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
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