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
Hyman Minsky podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season seven, episode one. When the Queen asked economists why nobody saw the 2008 financial crisis coming, the honest answer was that Hyman Minsky had, decades earlier. His ‘financial instability hypothesis’ and the idea of a ‘Minsky moment’ (the point at which a debt-fuelled boom tips into a crash) became suddenly fashionable after 2008. The episode covers why stability can paradoxically sow the seeds of instability, and why Minsky bel
Leon Walras podcast
This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season six, episode five. Walras was central to the Marginal Revolution, the shift in the late 19th century that transformed how economists think about value and price, and his general equilibrium theory laid the groundwork for how we model markets interacting with each other. Schumpeter called him ‘the greatest economist’, a bold claim that the episode interrogates with the usual mix of biography and ideas. This one is a bit more abstra