Economics Podcasts

I have been spending considerable time updating CyberEconomics this summer.

As I have been updating the links in the alternative-and-substitute pages, I realized that I do not have links to interesting video and audio material. Of course, there may not be much of it. However, I had some boring tasks recently and spent time listening to two podcasts that relate to economics. One was an interview of Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter who have written a book called Rebel Sell. It was an excellent interview and the book sounded very interesting. They were using an idea that Robert Frank has argued in several books, that much of our consumption spending is for status, to argue that the counter-cultural left is not outside the consumer mentality, but very much in the middle of it.

The other podcast was an interview with Allan Meltzer, who is one of the mainline monetarists. It was long and the interview wandered a bit, but I have long been interested in monetary history. In fact, I reviewed the first volume of Meltzer’s A History of the Fed for Choice magazine. This one was part of the EconTalk series, which interviews many important economists.