What’s the role of a university in a democratic society? What responsibility do universities have to foster the public good, and what responsibilities does the public have to support centers of education and research? These have become some of the most fraught and pressing questions in our current moment. But of course, they’re also timeless questions — ones that are as old as the United States itself. On this episode, Mark explores these questions (and more) with literary scholar Kevin McLaughl...
Jun 20, 2025•34 min
On this episode, Mark talks with two guests to try and understand why, despite growing right populist movements emerging and winning elections in countries around the world, the left seems to be stalling. It’s a simple question with an incredibly complex answer. Hopefully, though, these two guests will help you to see both the question and its possible answers in a new light. Guests on this episode: Björn Bremer: political scientist at Central European University, John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow...
May 16, 2025•48 min
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Małgorzata Mazurek, a historian, associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, and author of the forthcoming book “The Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968.” Mazurek explores how, between World Wars I and II, a group of thinkers led by economists Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau began to re-envision Poland’s economy – and future. Their work, and Mazurek tells it, threatened many of the assumptions he...
Apr 11, 2025•24 min
In this episode, Mark Blyth talks with two inequality experts to try and understand something that’s been bugging him for years. It goes like this: inequality has profound effects on our economy, society, and lives. It has also been growing, and today is at historically high levels. Given all that, why does inequality never seem to be a topic around which we organize our politics? Too complicated? Too boring? Too unsolvable? The answers that Mark got made him rethink the question itself, and hop...
Mar 07, 2025•44 min
To state the obvious, there are many hurdles to addressing the climate crisis in a meaningful way. However, there’s been one relatively bright spot on this front in the last decade: the price of renewable energy — particularly solar and wind power — has dropped dramatically. By many measures, they’re now cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. So does that mean when it comes to a “green transition” can we just sit back and let the market take care of it? According to Brett Christophers, a professo...
Dec 20, 2024•42 min
This is a new experiment we’re trying at the Rhodes Center Podcast. From time to time, going forward, instead of focusing on one expert and their latest research, Mark will take a deeper dive into one issue (or one question) that’s been bothering him. Future episodes will examine the politics of immigration and the persistence of inequality. But the first episode in this new series will explore a topic especially near and dear to Mark: inflation. Specifically, the stories we tell about what caus...
Nov 22, 2024•39 min
Remember the supply chain problems of 2020 and 2021? The story we were told was that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy's ability to make and transport goods of every type imaginable: Surgical masks. Car parts. Infant formula. But as New York Times' global economic correspondent Peter Goodman explains in his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain,” the story is more complicated than that. On this episode, Goodman and Mark Blyth discuss how,...
Oct 04, 2024•42 min
When it comes to governing our economy, estimates rule the day. We want to know what effect a policy might have on the government’s budget, on economic growth, on employment…in the next 1 year, 5 years, 10 years…you get the idea. If you want to make (or critique) public policy, you better have numbers to back it up. To get those types of estimates, economists and politicians often rely on institutions like the Office for Budget Responsibility in the UK, or the Congressional Budget Office in the ...
Jun 08, 2024•43 min
When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship. With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this trend has garnered lots of attention in the last few years, as our guest on this episode explains, there’s so much more to the...
Apr 30, 2024•35 min
Listeners of the Rhodes Center Podcast have probably heard of companies like Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard. You’ve also probably heard how, through ETFs and other investment products, these types of investment firms own a staggering share of the world’s biggest companies (20-25% of the S&P 500 by some estimates). But in this episode, you’ll hear about a whole other side of asset management; one that’s more opaque, and possibly much more influential (and corrosive) to our daily lives....
Mar 25, 2024•53 min
On this podcast, you’ve heard from a range of experts about the policies and politics of decarbonization. But what does the fight against climate change look like from the business side? Sophie Purdom is the Founder and Managing Partner of Planeteer Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in early-stage climate technology companies. She also writes Climate Tech VC , an industry newsletter that goes deep into the business side of the green transition. On this episode, Sophie Purdom talks wit...
Dec 08, 2023•33 min
In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates in the United States among white middle-aged men and women between the years of 1999 and 2013 . They published a book in 2020 that aimed to explain the trend, which they attributed to — among other factors — economic stagnation , social isolation, and the opioid crisis. The book, titled “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,”, caused a stir inside and outsi...
Nov 21, 2023•32 min
This is part three in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson). On this episode, Mark talks with four contributors for the book: Alex Reisenbichler, Aidan Regan, Oddný Helgadóttir, and Jonas Nahm. They look at case studies in a handful of countries, as well as some of the cross-cutting trends affecting all growth models across the world. They explore the role of finance and polit...
Oct 21, 2023•35 min
This is part two in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson). In part one (which, if you haven’t listened to, we’d recommend you go back and do), Mark and his guests discussed how growth models are almost like the business model for a country. But of course, countries don’t exist in isolation. They can rise and fall together, and operate as regional economies tied into wider glob...
Sep 22, 2023•33 min
This is the first in a three-part series on Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, a book co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro, and Jonas Pontusson. Using examples from around the world, the book offers a new understanding of what happens to our politics when growth slows down. In this episode, Mark grills his co-authors about how the book came to be, and the big questions that guided its creation. Guests on this episode: Lucio Baccaro , Director at the Max Planck Inst...
Aug 10, 2023•34 min
In 1849, the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle referred to economics as the “dismal science.” The pejorative stuck, and is still slung by critics of the field today. But what if economics is worse than “dismal”? What it’s…harmful? George DeMartino’s recent book, “The Tragic Science: How Economists Cause Harm (Even as They Aspire to Do Good)”, makes exactly that claim: that economists aren’t just ineffective at solving social problems; they often end up creating new ones. Worse still – sin...
