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
Daniel Kahneman podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season four, episode one. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics despite being a psychologist by training, and this episode covers the work that earned it: prospect theory, loss aversion, and the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking. These are foundational ideas for behavioural economics and map very directly onto the spec. The episode is clear, engaging, and well-paced, and students who have encountered Thinking, Fast a