Arthur Pigou podcast

This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season five, episode four. Pigou is responsible for one of the most important ideas in welfare economics: the Pigouvian tax, the argument that externalities should be corrected by taxing activities that generate negative external costs and subsidising those that generate positive external benefits. He was Marshall’s student and successor at Cambridge and shaped welfare economics into a coherent field. The episode connects his ideas to real-world policy, from carbon taxes to congestion charging. One of the more directly spec-relevant episodes in the series: Pigou’s ideas are foundational to the market failure and government intervention sections of the course, and the episode provides clear historical and conceptual grounding. Accessible to all students covering externalities.  Listen here