ePODstemology

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy – little tweaks to the choice environment citizens face as they navigate the world that can help them towards the decisions they would ideally like to make. Piano key stairs that play music to encourage you to walk rather than take the escalator. Being defaulted into a high savings-rate retirement plan by your employer. Or Timely and easy to action reminders from the tax office encouraging you to pay your bills. All nudges. If you think these are all bullshit, try navigating a budget airline’s website without paying for any additional extras. Here behavioural insights from psychology are used against to wear you down and encourage you to hand over cash for things you don’t need. Behavioural welfare economics is the philosophical side of these interventions. When we use nudges and other similar interventions to help people, how do we understand what is good for them? Economics would traditional use people’s own preferences as a measure of their welfare. But one of the main contributions of behavioural economics research has been to demonstrate that people’s preferences are often unstable, unclear, context sensitive, constructed on the spot, and otherwise a poor guide to their welfare. So how should economists, psychologists, and policymakers proceed? Tune in to find out. 

Malte's website:
https://www.maltedold.com/

Angner, E. We're all behavioural economists now. Journal of Economic Methodology, 26(3): 195-207. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2019.1625210

Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica., 47(2): 263 -292.

Kuhn on scientific revolutions:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/

Lakatos on scientific revolutions:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/

Chetty, R. (2015). Behavioural economics and public policy: A pragmatic perspective. American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, 105(5): 1-33.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34330194/behavioral_ely.pdf

Smith, V. (1962). An experimental study of competitive market behaviour. Journal of Political Economy, 70(2): 111-137.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=economics_articles

Bernheim, D. (2008). Behavioural welfare economics. NBER Working Paper 14622. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14622

Sugden, R. (2018). The Community of Advantage: A behavioural economist's defence of the market. Oxford University Press.
https://academic.oup.com/book/10329

Sugden, R. (2021). Normative economics without preferences. International Review of Economics, 68(1): 5-19.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-020-00356-8

Chater, N. & Loewenstein, G. (2022). The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioural public policy astray. Online first in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1-60.

Francis, D. V., Hardy, B. L., Jones, D. (2022). Black economists on race and policy: Contributions to education, poverty, and mobility, and public finance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 60(2): 454-493.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20211686

Gneezy, U. (2020). A fine is a price. The Journal of Legal Studies, 29(1): 1-17.   
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061

Nudge by Thaler & Sunstein:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-D

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious landscape that has shifted ever since, and how they devise new forms of spiritual practice. As we discuss in this episode, the experiences of young Zimbabweans in this regard are instructive for people in the global North, especially with respect to how we relate to our ancestors, meaning in life, and cultural power. As the systems of value that made sense of life after World War II come unstuck, a rift is growing between older, more traditional generations, and younger generations who yearn for a different world. There is much that we can learn from Anthropology with respect to navigating this mileau, and Raffaella distils some of this wisdom in conversation with regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick.   

Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that income is derived from labour or capital. The implications of compositional inequality for political economy are significant. What else is new is trends in global capitalism, especially the rise of China's middle class, the advent of artificial intelligence, superannuation funds and real estate assets making middle class boomers the new owners of the means of production, and the reluctance of states to tax inefficiently. 

Marco's personal website with all his publications:
https://www.mranaldi.com/

A brief explainer of compositional inequality:
https://www.mranaldi.com/ici

Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done, Harvard University Press: https://www.tony-atkinson.com/new-book-inequality-what-can-be-done/

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X

Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W. W. Norton: https://wwnorton.com/books/the-price-of-inequality/

Heather Boushey's Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Harvard University Press: https://equitablegrowth.org/unbound-how-inequality-constricts-our-economy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/

Francois Bourguignon's The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160528/the-globalization-of-inequality

A taste of the content in The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything, by Christopher Snowden:
https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/

Political economists from Goldsmith's London on the domestic regime (i.e. the low interest rate coalition between home owners and hedge funds): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-covid-19-revealed-the-politics-of-our-economy/ 

Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can squeeze more productivity out of you. Deeper issues like autonomy, culture, and relationships seem missing from the rhetoric. But not from the scholarship! In th bumper 90-minute episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Nina Jordan from Cambridge University and Cherise Regier and Will Fleming from Oxford University to discuss the latest research on workplace wellbeing, from the 4-day work week to worker voice and industrial relations policy. We even discuss the prospects for workplace wellbeing under capitalism. 

Cherise's personal webpage: https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/cherise-regier

Will's personal webpage: https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/people/will-fleming

Nina's personal webpage: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/person/nina-jorden/

Nikolova, M. and Cnossen, F. (2020). What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it. Labour Economics. https://docs.iza.org/dp13112.pdf

Budd, John, W. (2011). The Thought of Work. Cornell University Press: https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Work-Cornell-Paperbacks/dp/0801477611

Sharif, M. A., Mogliner, C., and Herschfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdf

OECD (2013). Guidelines on measuring subjective wellbeing. https://www.oecd.org/wise/oecd-guidelines-on-measuring-subjective-well-being-9789264191655-en.htm

Fabian, M. (2022). A theory of subjective wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-theory-of-subjective-wellbeing-9780197635261?cc=gb&lang=en&

Alexandrova, A. (2017). A philosophy for the science of wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780199300518?cc=gb&lang=en&

Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125169/on-justification

Argument that capitalism is about shifting returns to production towards capital: https://markfabian.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-is-capitalism.html

Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one of the most innovative scholars working on elicit finance and how to combat it. The conversation begins with development economics and the tendency for corrupt officials to move their ill gotten gains offshore. It moves from there to London, notorious site of money laundering through real estate investment, to explore recent efforts to combat elicit finance by creating a public ownership registry. Where does the conversation end? With solutions, but you'll have to listen to learn more about them. 

