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’s good enough) and developed the concept of bounded rationality to explain why. Because these ideas map so neatly onto both behavioural economics and the objectives of firms sections of the spec, this is one of the more directly useful episodes for classroom purposes. It’s a good listen to set before or after teaching those topics. Accessible to most students: the ideas are familiar enough from the spec that students will have context to engage with the episode without feeling lost.  Listen here