Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that inco...
Jul 06, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can squeeze more pr...
May 08, 2023•1 hr 37 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one of the most innovative scholars working on elicit finance and how to combat it. The conversation beg...
May 07, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has passed through the culture in the past decade, exploding especially on some university campuses and nowadays reaching...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 4Ep. 2
One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as western psychologists have realised how distorted their view is by their tendency to only sample 'W...
Mar 07, 2023•38 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoked a flurry of activity concerned with how to revive left behind places and dampen their rage. A larg...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 12
What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nations that rose in the second half of the 20th century. In place of industrialisation and associated exp...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degree of sentience? If it's the later, then cephalopods seem curious, honeybees are capable of solving c...
Jun 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 10
The advancement of health care is one of the hallmarks of development and a central objective of not for profit, public, and private organisations, especially in the developing countries of Africa. Wiktoria Tafesse is an early career researcher working on a range of topics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics. She joins ePODstemology’s regular host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the role health plays in development, the idiosyncratic features of developing countries with respect to...
May 30, 2022•57 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Through most of human history, we needed more food, cheaper food, and easier to access food, so we built economic systems that could deliver mountains of the stuff. Now that was a noble effort at the time, but we didn’t think much about waste, and so huge quantities of food today ends up in landfill where it turns to greenhouse gases, or rots on the vine, squandering the resources we used to produce it. Much of our food is also of dubious nutritional quality but can meet our demands for supposed...
May 18, 2022•57 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by philosopher of science Dr Riana Betzler from Washington University in St Louis to discuss the nature and study of empathy. In popular culture, empathy is one of these haloed qualities that we generally perceive as good and desirable. Yet in recent years some psychologists, notably Paul Bloom at Yale, have argued that empathy is overrated, indeed, harmful, because it biases our moral judgements towards our in groups. Riana’s research is princ...
May 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 7
ePODstemology is about popularising the genuinely new ways of thinking emerging from the pathbreaking research of young scholars. There are few fields that represent this agenda more than machine learning, a branch of computer science and statistics that promises to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, crack open hard questions that have bedeviled humanity for decades, and even crack open our minds with whole new ways of understanding our world. In this episode, regular host...
Apr 19, 2022•59 min•Season 3Ep. 6
The biggest change in electoral politics in the last decade is without a doubt the advent of social media. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in Brexit, Russian bots in the EU, the zone that Steve Bannon suggests political parties flood with shit, it’s all happening on our favourite doom-scrolling apps. How is political science getting to grips with this new and influential phenomenon? Dr Kevin Munger from Pennsylvania State University joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss. The...
Mar 30, 2022•52 min•Season 3Ep. 5
What are the big questions in macroeconomics right now? Well there’s the unprecedented assault on Russia’s financial architecture, that’s quite topical. We usually study how to avoid financial crises, not how to start them. How do a tank a central bank? Just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the big news was the return of inflation. After a decade or so of ‘secular stagnation’ and fears of deflation, consumer prices across the world are rocketing up. Is this just a hangover from CO...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 4
How does science, the quintessential secular enterprise, study religion? What can we learn about religion by applying the tools of scientific method, and what can religion teach secularists about how to build thriving societies? In this episode, social psychologist Dr Kitty O'Lone from Cambridge University's Woolf Institute joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss these and other questions pertaining to the secular benefits of religious practices. Dr O'Lone discusses her previous work ...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Artist, feminist economist and activist Cassie Thornton joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian to discuss her recent project The Hologram, a social technology for creating peer to peer care networks and unlearning capitalism. Inspired by the community health clinics of post-GFC Greece, The Hologram seeks to cultivate our capacity for caring about others in a collective, non-reciprocal, and holistic fashion. The project illustrates how the steady professionalisation, individualisation, and commerci...
Feb 13, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 2
Long before Donald Trump referred to Mexican migrants as 'bad hombres', migration was a perennially hot topic in economic and social policy. Some of the endlessly debated question in this space include: do migrants hurt the labour market prospects of locals by taking away jobs and depressing wages? Or do they instead create more opportunities by bringing capital and spurring economic activity? Is there a difference in effects between skilled and unskilled migrants? What about refugees? Do tempor...
Jan 31, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Season 3Ep. 1
The ePODstemology Christmas Special! Popular guest, Bayesian Bae, and all round great person Rachel Meager from the LSE returns to ePODstemology to sit in the host's chair and interview regular host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University. The topic is all things wellbeing. The philosophy of it, the psychology of it, the economics and public policy of it. Why does wellbeing scholarship need to be interdisciplinary? How do we even measure it? What even is wellbeing? Fabian delivers hot takes faster...
