Today's guest is Robert Wright, author of The Poverty of Slavery. The New York Times' 1619 Project has prompted renewed discussions on slavery and the New History of Capitalism literature. This episode is the first in a series addressing these topics. We discuss the prevalence of slavery in the developing world today, the arguments for and against reparations, and the rent-seeking behaviour of slaveowners in the Antebellum South. This ground-breaking book adds an economic angle to a...

Today's guest is Alain Bertaud, author of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Alain discusses his extensive experience in urban planning: When he was first trained as a planner, urban planning was thought of as an offshoot of architecture. In this conception, cities are just large buildings that need to be laid out and designed by a skilled architect. Through his experience, Alain came around to thinking of cities not as large buildings to be designed, but as markets. He argues...

Ben Powell joins the podcast today to discuss his new book, Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, coauthored with Robert Lawson. The book is a combination of economic analysis and Anthony-Bourdain-style travel diary. Do We Have to Say It Again? Socialism Sucks! Apparently we do. Because today millions of Americans—young and old—are flocking to the socialist banner and chanting, “What do we want? Socialism—the economic system that has impoverished...

Today's guest is Edward J. Lopez of Western Carolina University. We discuss his book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change, which was co-authored with Wayne Leighton. Does major political reform require a crisis? When do new ideas emerge in politics? How can one person make a difference? In short: how and when does political change happen? Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers tackles these big questions, arguing that ideas and...

Vincent Geloso returns to the podcast today to discuss his paper, "Markets for Rebellions? The Rebellions of 1837-38 in Lower Canada". The paper discusses the idea that political upheaval and even violent rebellion can be more likely in areas with a high degree of market access. In 1837-38, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada rebelled. The rebellion was most virulent in the latter of the two colonies. Historians have argued that economic consideration were marginal in explaining...

Tooday's guest is Jennifer Murtazashvili of the University of Pittsburgh. We discuss her book, Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan. Despite vast efforts to build the state, profound political order in rural Afghanistan is maintained by self-governing, customary organizations. Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan explores the rules governing these organizations to explain why they can provide public goods. Instead of withering during decades of conflict, customary authority...

Today's guest is Randall Holcombe of Florida State University. Our discussion today focuses on his book, Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power Is Made and Maintained. Problems associated with cronyism, corporatism, and policies that favor the elite over the masses have received increasing attention in recent years. Political Capitalism explains that what people often view as the result of corruption and unethical behavior are symptoms of a distinct system of political...

Today's guest is Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University. We discuss his book, Free Trade and Prosperity: How Openness Helps Developing Countries Grow Richer and Combat Poverty. Free Trade and Prosperity offers the first full-scale defense of pro-free-trade policies with developing countries at its center. Arvind Panagariya, a professor at Columbia University and former top economic advisor to the government of India, supplies a historically informed analysis of many longstanding but flawed...

Today's guest is Robert Krol of California State University. Our topic is a recent policy paper he wrote for The Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University entitled Can we Build our way out of Urban Traffic Congestion? This paper examines the impact of highway expansion on congestion. Because highway expansion lowers travel times, expanded highways attract additional vehicle traffic—so-called induced travel. The empirical evidence indicates that the magnitude of induced...

Today's guest is Vlad Tarko of Dickinson College. We discuss the life and work of Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Vlad is the author of Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography. We discuss Elinor Ostrom's work on polycentric governance, the management of common-pool resources, and policing. We also discuss the continuing work scholars are doing in this research area, including Vlad's new book Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Political...

My guest today is Matthew Curtis, founder of the startup Vice Lotteries. Vice Lotteries is a new startup that aims to challenge state governments' legal monopolies over lotteries. State lotteries are amazingly and bizarrely unethical. They drain billions of dollars out of communities, primarily poor ones. Lottery spending has increased substantially over the past decades, with the average lotto player spending $600 per year, and many spending significantly more than that. Vice Lotteries...

Today's guest is Jamin Speer of the University of Memphis. We discuss his paper, "Are Changes of Major Major Changes? The Roles of Grades, Gender, and Preferences in College Major Switching" co-authored with Carmen Astorne-Figari. The choice of college major is a key stage in the career search, and over a third of college students switch majors at least once. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of major switching, looking at the patterns of switching in both academic and non-academic...

