him, which is a reasonable indicator of influence. The most famous is the Kuznets curve, which predicts an inverted U-shape relationship between income per head and inequality: as countries develop, inequality first rises and then falls. The episode also covers the environmental Kuznets curve (a similar pattern proposed for environmental degradation) and Kuznets’s foun