Ceteris Never Paribus: The History of Economic Thought Podcast

Presenter: Debjani Bhattacharyya, Drexel University and Leiden University. Hosted and produced by Maria Bach This episode features the Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Economics (HPPE) seminar at LSE with Debjani Bhattacharyya on The Science of Planning: Notes from Indian Economic History that took place on 15 November 2017. About the presenter: Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and Research Fellow of International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University. Her research focuses on modern South Asian history, urban environmental history, legal history and history of economic thought. She has one book in progress and published journal articles on the history of colonial India. At the HPPE seminar she presented some of her latest work on the Science of Planning in colonial India at the beginning of the 20th century. About the paper: The paper traces the emergence of the theories of economic planning in colonial India in an attempt to historicize planning and its various instantiations from roughly the 1930s. By tracing a long genealogy of planning, the paper interrogates the competing ideas and methods of governance that were subsumed under the rubric of planning. What were the overlapping and diverging arenas of the politics and economics of planning? Did planning mean the same thing to the politicians and the economists? The crisis within the planning commission was a crisis of “planning” as an institution, a set of ideas and practices that sought to organize politics, governance and populations in India. Contrary to understanding planning as that technocratization of state administration, the paper concludes by unraveling the incommensurability between developmental planning and the electoral and patronage politics of governing the world’s largest democracy. About HPPE: The HPPE seminar series is organised by PhD students at the Economic History Department at LSE established by Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg in 2012. The seminar brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the evolution of economic thinking and embraces topics from Ancient Greece to contemporary Africa. The seminar inquires how the theory and practice of economics changes with the historical and philosophical context. It aims to provide scholars at any stage of their career with an opportunity to discuss their work with a critical audience. For further information, please contact the current convener, Chung Tang Cheng. Special thanks to both Debjani and Tang for making this episode possible! The following people were heard during the Q&A session: Eleanor Newbigin, Mary Morgan, Hugo Evans, Maria Bach, Jim Thomas and Paul Hudson. Please note that parts of the recording had to be cut due to poor sound quality and background noise. Rest assured that we are continuously working on making our recording practises better!

Guests: Peter Bent, François Allisson, Herman Daly and Sara Stevano (see below for more information).Host and Producer: Maria Bach, Centre Walras Pareto, Unil, Lasuanne (former Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Paris)Guest hosts: Wilhelm Aminoff, Wyatt DeLong, Farrah Aridou, Jonathan Noulowe II and Paul Harding, students of a history of economics course at the American University of Paris. Inspired by Radiolab's episode on the cataclysm sentence, this episode explores whether we could find a cataclysm sentence for economics. Radiolab had found out about the famous and award winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who in the 60s wanted to revamp the physics undergraduate degree to get more researchers into physics. He started his course at Caltech with what he called the cataclysm sentence, which is: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?” We changed it a bit to apply only to economics: "The one piece of economic knowledge that you would pass on to a future society if ours were to perish in a cataclysm." Along with students at the American University of Paris, we interviewed four people, an economic historian, an ecological economist, a feminist political economist and an historian of economics. Here is the list of their cataclysm sentences: Peter Bent, Department of Economics, Trinity College, Connecticut, USA Julie Nelson's (UMass Boston) definition of economics: "The study of the ways societies organize themselves to provide for the survival and flourishing of life." Herman Daly, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, USA "Although not reducible to biophysics, the human economy is nevertheless ecologically constrained, especially in its primary macroeconomic goal of aggregate growth, by the fact that it is a physical subsystem of a finite ecosphere that lives from a non growing entropic flow of solar energy captured by scarce and depleting terrestrial materials.” Sara Stevano, Department of Economics, The School of Oriental and African Studies, London "Power relations are intrinsic to economic phenomena at multiple and interconnected scales." François Allisson, Centre Walras Pareto, Unil, Lausanne "Economics was a temporary scienceNecessary in times of perceived scarcityTo understand the waysIn which human needsTranslatedIn various ways of organising human activities" (pictured above) While everyone had slightly different takes on the task and took us down different avenues of knowledge, there were several common themes. So fasten your seat belts, as we take you on a journey of discovery and at times a rather philosophical, utopic and radical discussion about what really matters. Featured music (apart from the usual intro and outro music): Sounds by Jordan Powell, Erokia: https://freesound.org/people/Erokia/

• Guest: Nestor Lovera (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne)
• Host and Producer: Maria Bach (Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne)

In this episode, Maria interviews Nestor Lovera from the Université of Reims Champagne-Ardenne about his thesis and latest projects. For a summary of Nestor’s thesis, click here.

Check out Nestor’s new podcast (in French) on the history of economic thought: https://l-heure-d-unepauseconomique.fr/

Guests: Stefan Kolev and Mark McAdamHosted and produced by Reinhard Schumacher and Erwin Dekker In this episode, Reinhard and Erwin talk with Stefan Kolev and Mark McAdam about the recent translation of eight classic articles in the tradition of German Socio-Economics including work by Georg Simmel, Joseph Schumpeter, Gustav Schmoller and Ferdinand Tönnies. These articles were picked from the rich archive of Schmollers Jahrbuch (currently Journal of Contextual Economics). They discuss the best way to understand the German tradition of Socio-Economics, the helpfulness of the Historical School label, how institutional change is best studied, and how relevant this tradition of thought is to under current socio-economic transformations around the world. The editors of these translations also discuss the process of translation both language wise and between different intellectual traditions.The issue of the Journal of Contextual Economics with all translation and original articles is open-access for a limited amount of time.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/ In this episode, Maria Bach explores how poverty has been defined and measured over time inspired by her work with Mary Morgan recently published in the History of Political Economy Journal (https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/issue/50/S1) The episode features notably Amartya Sen, Frances Stewart, Stephen Marglin and Mary Morgan. Here is a list of the books, websites and articles mentioned in the episode:1. GSDRC's definition of poverty2. UNESCO's definition of poverty3. The Economist's article on defining poverty4. Poverty and Social Exclusion Project based in the UK5. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen's An Uncertain Glory, 20136. Howard Glennerster, John Hills, David Pichaud and Jo Webb's One Hundred Years of Poverty and Policy, 20047. Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 19088. The New York Times article on How to define poverty? by Louis Uchitelle, 20019. The UN Intellectual History Project10. The IMF and World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)11. Frances Stewart and Michael Wang's working paper on Do PRSPs empower poor countries and disempower the World Bank, or is it the other way round?