In this episode (# 2), we discuss Eisler’s early years as a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie in turn-of-the-century Vienna with historian Steven Beller. We also hear from the closest living relative of Robert Eisler, his grand-nephew Richard Regen. Philosopher Tom Hurka provides some background for understanding the arguments Eisler is making in Studies in Value Theory, especially his critiques of hedonism and aesthetic philosophy. Finally, we look at the events surrounding Eisler’s dramatic arr...
Jun 16, 2020•52 min•Ep. 173
In today’s ultra-polarized and highly partisan political environment, Welfare for the Rich: How Your Tax Dollars End Up in Millionaires' Pockets―And What You Can Do About It (Post Hill Press, 2020) is one of the rare books written to appeal to engaged and open-minded citizens from across the political spectrum. Welfare for the Rich is the first book to describe and analyze the many ways that federal and state governments provide handouts—subsidies, grants, tax credits, loan guarantees, price sup...
Jun 09, 2020•52 min•Ep. 81
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the ...
Jun 02, 2020•2 hr 1 min•Ep. 20
You mean big business is good, contributes to our general welfare, and is not generally guilty--with notable exceptions--of all of the charges made against it? That's the argument libertarian economist Tyler Cowen makes in his book Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero (St. Martins, 2019) Most NBN listeners will raise an eyebrow to that claim, but most of those same NBN listeners are up for a good back-and-forth on the virtues and demerits of our market system. And to that end, be...
Jun 01, 2020•29 min•Ep. 21
John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, Brandon ...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 195
Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-19 crisis is, unfortunately, a new broad-based instance in the valuation of human life. And I do mean value: in terms of cash dollars. Ultimate Price covers the ways that companies, courts, nations, and individuals have come to put a price tag on individual existence. While the book was written prior t...
Apr 30, 2020•46 min•Ep. 20
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary resear...
Apr 28, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 193
It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations - Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time Thomas Piketty, the French economist, was dubbed the modern Marx by The Economist in the wake of his bestselling Capital in the 21st Century, which presented historical data reaching back to the eighteenth century and focused on the dynamics of the distribution of wea...
Apr 21, 2020•37 min•Ep. 61
"Most lawyers, most actors, most soldiers and sailors, most athletes, most doctors, and most diplomats feel a certain solidarity in the face of outsiders, and, in spite of other differences, they share fragments of a common ethic in their working life, and a kind of moral complicity." – Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict. There are many more examples of professional solidarity, however fragmented and tentative, sharing the link of a common ethic that helps make systems, and the analysis of th...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 60
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook...
Mar 30, 2020•54 min•Ep. 46
I spoke with Dr. Amr Khafagy about his recent book The Economics of Financial Cooperatives (Routledge, 2019). Amr is Research Assistant at the Countryside and Community Research Institute of the University of Gloucestershire. Building on theories of finance and distribution, and the political economy of finance, this book explains the influence of financial cooperatives on wealth and income distribution, and institutional factors that determine the development of financial cooperatives. The book...
Mar 17, 2020•32 min•Ep. 35
Megan Tobias Neely and Ken Hou-Lin's new book Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores the rise of finance in American life over the last forty years and its implications for American workers, families, and economies. The authors argue that finance has transformed from a servant to the economy to its master - from a means of creating a prosperous society to an end in itself. The consequences of this shift are profound: the authors identify the many ways...
Mar 11, 2020•50 min•Ep. 124
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities a...
Feb 25, 2020•42 min•Ep. 154
Today I spoke with professor Peter J. Boettke the author of a great new book on Friedrich August von Hayek. Dr. Boettke is University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at George Mason University, USA. F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores the life and work of Austrian-British economist, political economist, and social philosopher, Fried...
Feb 10, 2020•49 min•Ep. 34
In her new book Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promise (St. Martin's Press, 2019), Jodie Adams Kirshner tells the story of the people of Detroit before, during, and after its bankruptcy, offering lessons about urban governance, post-industrial economics, development, and the usefulness of bankruptcy itself as a tool to aid U.S. cities. Join us to hear the fascinating, infuriating, and heartbreaking stories of Detroiters struggling to build better lives for themselves and thei...
Feb 07, 2020•29 min•Ep. 87
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same s...
