Gary Becker podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season seven, episode four. Gary Becker took economic tools including cost-benefit analysis, incentives and rational choice, and applied them to areas most economists had never ventured: discrimination in the workplace, the economics of the family, and even the decision to commit a crime. His work was controversial but hugely influential, and it’s largely thanks to Becker that economists now feel licensed to wander into sociology, crimin
William Stanley Jevons podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season seven, episode three. Jevons was one of the architects of the Marginal Revolution and the economist who insisted that economics must be a mathematical science, a claim that reshaped the whole discipline. His development of marginal utility theory is foundational to how we explain demand curves and consumer behaviour, which makes this one of the more directly relevant episodes for early A-level micro content. He also has a bizarre
Robert Lucas Jr. podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season seven, episode two. Robert Lucas was the leader of the New Classical school and the man most associated with putting Keynesian economics on the back foot in the 1970s. His ‘rational expectations’ hypothesis (the idea that people anticipate government policy and adjust their behaviour accordingly, which limits its effectiveness) is a useful idea for evaluating demand-side policy. The episode also covers the Lucas critique, his wedg