Assorted Podcasts

What's wrong with macro-economics-Paul Omerod

New economics- Arnold Kling

State Building in Afghanistan: and Lessons from Seventeenth Century France


The Invention of the Jewish People

Professor Shlomo Sand has triggered a debate with his new book which argues that one of the founding myths of Israel - the exile and return of the Jews from their ancestral land - is a myth.

Why was Christmas banned for almost 20 years in England

A.C. Grayling - A Very Public Philosopher

A.C. Grayling, one of Britain's foremost philosophers and public intellectuals. An extraordinarily wide-ranging writer, Grayling has written plays, he's written works of technical philosophy and he's written about great philosophers: including books on Berkeley, Russell and Wittgenstein and a biography of René Descartes More recently, he's turned his attention to historical topics, with a book on the Allied bombing of civilians in WWII, and that's one of the issues that we discuss with him today: what is the role of the philosopher in assessing the moral validity of the Allies' prosecution of the war against barbarism?

The liar's paradox and other philosophical absurdities

The man who taught Darwin beetles

The parable of the wise ones

Religion and Pluralism in a Divided World
Speaker: Anwar Ibrahim

Studying Islam across times and place: how to compare?
Speaker: Professor John Bowen

Beyond Copenhagen- Lord Stern

Public hospitals - reform overseas

Thailand's democracy

The tale of two cities
Over the past ten years Australian cities and towns have faced water shortages and water restrictions, yet Singapore, which once imported 80 per cent of its water, has become self sufficient. Are there any lessons Australian cities can learn from Singapore?

Babies at risk?
Figures show that the number of babies taken from mothers at birth is rising dramatically, particularly in NSW. Judgments must err on the side of child safety, but there's concerns some babies are taken needlessly. One couple is suing for $18 million.

Mahatma Gandhi: from lawyer to national liberator

The crime gene
Convicted murderer Abdulmalek Bayout recently made legal history when a court in Italy reduced his sentence because it accepted that Bayout was genetically predisposed to being aggressive and violent! Controversial...well it gets worse...the so-called crime gene is more prevalent in some racial groups than others!

Influentional Books Assorted

Mathew Yglesius

William McNeil, Plagues & Peoples: This had a kind of revelatory quality to me, the idea that everything you thought was important about history was actually kind of trivial and the real determinants of human destiny are something else entirely. Guns, Germs, and Steel is arguably the better book in this genre, but I only ever read it because I’d read P&P first so I’m giving McNeil the nod.

Tyler Cowen (who started the meme);

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography. This got me thinking about how one's ideas change, and should change, over the course of a lifetime. Plus Mill is a brilliant thinker and writer more generally.

Bryan Caplan;

Judith Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Harris sucked me into the exciting world of behavioral genetics - and got me thinking about the implications for the meaning of life.

David Henderson;

A Guide to Rational Living, by Albert Ellis. I hit some bumps in my last year in the Ph.D. program at UCLA. I got extreme writer's block and was getting nowhere on my dissertation. I write about this in Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, co-authored with Charley Hooper. I went to see a therapist, Roger Callahan, who gave every one of his new patients a copy. That one book has helped me deal with so many life situations.

Arnold Kling;

Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules. Again, you may find that the examples seem old, but no better book has been written on the economic issues of the information-driven economy. Among other things, this book convinced me that Price Discrimination Explains Everything.

Josh McCabe;

Off the Books by Sudhir Venkatesh. I hate to add something so recent from a guy who turned into one of the “superstars” of sociology, but this was one of the books which got me excited about the kind of things ethnography could do for your analysis. Like Jacobs, Venkatesh finds all sorts of order where others only see chaos.

Will Wilkinson;

A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I dug into this book with the intention of saying what was really, really wrong with it. Instead, I ended up feeling like I understood political philosophy.

Kieran Healy;

Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. So clever, so unassuming, so it made me want to be an economist. Then I took some economics and it wasn’t much like Schelling at all.

William S. Cleveland, Visualizing Data. “This book presents a set of graphical methods for displaying data”. Does it ever. Tufte gets the Presidential Commissions and the high media profile, and deserves all that, but Cleveland shows you how it’s done in practice and wrote the software that lets you code it yourself. For me it opened up the world of serious thinking on data and model visualization for quantitative data.

Russell Arben Fox;

Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View. I think I must have underlined every sentence in this book. It was the first book I'd read that made me think both critically and practically about all the stuff I'd been reading about "republicanism" for years.

Updated

'I've photgraphic memory'- Sir Arthur Lewis

A great video of Sir Arthur Lewis from UC.

In the interview Sir Lewis states that he would have preferred to become an engineer but in the colonial England he wouldn't have got a job with it. So instead he became an economist- thanks to British racism.

Related;
W. Arthur Lewis: Evolution of the International Economic Order

Which Nobel Laureate was rejected by The Economist magazine?

They said that they could not hire a black journalist since he would have to interview people who might refuse to see him because of his color

A New Game in Town -Predictalot

Predictalot ;

The basic game play is simple: select a prediction type, customize it, and invest points on it. Yet you'll never run out of odds to explore: you can make hundreds of millions of predictions! The odds on each update are continuously based on other players' predictions and the on-court action...

n technical terms, Predictalot is a combinatorial prediction market of the sort academics like Yahoo! and George Mason University professor Robin Hanson have been dreaming about since early in the decade...

With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market built, testing the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce. Predictalot is a game, and we hope it's fun to play. We'd also like to pave the way for serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology.

Markets like Predictalot, WeatherBill, CombineNet, and Internet advertising systems, to name a few, represent the evolution of markets in the digital age, empowering users with extreme customization

Assorted

Defenders and Demonizers of Credit Default Swaps

The problem with the Value-Added Tax

Do fish stir the ocean?

Algebra in Wonderland

It Takes Two to Tango

What Game Theory Can Tell Us About Terrorism

Building a Better Teacher

Mom, Apple Pie and Mortgages

Solow Quote of the Day

Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I’m getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte.

- Solow

Intellectuals and Society

Sowell discusses his new book, Intellectuals and Society

We also recommend Posner's book, Public Intellectuals