Hayek Program Podcast - Environmental Economics — Bobbi Herzberg on Climate Change and Polycentricity

Welcome back to the Environmental Economics series, hosted by Jordan Lofthouse. On this episode, he interviews Bobbi Herzberg on a polycentric approach to solving climate change. Bobbi and Jordan discuss the importance and meaning of "polycentricity", how we can vote with our feet, major themes from public choice, Elinor Ostrom's work on climate change, and the six advantages that polycentric systems have for coping with climate change: (1) competition among decision makers, (2) cooperation among decision makers, (3) perceptions of legitimacy that lead to coproduction, (4) mutual learning through experimentation, (5) institutional resilience/robustness, and (6) emergent outcomes that are socially desirable but not centrally planned.

Bobbi Herzberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow. Previously, she served as assistant director of individual freedom & free markets at the John Templeton Foundation, as administrative director of The Institute of Political Economy, and as president of the Public Choice Society from 2014-2016.

Check out Jordan Lofthouse's work.

Referenced Works: Jordan and Bobbi's "The Continuing Case for a Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change", Elinor Ostrom's "A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change"

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The Economics of Everyday Things - 3. My Sharona (Replay)

Can a hit single from four decades ago still pay the bills? Zachary Crockett f-f-f-finds out.

 

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Planet Money - A very Planet Money Thanksgiving

Here at Planet Money, Thanksgiving is not just a time to feast on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles and pie(s). It's also a time to feast on economics. Today, we host a very Planet Money Thanksgiving feast, and solve a few economic questions along the way.

First: a turkey mystery. Around the holidays, demand for turkey at grocery stores goes up by as much as 750%. And when turkey demand is so high, you might think that the price of turkey would also go up. But data shows, the price of whole turkeys actually falls around the holidays; it goes down by around 20%. So what's going on? The answer has to do what might be special about supply and demand around the holidays.

We also reveal what is counted (and not counted) in the ways we measure the economy.

And we look to economics to help solve the perennial Thanksgiving dilemma: Where should each dinner guest sit? Who should sit next to whom?

This episode was hosted by Erika Beras and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed with an assist from Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Josh Newell.

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The Economics of Everyday Things - 26. Graffiti

 Is graffiti public art, or public nuisance? It depends who you ask. Zachary Crockett tags in where it all started.

 

RESOURCES:

EXTRA:

  • "Urinetown," by Tell Me Something I Don't Know (2017).

 

SOURCES:

  • Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the City of Philadelphia's Community Life Improvement Program.
  • Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia.
  • REPOZ, graffiti artist.

Planet Money - Economic fact in literary fiction

Some of the most influential and beloved novels of the last few years have been about money, finance, and the global economy. Some overtly so, others more subtly. It got to the point where we just had to call up the authors to find out more: What brought them into this world? What did they learn? How were they thinking about economics when they wrote these beautiful books?

Today on the show: we get to the bottom of it. We talk to three bestselling contemporary novelists — Min Jin Lee (Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires), Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility), and Hernan Diaz (Trust, In the Distance) – about how the hidden forces of economics and money have shaped their works.

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Molly Messick, and engineered by Neisha Heinis. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez.

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Music: Universal Music Production - "This Summer," "Music Keeps Me Dancing," "Rain," and "All The Time."


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Planet Money - China’s real estate crisis, explained

China's economic growth for the past few decades has been extraordinary. And much of that growth was fueled by real estate – it was like this miraculous economic engine for the country. But recently, that engine seems to have stopped working. And that has raised all kinds of questions not just for China but also for the global economy.

Today on the show, we look at what's happening inside China's real estate market. And we try to answer the question: how did we get here?

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Hayek Program Podcast - Peter Boettke & Jennifer Burns on the Life of Milton Friedman

This week, Peter Boettke interviews Jennifer Burns, author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Milton Friedman achieved tremendous sucess as an economist including being a John Bates Clark Medal winner, a Nobel Prize winner, and the president of the American Economic Association (AEA). In this episode, they discuss Friedman's time at Columbia University, the origin of his economic theory, the influence of Frank Knight, Friedman's female coauthors including Anna Schwartz and Rose Friedman, Friedman's association to conservatism, and more.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (November, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). An expert on this history of conservative ideas and politics, she has written for The NewYork Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

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The Economics of Everyday Things - 25. Private Jets

Executives shell out millions of dollars for the privilege of flying private — but that convenience comes at a steep cost to the rest of us. Zachary Crockett prepares for takeoff.

 

RESOURCES:

 

EXTRAS:

 

SOURCES:

  • Chuck Collins, program director on "Inequality and the Common Good" at the Institute for Policy Studies.
  • Anthony Tivnan, founder and president of Magellan Jets.

Planet Money - The alleged theft at the heart of ChatGPT

When best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston began playing around with OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, he was, at first, impressed. But then he realized how much in-depth knowledge GPT had of the books he had written. When prompted, it supplied detailed plot summaries and descriptions of even minor characters. He was convinced it could only pull that off if it had read his books.

Large language models, the kind of artificial intelligence underlying programs like ChatGPT, do not come into the world fully formed. They first have to be trained on incredibly large amounts of text. Douglas Preston, and 16 other authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Piccoult, and Jonathan Franzen, were convinced that their novels had been used to train GPT without their permission. So, in September, they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

This sort of thing seems to be happening a lot lately–one giant tech company or another "moves fast and breaks things," exploring the edges of what might or might not be allowed without first asking permission. On today's show, we try to make sense of what OpenAI allegedly did by training its AI on massive amounts of copyrighted material. Was that good? Was it bad? Was it legal?

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Planet Money - Never have I ever

The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries, high up in their ivory towers. On the other, there's the messy world we're all living in, where those economics are actually playing out.

Sometimes, researchers will write about something that they themselves have never actually experienced. Sure, they've thought about it, theorized, come up with smart analyses...but that's not the same as getting out of that armchair and into the real world.

So, in this episode, we play our own version of Never Have I Ever. We dare two researchers to go places and do things they have never done before, in hopes of learning something new about the economic world around us.

(Okay, fine, it's maybe more like Truth or Dare...but go with us here.)

Today's episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Sally Helm, fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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