Oxford College Principles of Microeconomics Course

Demetri speaks with Steve Keen, one of the few economists to correctly anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The two discuss Keen’s latest work modeling the impact of climate on economic output, as well as debunking some of the common misperceptions about money and credit held by Keynesian and Austrian theorists alike.

From Planet Money:
A famous biologist, Paul Ehrlich, predicts that overpopulation will lead to global catastrophe. He writes a bestselling book — The Population Bomb — and goes on the Tonight Show to make his case.An economist, Julian Simon, disagrees. He thinks Ehrlich isn't accounting for how clever people can be, and how shortages can lead to new, more efficient ways of doing things.
So Simon challenges Ehrlich to a very public, very acrimonious, decade-long bet. On today's show: The story of that bet, and what it tells us about the future of humanity.

The ways people and sometimes policymakers respond to disasters can have hidden and unintended consequences. And sometimes those consequences can be tragic.

On today's show, our old friend Tim Harford, an economist and host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, joins us to talk about unintended consequences. FWe discuss how our minds are better at solving problems that we can see directly than they are at anticipating problems and risks that our decisions might be creating further down the line. And we talk about how a better understanding of unanticipated consequences and the ""identifiable victim effect"" can help us respond to the coronavirus pandemic in ways that can make it less likely that those consequences will be fatal.