Tag: EconTalk

Robert Pondiscio on How the Other Half Learns

EconTalk | 18 May 2020 | 1h 20m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Robert Pondiscio about his book How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice. Pondiscio shares his experience of being embedded in a Success Academy Charter School in New York City for a year – lessons about teaching, education policy, and student achievement. Dissects what Success Academy does well.

Branko Milanovic on Capitalism, Alone

EconTalk | 11 May 2020 | 1h 38m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Branko Milanovic about his book, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World. Discusses inequality, the challenge of corruption in the Chinese system, and Milanovic’s claim that in American capitalism, the texture of daily life is increasingly affected by the sharing economy and other opportunities.

Arnold Kling on the Three Languages of Politics, Revisited

EconTalk | 6 April 2020 | 1h 03m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Arnold Kling about the revised edition of his book The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides. Kling talks about the changed political landscape in the United States and around the world and how his ideas have changed since the book was first published in 2013.

Azra Raza on The First Cell

EconTalk | 23 March 2020 | 1h 24m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Azra Raza about her book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Raza argues that we have made little progress in fighting cancer over the last 50 years. The tools available to oncologists haven’t changed much – the bulk of the progress that has been made has been through earlier and earlier detection rather than more effective or compassionate treatment options. Raza wants to see a different approach from the current strategy of marginal improvements on narrowly defined problems at the cellular level. Instead, she suggests an alternative approach that might better take account of the complexity of human beings and the way that cancer morphs and spreads differently across people and even within individuals. The conversation includes the challenges of dealing with dying patients, the importance of listening, and the bittersweet nature of our mortality.

Isabella Tree on Wilding

EconTalk | 16 March 2020 | 1h 17m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Isabella Tree about her book Wilding. Describes how Tree and her husband turned their three and a half-acre farm, the Knepp Castle Estate, into something wilder, a place for wild ponies, wild pigs, wild oxen, and an ever-wider variety of birds and bugs. Covers the re-wilding phenomenon, the complexity of natural systems, and the nature of emergent order.

Richard Davies on Extreme Economies

EconTalk | 9 March 2020 | 2h 04m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Richard Davies about his book Extreme Economies: What Life at the World’s Margins Can Teach Us About Our Own Future. Explores economic life in extreme situations. Examples discussed are the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, two Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, the rain forest in the Darien Gap in Panama, and Kinshasa, the largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. An economic and journalistic tour de force as Davies shares insights from his encounters with people around the world struggling to trade and prosper in extreme environments.

Peter Singer on The Life You Can Save

EconTalk | 17 February 2020 | 1h 06m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Peter Singer about his book The Life You Can Save. Singer argues that those of us in the developed world with a high standard of living can and should give/forgo some luxuries and donate instead to reduce poverty and suffering in poor countries. This is a wide-ranging conversation on the potential we have to make the world a better place and the practical challenges of having an impact.

Marty Makary on the Price We Pay

EconTalk | 10 February 2020 | 1h 20m | Listen Later | iTunes
Interview with Marty Makary about his book The Price We Pay. Makary highlights some of the stranger aspects of the US health care system including the encouragement of unnecessary or even harmful procedures and the predatory behaviour of some hospitals who sue patients and garnish their wages to recover fees that are secret until after the procedure is completed. Makary favours requiring hospitals to make their prices transparent. He also discusses a number of ways that employers and patients are trying to avoid the worst aspects of the current system.