Podcast: Economics & Beyond

Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and author of the book, What’s the Future?, talks about how new technology can either be considered a scapegoat or a mirror and what this means for our future.

American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner talks about how the faith in Democracy and in the state have suffered tremendously over the past two decades, how it can be restored, and what impact this loss of faith will have on the Biden presidency

INET’s Research Director Thomas Ferguson discusses the latest analysis he and his colleagues have conducted of campaign spending in the 2020 election cycle. The result dispels the myth that money has lost significance and that Republicans were at a significant disadvantage.

New Consensus president Saikat Chakrabarti talks about what Biden can do, even without Congress, to make a real difference in the lives of ordinary Americans

University of Cambridge professor and INET co-founder William Janeway discusses the crucial role that government has always played in generating technological innovation, how this role has been diminished in recent years, and the problems this lack of attention will cause for the US in the near future

Famous whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg discusses his book, The Doomsday Machine, which chronicles the tremendous threat to humanity that US nuclear war planners deliberately considered and whose plans he was going to leak instead of the Pentagon Papers, had it not been for the Vietnam War. Part 1 of 3.

Christopher Cramer and John Sender, authors of the book, African Economic Development: Evidence, Theory, and Policy, discuss their book (co-written with Arkebe Oqubay) and how economic policy needs to be rooted in flexibly responding to changing circumstances and consequences, instead of dogma. Link to a PDF version of the book: http://fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/academic/pdf/openaccess/9780198832331.pdf

INET’s Young Scholar’s Initiative (YSI) is holding its third plenary conference this November, this time all online. However, unlike most online conferences, the 2020 YSI Plenary is a true workshop for young scholars to get to know each other and to identify the most important economic questions for the near future. Rob Johnson discusses the project with YSI’s coordinators Jay Pocklington, Heske van Doornen, and Thomas Vass.

Pavlina Tcherneva, Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College, discusses her new book, The Case for a Jobs Guarantee, outlining why society would benefit tremendously from such a program.

Dean Baker, senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, talks about how geopolitical and economic tensions between the US and China benefit powerful elite sectors in the US, but are bad for working people.