Jun 06, 2023•40 min
On this episode Mark Blyth talks with this year’s invited speaker at the Rhodes Center’s annual 'Ethics of Capitalism’ lecture series, journalist David de Jong. David’s groundbreaking book “Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties”, looks at the individuals and companies that accumulated unimaginable wealth under the Third Reich. Through his incredible investigative work, he exposes how these companies – including iconic German businesses like Volkswagen, BMW, and ...
Apr 29, 2023•35 min
The history of international politics since 1945. The role of values in the global economy. The future of America’s relationship with China. All three of these would be ambitious topics for a work of political economy. But combining them? That’s not for the faint of heart. However, that’s exactly what Sir Paul Tucker has done in his new book, “Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order”. Tucker is a former central banker, and a current research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School...
Apr 14, 2023•39 min
One concept that comes up a lot on the Rhodes Center Podcast: the idea of the 'free market’. The idea, as you might know it, begins with John Locke, is fashioned fully by Adam Smith, and is delivered to us gift-wrapped (after some delays) by the likes of Hayek and Friedman in the mid 20th century. But as our guest on this episode explains, the idea of the free market is hardly so straightforward. Jacob Soll is a professor of philosophy, history, and accounting at the University of Southern Calif...
Mar 31, 2023•34 min
On the last episode of the podcast, Mark talked with two experts regarding the Inflation Reduction Act, and the political and logistical challenges of accelerating a ‘Green Transition’ in the US. Which makes for an interesting comparison to our topic today. Because these days, when people want to critique how slow and ineffective the US government can be, they often compare it to another country – one that we tell ourselves is where big government projects happen faster and better than almost an...
Mar 10, 2023•34 min
Over the last two years, if you had asked Mark Blyth if the Biden administration would ever do anything meaningful to fight climate change, he’d have said “no.” These feelings only got stronger in 2021, after the Democrats failed to pass their first big attempt at climate legislation, known as ‘Build Back Better.’ But then, something changed. The Inflation Reduction Act became law. And despite the name, it’s a decarbonization bill, and a better one than Mark ever thought we were going to get. (I...
Feb 17, 2023•35 min
In the last few years, globalization has gotten an increasingly a bad rap. Whether because of increasing geopolitical tensions over high end computers chips, or the realization that when you outsource your manufacturing base it’s quite hard to make things in a hurry (see: the pandemic), people across the political spectrum are calling time on ‘make it there, ship it here.’ It seems that politicians of all stripes want to roll back global supply chains and ‘friendshore’ all our wants and needs. T...
Dec 16, 2022•30 min
This episode is a little different than the type of conversation you normally have on the show. Last year, Mark spoke with Oded Galor about his book The Journey of Humanity , a long-run take on why humanity changed so little for so long, and then all of sudden changed tremendously, mostly for the better. It’s a fascinating idea, but of course nobody actually experiences that long-run journey, or compares their daily life to distant ancestors. People typically think on the much shorter timescale ...
Nov 04, 2022•32 min
On this episode Mark talks with Oded Galor, Professor of Economics at Brown University, and author of the new book The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality . In this book Oded survey’s 200,000 years of human history to create a theory for why societies and economies grew so slowly for so long – and why, starting about 200 years ago, that began to change very rapidly. It’s a sweeping history that puts the work of many influential economists into a new light – from Adam Smith ...
Jul 11, 2022•46 min
There’s a standard story economists and historians use to explain the global economy over the last 100 years: there was the gold standard, which gave way to the Bretton Woods system, which gave way to “neoliberal globalization”. But on this episode of the Rhodes Center Podcast, Mark talks with someone whose work challenges this story by attacking its foundational myth with deep archival work. James Ashely Morrison is an associate professor of International Relations at the London School of Econo...
Jun 17, 2022•36 min
From 2019 to 2021, Frances Haugen worked as a Product Manager in Facebook’s Civic Integrity Department. During that time she got an inside view into how Facebook’s algorithms are deliberately designed to influence its users. She also saw something deeply worrying: that this influence was often used to grow Facebook’s profits at the expense of users' safety and wellbeing. In 2021 she anonymously leaked tens of thousands of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. Since then she’s testified ...
May 27, 2022•25 min
In the last few years we’ve seen critiques of free trade from across the political spectrum. Trump focused on the US-China trade imbalance, while the left focuses its ire on free trade agreements themselves. It’s, of course, not the first time that protectionist ideas have found currency in a globalizing economy. In the late 18th century a theory known as ‘neomercantilism’ began to thrive in a number of western countries. It was a theory, most famously espoused by the German thinker Friedrich Li...
Apr 08, 2022•39 min
On this episode Mark talks with Dr. Fiona Hill about her new book There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century . A foreign policy expert and key witness in President Trump’s first impeachment trial, she reflects on growing up in the deindustrializing North of England in the 1980s and how that upbringing attuned her to developments in both Russia and America that we are coping with today. This talk was recorded in late February 2021. Learn more about and purchase...
Mar 11, 2022•32 min
The Rhodes Center Podcast explores the most important issues in finance and economics through straightforward, candid conversations with the world’s leading experts. The show is hosted by Mark Blyth, political economist and Director of the Rhodes Center, at the Watson Institute at Brown University. On this episode Mark talks with Manuela Moschella about the recent transformations to central bank policy and orthodoxy. Central banking used to be straightforward - fix short term rates and get price...
Feb 25, 2022•37 min
On this episode Mark talks with Elizabeth Popp Berman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and author of Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy. In it, she explains how in the middle of the 20th century a new kind of economic thinking took hold among policymakers at all levels of government. It replaced bold visions of justice and equality with a more technocratic style, one whose goals could be summed up in one word: efficiency. Over t...
Feb 11, 2022•31 min