Dec 22, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Infrastructure is the skeleton upon which the economy is built. Energy, water, sewerage and other utilities provide the fuel and take away the waste; roads, bridges, railways, ports, and broadband cables facilitate the movement of goods that is the essence of commerce; and town halls, leisure centres, parks are the sites on which the public sphere is manifested. So why don't we talk more about this critical aspect of our world? Even more pertinently, why don't we talk about how it is governed ? ...
Nov 21, 2021•56 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Believed dead and buried after World War 2, the far right has risen like a zombie from the ashes of deindustrialising towns to once again plague the polities of the trans-Atlantic region. The electoral success of Trump and Brexit made the ‘elites’ pay attention, but it’s only recently that we’ve come to understand enough about what happened in 2016 to give a thorough accounting. Here to help us understand the nature, causes, and consequences of the far right is Dr Diane Bolet, Assistant Professo...
Nov 21, 2021•57 min•Season 2Ep. 5
What is the difference between merely 'statistical' discrimination and prejudice? How can we disentangle these things in social sciences research, and should we? How can researchers get away from a focus on the individual in discrimination research to better understand how institutions, culture, and macro-history cause both statistical and prejudicial discrimination? What can economists learn from sociology and cultural psychology about discrimination, and vice versa? Ben Harrell from the LGBT p...
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Whether it's build back better, levelling up, or the climate transition, industrial policy is back in the news. Everyone wants to restructure their economies for geopolitical, equality, green, or good old fashion efficiency reasons, but how to do it? Nathan Lane from Oxford University joins host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University to discuss. Industrial policy has a mixed history, having been both the darling and the black sheep of the economics profession in less than 100 years, embroiled in ...
Oct 16, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 3
What can social scientists learn from biology? A great deal, according to guest Reuben Finigan of the London School of Economics. The burgeoning field of sociobiology provides mind-blowing insights into sociological phenomena like cooperation, common pool resource management, corruption and rent seeking behaviour, how market actors try to deceive regulators, and the efficient provision of public goods. Many of these insights are derived from applying models from the biological sciences, typicall...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 2
'Creative destruction' is an inevitable and desirable part of ongoing economic activity, but it does have losers. In particular, the employees of firms that go bust and obsolete industries that disappear. In normal times, these workers will find employment elsewhere or in emerging industries, especially if they are able to retrain easily. But in times of industrial transition, when there are wide ranging structural transformations in the economy, the sheer volume of creative destruction can see ...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 1
This episode is all about statistics in social science. It's one for all the new armchair epidemiologists out there, especially if COVID has got you thinking about how we can make "evidence-based policy". Statistics cheerleader Rachel Meager, who is Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Politics Science, joins host Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to answer all your questions. Should you be a Bayesianism Bae or a frequentism fan? Should all social science foll...
Jul 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 8
What are the potentials and pitfalls of the new data economy and associated efforts at data governance? Tech entrepreneur, digital marketer, and academic researcher Sam Gilbert joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to discuss how we can achieve "Good Data". Sam explains the commercial, scientific, and social value of data, clarifies some common misunderstandings of how data is generated and used, and analyses the many political complexities around data regulation. If yo...
Jul 21, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 7
The psychological science of happiness, well-being, and meaning in life has progressed rapidly in recent decades but it's insights are only just starting to penetrate the public discourse. Here to help is Frank Martela, a psychologist from Aalto University in Finland, the world's happiest country according to the World Happiness Report. Frank and host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University take you on a tour of the major theories of well-being in psychology, offer practical advice on how to secur...
Jun 27, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 6
An exceedingly thoughtful mystery guest takes us on a tour of how notions of femininity and motherhood are changing culturally, politically, symbolically, and psychically. We discuss the history of the masculine and feminine archetypes, especially in mythological representations, and recent efforts at their revival by figures like Jordan Peterson. While there is value in salvaging what we can from these, it seems undeniable that contemporary gender politics, much like the broader existential vac...
Jun 13, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Taxes and transfer payments are perhaps the most fundamental element of public policy, yet we rarely hear about these issues outside of banal political point scoring. Robert Breunig joins ePODstemology for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of tax and transfer policymaking. We discuss the basic economic and political logic of taxes and transfers, the lessons of the 20th century, and what to expect from contemporary efforts to combat tax avoidance by multinational firms and individual...
May 30, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 4
In the contemporary culture wars there's a crop of commentators who insist that 'science' is on their side. They're talking about falsification, replication, quantitative methods, and randomised-control trials - the buzzwords of positivism - and they insist that what their opponents say is invalid because it doesn't meet positivism's standards for what counts as 'knowledge'. Sensing an opportunity for ePODstemology to discuss epistemology, we invited Rod Graham of Old Dominion University to the ...
May 16, 2021•52 min•Season 1Ep. 3