Kevin Erdmann of the Mercatus Center returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy. From the publisher's website: The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Shut Out demonstrates that high home prices...

Today's guest on Economics Detective Radio is Anja Shortland of King's College London, discussing her new book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business, where she brings an economist's perspective to the shady world of the kidnapping for ransom business and to the professionals who specialize in getting hostages home safely. The book's description reads as follows: Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap...

Mark Thornton returns to the podcast to discuss his new book The Skyscraper Curse (available digitally for free). The book discusses the connection between record-setting skyscrapers and economic recessions. Here's an excerpt from the book's introduction: The Skyscraper Index expresses the strange relationship between the building of the world’s tallest skyscraper and the onset of a major economic crisis. This relationship only came to light in 1999 when research analyst Andrew Lawrence...

Today's guest is Louis Rouanet from George Mason University. Our discussion focuses on an economic history paper he co-authored with Ennio Piano (a previous guest of the show), "Filling the Ranks: The Remplacement Militaire in Post-Revolutionary France." Many economists have analyzed the efficiency of a volunteered army relative to a conscripted army. However, they have rarely studied the working of real-world alternative, market-based, military institutions where military obligations are...

Today's guest is economic historian Gregory Clark, and our topic is England's New Poor Law of 1834. Gregory and his co-author, Marianne E. Page, wrote a paper on the topic entitled "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?" Spoiler alert: It didn't. The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith,...

Today's guest is Mikayla Novak (Twitter, SSRN) of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University. Her work focuses on some innovative new and potential uses for blockchain technology. As we all know at this point, the first use of blockchain technology was to create decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But a blockchain is a much more general technology than this: it is a decentralized ledger that is resistant to tampering by any one individual. As such, it is a...

Today's guest is Martin Gurri (Twitter, blog), author of The Revolt of the Public. We discuss his book, which deals with the impact of information technology on political trends and populism. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.” Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The...

Today on the podcast, Ash Navabi returns to discuss his recent work on housing and rent control. Ash published an opinion piece entitled "Why low-income earners should actually welcome Ontario's reversal on rent control." In that article, Ash pushes back on the kneejerk reaction to the Ontario government's reversal of its rent control policy on new units: There's no question that there are problems with affordability and livability in certain areas of Ontario, but implementing rigid rent...

Today's guest is Jonathan Meer of Texas A&M. We discuss his work on the minimum wage. The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. For both theoretical and econometric reasons, we argue that the effect of the minimum wage should be more apparent in new employment growth than in employment levels. In addition, we conduct a simulation showing that the common practice of including state-specific time trends will...

Today's guest is Bryan Cutsinger of George Mason University, discussing his paper, "Seigniorage in the Civil War South." During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate Congress adopted three currency reforms that were intended to reduce the quantity of Treasury notes in circulation by inducing the money-holding public to exchange their notes for long-term bonds. In this paper, we examine the political factors that influenced the adoption of the reforms and their effect on the flow of seigniorage...

Today's guest is Bob Murphy of Texas Tech University. We discuss his work on climate change and the social cost of carbon. Bob started working on issues related to climate change when he started working with the Institute for Energy Research. We discuss the implications of the Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) used to evaluate the impact of climate change, the pivotal role played by discount rates in evaluating any kind of climate policy, the pitfalls of carbon taxation, and the...

Today I discuss one of my own papers: "Instructions" by Freeman, Kimbrough, Petersen, and Tong. This research project on experimental instructions has been ongoing for years, but it was recently conditionally accepted for publication. I tell the story of how the research came together and detail some of the results. A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently-reported variety of practices and limited research...

Today's guest is Viktor Vanberg of the Walter Eucken Institute. We discuss a recent working paper of his entitled Individual Choice and Social Welfare: Theoretical Foundations of Political Economy. What we call an economy, i.e. the nexus of economic activities and relations within some defined regional limits – e.g. a local, a national or the world economy –, has always been subject to measures taken, or constraints imposed by political authorities. How economies work is inevitably, and to a...