EconTalk

Trade historian Doug Irwin discusses the history and economics of tariffs, why protectionism persists despite economic consensus against it, and what lessons history offers for current trade policy debates.

Economist Emily Oster discusses why public health messaging fails when it oversimplifies, the importance of acknowledging uncertainty, and how better communication of evidence could improve health outcomes.

Alain Bertaud on urban planning and what makes cities work. Cities are labor markets, not designed artifacts. The best urban environments emerge from letting markets work while providing infrastructure — not from master planning.

Scott Sumner on why government attempts to pick economic winners almost always fail. The knowledge required to direct industrial development is dispersed across millions of actors — no central planner can aggregate it.

Robert Chandler on translating Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate — often called the Russian War and Peace. The novel's central theme: individual kindness persists even in totalitarian systems that try to extinguish it.

Philosopher Hanno Sauer discusses his book tracing the evolution of human morality over 600,000 years. Covers how cooperation, punishment, and moral reasoning developed and why moral progress is real but fragile.

Bryan Caplan on Build Baby Build and why housing costs are artificial. Zoning, permitting, and NIMBYism create artificial scarcity. The solution is simple (build more) but politically difficult because existing homeowners benefit from scarcity.

Arnold Kling on The Three Languages of Politics and how political tribes talk past each other. Progressives frame issues as oppressor vs. oppressed, conservatives as civilization vs. barbarism, libertarians as freedom vs. coercion. Each framework makes the others invisible.

Michael Morris on tribalism — not as pathology but as fundamental human psychology. Tribal instincts evolved for cooperation, not just conflict. The question isn't how to eliminate tribalism but how to channel it toward constructive ends.

Marty Makary on systemic failures in modern medicine. Overtreatment, unnecessary procedures, and the influence of pharmaceutical marketing create a medical system that sometimes harms more than it helps.

Richard Reeves on the growing gender gap in education and social outcomes. Boys are falling behind girls in every level of education. The causes are structural and cultural — and the solutions require taking boys' struggles seriously without undermining girls' progress.

J. Doyne Farmer on chaos theory, complexity economics, and why traditional economic models fail. Markets are complex adaptive systems — not equilibrium machines. Farmer's work at the Santa Fe Institute bridges physics and economics.

Sam Harris on EconTalk discussing antisemitism, radical Islam, and Western moral confusion. Harris and Roberts explore why some progressive movements fail to apply their own principles consistently across cultures.

Erik Hoel on how parenting transforms moral character. Having children forces confrontation with selfishness, patience, and unconditional love. The experience of being responsible for a helpless person changes who you are.

Diana Schaub on Lincoln's political philosophy and its relevance today. Lincoln's genius was holding moral clarity (slavery is wrong) together with political pragmatism (abolition requires strategy). This combination is rare and learnable.

Mark Helprin on the relationship between literature and warfare, beauty and violence. Helprin — novelist and veteran — argues that great writing requires both aesthetic discipline and moral seriousness. Literature that avoids difficulty is literature that avoids truth.

Cynthia Haven on René Girard's mimetic theory. Humans don't desire independently — they imitate the desires of others. This mimetic desire explains everything from fashion to violence. Girard's theory as a framework for understanding culture wars.

Nick Bostrom on Deep Utopia and what happens when AI makes human labor unnecessary. If all problems are solved, what do we do? The question of meaning becomes the central challenge of a post-scarcity world.

Paul Bloom on AI simulations of deceased loved ones and the desire for immortality. Should we create digital replicas of the dead? The question forces us to ask what we actually value about persons — their information or their embodiment.

Teppo Felin on the limits of prediction and why Big Data can't substitute for human judgment. Prediction requires theory — a framework for knowing what to look for. Without theory, data is noise.

Michael Norton on the psychology of rituals. Rituals work even when you don't believe in them — the mechanism is behavioral, not metaphysical. The decline of religious ritual has left a void that secular rituals could fill.

Adam Mastroianni on the emotional thermostat — the brain's mechanism for returning to baseline after both positive and negative events. This is the hedonic treadmill viewed as adaptive technology rather than curse.

Azeem Azhar on the 'exponential gap' — technology advances exponentially while institutions adapt linearly. This mismatch produces crises in regulation, education, and governance that get worse as the gap widens.

Jeremy Weber on statistical literacy and how statistics are used to mislead. The problem isn't lying — it's selective presentation of true facts that create false impressions. A guide to reading data honestly.

Charles Duhigg on the science of conversation. Great conversations require matching the type of conversation your partner wants — practical, emotional, or social. Most conversational failures come from offering solutions when someone wants empathy.

Brian Klaas on randomness and meaning. His book Fluke argues that small random events have outsized consequences. This doesn't make life meaningless — it makes meaning more precious, because it's not guaranteed by any cosmic plan.

Paul Bloom on whether AI can have moral understanding. Bloom argues that morality requires suffering — and without the capacity to suffer, AI can mimic moral reasoning but can't be moral. The question reveals what we actually mean by 'moral.'