Herbert Simon podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season eight, episode one. Season 8 of Economics in Ten has the theme “The Economists’ Economist”: each episode, a well-known living economist nominates their favourite economist from history. Ha-Joon Chang’s pick is Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner who fundamentally challenged the assumption that economic agents act rationally. Simon coined the term ‘satisficing’ (the idea that rather than maximising, people settle for an option that
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