Irving Fisher podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season six, episode three. Irving Fisher was hailed by Schumpeter as ‘the greatest economist America has ever produced’, which makes it all the more striking that his reputation collapsed spectacularly after he publicly declared stock prices had reached ‘a permanently high plateau’, days before the 1929 crash. The episode covers his debt-deflation theory, which enjoyed a major revival after 2008, and his work on the quantity theory of mo
Corrado Gini podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season six, episode two. Every A-level student knows the Gini coefficient, but fewer know anything about the man behind it, and this episode is worth flagging to teachers precisely because it doesn’t shy away from the awkward parts. Gini’s association with Mussolini and his involvement in the discredited ‘science’ of eugenics are addressed directly, which makes for a useful discussion about how we evaluate the ideas of historically compl
A.W. “Bill” Phillips podcast
My favourite economist! This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season six, episode one. This one is a real treat. Bill Phillips has been described as the ‘Indiana Jones of Economics’ and the episode earns that billing: he built radios in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, spoke five languages, was arrested for spying, and constructed a hydraulic machine (the MONIAC) that physically modelled the flow of money through the economy using water. Oh, and he also gave us the Phillips