Statistical graphing was born in the seventeenth century as a scientific tool, but it quickly escaped all disciplinary bounds. Today graphics are ubiquitous in daily life. In their just-published A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication (Harvard UP, 2021), Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer detail the history of graphs and tables, how they help solve problems, and even changed the way we think. You'll never look at an excel chart the same way again.... Daniel Peris is Senior Vic...
Aug 23, 2021•58 min•Ep. 117
Is there an ideal portfolio of investment assets, one that perfectly balances risk and reward? In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio (Princeton UP, 2021) examines this question by profiling and interviewing ten of the most prominent figures in the finance world—Jack Bogle, Charley Ellis, Gene Fama, Marty Leibowitz, Harry Markowitz, Bob Merton, Myron Scholes, Bill Sharpe, Bob Shiller, and Jeremy Siegel. We learn about the personal and intellectual journeys of these luminaries—which include six Nobe...
Aug 02, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 21
In July 2021, nine summers after its then president saved the euro with three choice words (“whatever it takes”), the European Central Bank published the results of a thoroughgoing review of its strategy. A policy framework built for times when inflation posed a modest upside challenge had coped – but only just – with successive financial, sovereign-debt, banking and health crises that threatened chronically weak inflation at best and deflation at worst. Essential to the review was research cond...
Jul 28, 2021•49 min•Ep. 51
In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 113
Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how they relied on private financial institutions that encouraged risky lending practices. Yet federal policy makers did little to change their approach to curbing risky lending practices and there was little political response from consumers or consumer groups. How can political scientists explain the behavior of government actors, interes...
Jul 19, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 537
What can debt reveal to us about coloniality and its undoing? In Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Rocío Zambrana theorizes the way debt has been used as a technique of neoliberal coloniality in Puerto Rico, producing profit from death on the island. With close attention to the material practices of protestors who have fought that destruction of life for the purposes of profit, Zambrana argues that decolonization entails political-economic subversion and tran...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 255
In 1800 a Belfast linen merchant named Alexander Brown emigrated with his wife and eldest son to Baltimore. Today his family’s name lives on in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, a company that has long played an outsized role in American history. As Zachary Karabell details in his book Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power (Penguin, 2021), a key factor in its endurance over the country’s long and often tumultuous financial history has been the importance ...
Jun 22, 2021•49 min•Ep. 1013
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn’t really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations...
Jun 08, 2021•1 hr 25 min
In spite of Karl Marx's proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lo...
Jun 02, 2021•57 min•Ep. 156
A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton UP, 2021) provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, econo...
May 27, 2021•28 min•Ep. 108
Can classical economics help figure out climate change and support policies that slow global warming? Yale Sterling Professor of Economics William Nordhaus thinks so. In his new book, The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World (Princeton UP, 2021), Nordhaus tackles the "externality" that is pollution and carbon emissions. By making several adjustments to how we treat this externality in economic terms, it can be brought back into the "system" whereby sensi...
May 24, 2021•28 min•Ep. 32
I spoke with Bobby Lee about his book 'The promise of Bitcoin: The Future of Money and How It Can Work for You' (McGraw-Hill, 2021). Bobby Lee is a very interesting character, among the leading figures in the field of cryptocurrency. He is the founder and CEO of Ballet, a cryptocurrency startup. He is the cofounder of BTCC, the longest-running bitcoin exchange and leading financial platform worldwide. He also serves on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has built ...
May 18, 2021•41 min•Ep. 67
The inside story of the world's most famous board game-a buried piece of American history with an epic scandal that continues today. The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game (Bloomsbury, 2015) reveals the unknown story of how Monopoly came into existence, the reinvention of its history by Parker Brothers and multiple media outlets, the lost female originator of the game, and one man's lifelong obsession to tell the true story about the game's quest...
May 17, 2021•55 min•Ep. 984
I spoke with Prof. Tim Jackson about his latest book: Post Growth, Life after Capitalism, published by Polity Books in 2021. The book starts with a reflection on the event of the past few months. The success in 2019 of the school strikes for climate, the attention that Greta Thunberg received even in Davos, and the arrival of the pandemic that changed our priorities. Even the 2009 crisis challenged the degrowth movement when we experienced the consequences of the recession. I have asked how do w...
May 07, 2021•52 min•Ep. 65
For years, American Jewish philanthropy has been celebrated as the proudest product of Jewish endeavors in the United States, its virtues extending from the local to the global, the Jewish to the non-Jewish, and modest donations to vast endowments. Yet, as Lila Corwin Berman illuminates in The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: The History of a Multibillion-Dollar Institution (Princeton University Press, 2020), the history of American Jewish philanthropy reveals the far more complicated real...
May 05, 2021•55 min•Ep. 219
In The Other Side of the Coin: Public Opinion toward Social Tax Expenditures (Russell Sage Foundation, 2021), political scientists Christopher Ellis and Christopher Faricy examine public opinion towards social tax expenditures—the other side of the American social welfare state—and their potential to expand support for such social investment. Tax expenditures seek to accomplish many of the goals of direct government expenditures, but they distribute money indirectly, through tax refunds or reduc...
