this week's episode
Susan Cain on Bittersweet and the Happiness of Melancholy

Why do we like sad music or that poignant feeling that comes from attending a funeral? Author Susan Cain talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts...

last week's episode
Why Housing Is Artificially Expensive and What Can Be Done About It (with Bryan Caplan)
Housing is artificially expensive. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and the author of Build, Baby, Build talks with EconTalk's Russ...
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Katherine Levine Einstein on Neighborhood Defenders
Why is affordable housing in such short supply? Author and political scientist Katherine Levine Einstein of Boston University talks about...
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Econtalk Extra
By Nancy Vander Veer

Bearing Witness to War

Not everyone values 2500+ year old epic poems. If that’s you, give an expert the chance to convince you. In this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts interviews Claudia Hauer about war, education, and strategic humanism. Hauer is an expert at...

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Alain Bertaud on Cities, Planning, and Order Without Design

Urbanist and author Alain Bertaud of NYU talks about his book Order without Design with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Bertaud explores the role of zoning and planning alongside the emergent factors that affect the growth of cities. He emphasizes the...

Not everyone values 2500+ year old epic poems. If that’s you, give an expert the chance to convince you. In this episode of EconTalk, Russ Roberts interviews Claudia Hauer about war, education, and strategic humanism. Hauer is an expert at making the case for the importance of reading classical texts and often had to...

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Why do we like sad music or that poignant feeling that comes from attending a funeral? Author Susan Cain talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her book Bittersweet and the seductive and sometimes deeply satisfying power of melancholy.

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The universe, points out economist Noah Smith, is always trying to kill us, whether through asteroids hurtling through space or our every-few-hours hunger pains. Why, then, should we expect anything but a gravitational pull toward poverty? In this episode, Russ Roberts and Noah Smith reflect on films and TV shows t...

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Housing is artificially expensive. Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and the author of Build, Baby, Build talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the causes behind high housing prices and what can be done to bring prices down.

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How much do you know about Bruno Leoni? Friedrich Hayek credited Bruno Leoni with shaping his ideas on laws and legislation. James Buchanan said that Leoni identified problems that led to his own work on public choice. How is it possible, then, that so few of us know of the groundbreaking Italian political philosopher?...

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How big a problem is misinformation for a democracy? How do we arrive at the truth? Listen as economist and author Arnold Kling talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how we should think about truth-seeking. The conversation also revisits Kling's classic work, The Three Languages of Politics, and the relevance of its...

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Is tribalism destroying democracy? According to cultural psychologist Michael Morris of Columbia University, just the opposite may be the case. As he explains in his new book, Tribal, our tribal instincts can also be the source of our success--in politics, society, business, and even professional sports. Listen as Mo...

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Doyne Farmer's recent conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts has given listeners reason to reflect on the state of economics and the way mainstream economists model market behaviors and use their models and tools to predict behaviors and identify trends.  After listening to the EconTalk episode “Chaos and Complex...

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Bruno Leoni (1913-1967) Friedrich Hayek credited Bruno Leoni with shaping his ideas on laws and legislation. James Buchanan said that Leoni identified problems that led to his own work on public choice. How is it possible, then, that so few of us know of the groundbreaking Italian political philosopher? Listen as Du...

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An owl will eat a rabbit whole, but owls can't digest the fur or the bones. So how do they survive? Why do their eyes face forward rather than to the side? Long-eared Owls don't have ears, so what's up with the name and how do they hear? How can dogs help us track owls--that seems impossible. Owls don't make nests, so ...

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...people are utility monsters when it comes to themselves. But something happens when you have children. This is how Erik Hoel begins this thoughtful conversation with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. According to new parent Hoel, life is no longer "a constant, almost exhausting game of optimization." He has found a gr...

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Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary talks about his book Blind Spots with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Makary argues that the medical establishment too often makes unsupported recommendations for treatment while condemning treatments and approaches that can make us healthier. This is a sobering and informative explorati...

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British Army major and Sandhurst lecturer Andrew Fox recently spent a week with the Israel Defense Forces including a day inside Gaza. He was struck by the IDF's control of Gazan territory and shocked by the level of physical devastation. Listen as Fox and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss Fox's analysis of Israel's...

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Many boys and men in America are doing worse than girls and women in education while struggling with a culture that struggles to define what masculinity is in the 21st century. Is this a problem? Richard Reeves thinks so which is why he started the American Institute for Boys and Men. Listen as Reeves discusses the sta...

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Physicist J. Doyne Farmer wants a new kind of economics that takes account of what we've learned from chaos theory and that builds more accurate models of how humans actually behave. Listen as he makes the case for complexity economics with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Farmer argues that complexity economics makes better ...

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Ian Leslie’s work focuses on human behavior. He has appeared on two earlier episodes of EconTalk (Ian Leslie on Curiosity and Ian Leslie on Conflicted). In this episode, host Russ Roberts and Leslie continue the discussion of human behavior, discussing Leslie’s thesis that AI is already changing how we think. It is...

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