Jan 30, 2020•40 min•Ep. 103
Think that Wall Street has nothing to do with the real economy? You are probably not alone in that regard. But it turns out, you are wrong. As William N. Goetzmann demonstrates in his Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton University Press, 2016), the tools of finance were as important for the rise of civilization as were the soldiers, castles and battles. Were it not for property contracts, agreements over imports and exports of grain, how to manage risk in ...
Jan 20, 2020•15 min•Ep. 19
With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento. American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher educ...
Dec 05, 2019•30 min•Ep. 386
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, g...
Dec 03, 2019•58 min•Ep. 42
Tired of the mechanical, narrowly rational human behavior of the Chicago school, but not exactly comforted by the emphasis on irrational activity in behavioral economics? So am I. Richard Robb, professor at Columbia and fund manager, offers a third way. In Willful: How We Choose What We Do (Yale University Press, 2019), Robb develops the notion of "for itself" behavior and decision making that can't be reduced to the algorithms of calculating machines, or even those that are adjusted for human f...
Nov 18, 2019•42 min•Ep. 18
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, ...
Nov 03, 2019•40 min•Ep. 45
Whether man-made or naturally occurring, large-scale disasters can cause fatalities and injuries, devastate property and communities, savage the environment, impose significant financial burdens on individuals and firms, and test political leadership. Moreover, global challenges such as climate change and terrorism reveal the interdependent and interconnected nature of our current moment: what occurs in one nation or geographical region is likely to have effects across the globe. Our information...
Oct 29, 2019•36 min•Ep. 42
Culture matters. And a key element of culture is storytelling. These maxims can be accepted as given, except in modern economics, where the mechanistic framework of modern macroeconomic analysis allows just for formulas. Concerned about the relationship between unemployment levels and inflation? Here's the formula: gW = gWT - f(U − U*) + λ·gPex It's called the Phillips Curve. Your personal experience of unemployment or rising costs, the stories that you tell others or hear from them--about globa...
Oct 14, 2019•15 min•Ep. 16
“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And it is so central to the idea of the United States that some even labeled Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims free enterprisers. In his new book, Free Enterprise: An American History (Yale University Press, 2019), Lawrence Glickman analyses that phrase’s historical meaning and shows how it became common sense. Glickman, a historian and the Stephen and...
Sep 13, 2019•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 52
I spoke with James C. W. Ahiakpor, he is Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, at California State University, East Bay, USA. We discussed his new book Macroeconomics without the Errors of Keynes: The Quantity Theory of Money, Saving, and Policy (Routledge, 2019) A provocative title for a very original book that is a critique not only of Keynes but also of some of his followers and his scholarly opponents. This is a sophisticated book and an erudite account and analysis of crucial debates...
Sep 13, 2019•46 min•Ep. 30
Dividend investors are a small but dedicated band. Ten years into a stock market rally led by no or low-dividend paying companies, they still argue in favor of long-term business ownership rather than betting on near-term prices in the market. They still view a dividend as, in the words of Richard Russell, "a true return on investment. Everything else is hope and speculation." David Bahnsen is just such an investor. As CIO of the Bahnsen Group, he and his team manage $2 billion in assets. His ne...
Aug 14, 2019•47 min•Ep. 15
The authors of Chains of Finance: How Investment Management is Shaped (Oxford University Press, 2017) make points that professionals already know and that end-investors ought to know: that there are a lot of cooks in the investment kitchen, and that the investment process is materially shaped by the chain of individuals and institutions that go into manufacturing investment products. Advisors, consultants, compliance, sales, portfolio managers, analysts, traders, distributors, custodians---these...
Aug 09, 2019•50 min•Ep. 14
Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but government credit has been part of American life since the nation’s founding. Sarah L. Quinn’s new book dissects the political and social development of these policies in American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation (Princeton University Press, 2019). Quinn is associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington. From the 1780s...
Aug 06, 2019•26 min•Ep. 365
How are markets made? In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores the history of the finance industry to understand the role of markets and technologies in contemporary capitalism. The book offers a detailed theoretical engagement with the personalities and technological changes underpinning the modern sy...
Jul 22, 2019•45 min•Ep. 130
Small is beautiful, right? Isn't that what we've all been taught? From Jeffersonian politics to the hallowed family farm, from craft breweries to tech start ups in the garage. Small business is the engine and the soul and the driver of the American system. That's the dominant narrative. And according to Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind, it is really wrong. In their new book, Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018), the authors review the empirical evidence and co...
Jul 19, 2019•47 min•Ep. 12