May 04, 2021•38 min•Ep. 105
In this podcast Michael Blakey describes how as a strongly dyslexic child his relationship with schooling and formal education was very challenging. He credits his parents with putting him in environments where he developed a lot of resilience - going to boarding schools from the age of seven, and only later in life realising that this was unusual. His early experiences retailing sweets and vodka at school, led to large scale warehouse parties in the US, flipping real estate in London and making...
May 03, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 62
The emergence of individual and commercial insurance in Early Modern Europe required an understanding of probability. In Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rachel Friedman highlights the political thinking that developed side by side with the advances in statistical methods. By the 20th century, small scale, group insurance had become national programs with profound political implications. Friedman's work traces how what she calls probabilistic social insu...
Apr 20, 2021•43 min•Ep. 31
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy placed much greater focus on stabilizing the market than on helping struggling Americans. As a result, the richest Americans got a lot richer while the middle class shrank and economic and wealth inequality skyrocketed. In Engine of Inequality, Karen Petrou offers pragmatic solutions for creating more inclusive monetary policy and equality-enhancing financial regulation as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead of pr...
Apr 13, 2021•35 min•Ep. 102
Mungo Keulemans talks about growing up in South Africa, working in the family business, his army experiences, his move to Europe, Japan and back to Europe. We hear about his entrepreneurial journey in the family business in Poland, and after its sale to one of the world’s leading companies, his time in the larger corporation and his return to entrepreneurial life leading to his investment and CEO role at PMR. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing ...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 59
Today I talked to Pedro Gustavo Teixeira about his new book The Legal History of the European Banking Union: How European Law Led to the Supranational Integration of the Single Financial Market (Hart, 2020) Since 1950, the political and economic integration of Europe has tended to accelerate through functional mini-unions: coal and steel, nuclear power, and – in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic - it could well be healthcare next. The most recent of these mini-federations is the European Bank...
Apr 12, 2021•46 min•Ep. 44
Today I talked to Adam Bryant about his new book (co-authored with Kevin Sharer), The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders (Harvard Business Press, 2021). Adam Bryant is managing director of Merryck & Co, a leadership development and mentoring firm. Before then, Adam was a journalist for 30 years, including at the New York Times where he authored the “Corner Office” column. He’s a speaker, teacher, and frequent contributor on CNBC. This episode is rooted in the seven pa...
Apr 08, 2021•36 min•Ep. 49
“Economics is the long-run driver” in the history of Europe’s monetary union, writes Richard Pomfret in the first of a new Cambridge Elements series on the Economics of European Integration: The Road to Monetary Union (Cambridge University Press, 2021). “Politics often determined the timing of the next step ... but it has not determined the direction of change”. In this "Element" – intended to be “longer than standard journal articles yet shorter than normal-length book manuscripts”, according t...
Apr 07, 2021•35 min•Ep. 43
In this episode Florian Feas describes his route into setting up Slator: to solve problems he became aware of, as a result of working in the translation industry in senior positions. He outlines the importance of having a co-founder with complementary skills and how SaaS business tools enabled him to scale his business fast and cost effectively We draw out lessons that any entrepreneur can benefit from hearing. Florian Faes is the Managing Director of Slator, a business media and advisory firm f...
Apr 05, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 58
Are we in the midst of a financial bubble? Do the current valuations of the electronic vehicle stocks or their SPACs make you raise an eyebrow? The trouble with bubbles is that they are hard to spot from within, and much easier to define and analyze after the fact. In their new book, Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles (Cambridge University Press, 2020), William Quinn and John D. Turner analyze past instances of extreme speculation to come up with a typology of the phenomenon. U...
Mar 30, 2021•52 min•Ep. 30
In this episode we talk to Ashutosh about his upbringing and journey into corporate life, and the lessons that taught him. His route into entrepreneurship to build the “Boots of India”,which grew to be India’s largest retail pharmacy chain, and his life post-exit as an author and podcaster. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversati...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 57
For decades, a secret army of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers has been developing into the shadowy Wealth Defense Industry. These ‘agents of inequality’ are paid millions to hide trillions for the richest 0.01%. In The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (Polity, 2021), inequality expert Chuck Collins, who himself inherited a fortune, interviews the leading players and gives a unique insider account of how this industry is doing everything it can to cr...
Mar 26, 2021•37 min•Ep. 100
Veronique Ozkaya shares her teenage experience working in the family business, why she wanted to get away from her hometown, her brief career as a diplomat, and rapid rise to a leading position in the translation industry. Veronique shares her insights into gender diversity (or its absence) in the industry, and her approach to leadership. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal stories of our carefully selected guests ...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 55
In this magnum opus, Paul Vallely guides the reader on a journey through the history and meaning of giving in religion and society. Vivid with anecdote and scholarly insight, this magisterial survey – from the ancient Greeks to today's high-tech geeks – provides an original take on the history of philanthropy. It shows how giving has, variously, been a matter of honor, altruism, religious injunction, political control, moral activism, enlightened self-interest, public good, personal fulfillment ...
Mar 08, 2021•56 min•Ep. 43
Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (Oxford UP, 2021) is the f...
Mar 04, 2021•40 min•Ep. 99