Matt's website: https://sites.google.com/view/mattcollin/home

The Panama papers: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/

The end of Londongrad? The impact of beneficial ownership transparency on offshore investment in UK property.
 https://www.dropbox.com/s/zzoh2ye2aem47cr/uk_bo_main.pdf?dl=0 

Jason Sharman's publications (natural experiments of willingness to engage with dodgy clients by banks): 
https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-jason-sharman 

Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has passed through the culture in the past decade, exploding especially on some university campuses and nowadays reaching into workplaces as gen Z graduates into employment. It's extremes were characterised by cancel culture - an authoritarian tendency to shut down people with opposing views. Freedom loving liberals everywhere were aghast, but not all of them are now similarly aghast at outright authoritarian efforts by Republican-controlled  legislatures in the United States to ban elements of the Woke agenda. These are heady times. Here to chill things out a bit is Rod Graham, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Rod argues that the woke movement is really just generational change. Where 20th century generations prioritised survival, materialism, efficiency, and equal treatment of competitors in the labour market, today's youth place a greater emphasis on self-actualisation, identity, and equality. The implications are far ranging. 

Rod's professional page: 
https://www.odu.edu/directory/roderick-graham

Rod's twitter thread that inspired this conversation: 
https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1625237234483089408

Inglehart and Welzel on survival vs self-actualisation values:
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings

One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as western psychologists have realised how distorted their view is by their tendency to only sample 'WEIRD' subjects - western, education, industrialised, rich, and democratic. Joseph Heinrich has attempted to chart the history of WEIRD societal psychology in his opus 'The WEIRDEST People in the World', but enormous amounts of research remains to be done. 

Season 4 of ePODstemology kicks of Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington of the London School of Economics, one of the early career researchers operating at the forefront of this area of research. She was recently tenured as Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Jennifer is an expert in social dominance theory in particular and her research has appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Social Sciences,  and Evolution and Human Behaviour, among other leading journals. Tune in to learn more!

Jennifer's website:
http://www.jennifersheehyskeffington.com/

Taking context seriously in The Psychologist:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/taking-context-seriously

Josef Roundtree Foundation article on how poverty affects decision making:
https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/how-poverty-affects-peoples-decision-making-processes

Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoked a flurry of activity concerned with how to revive left behind places and dampen their rage. A large part of this agenda is localism: a combination of place-based policy, participatory governance, and community initiatives aimed at fostering not just economic, cultural, and political revival, but also social capital and ’pride in place’. How effective is this agenda likely to be, and how should we even conceptualise its effectiveness? Is economic growth the goal, or something more complex? To think through these issues, ePODstemology welcomes Jack Shaw, senior account manager for the London Progression Collaboration, affiliate researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, and local government member for Barking and Dagenham in London. Jack is in the thick of the localism debate in the UK, where the government has recently released a whitepaper on ‘levelling up’ that aims to redress left behind places, in large part through localism initiatives and the devolution of decision making powers from the centre to local governments. Will it work or is it all bluster? Tune in to find out.   

Follow Jack on twitter! @JackShawLPC

https://www.ippr.org/about/people/staff/jack-shaw 

Levelling up whitepaper: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9463/#:~:text=of%20his%20Government.-,Levelling%20up%20white%20paper,social%20disparities%20across%20the%20UK. 

Bennett Institute materials on localism, place, levelling up, community infrastructure, etc.

https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/place/ 

Rodriguez Pose on the revenge of places that don’t matter: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85888/1/Rodriguez-Pose_Revenge%20of%20Places.pdf 

Torsten Bell on low growth and productivity in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/why-be-a-poor-version-of-germany-instead-of-doing-what-we-do-best 

Bennett Institute outputs on productivity in the UK: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/productivity/ 

The Economist on the cultural transition from Billy Elliot to Everyone is talking about Jamie: https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/04/28/in-britain-internal-migration-is-out-of-favour 

Ron Martin and Peter Tyler on how the levelling up agenda is underfunded (and other gems): https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/levelling-up-left-behind-places/  

Eric Kleinenberg on urban farms and other initiatives in Palaces for the People: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557044/palaces-for-the-people-by-eric-klinenberg/ 

Diane Bolet on the link between community pub closures an

What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nations that rose in the second half of the 20th century. In place of industrialisation and associated expansions in manufacturing capacity, we see a relatively larger role played by the services sector, both in terms of relatively high-end services like software development, copy editing, and call centres, and smaller, often informal operations like kiosks, airtasker, and tourism. What are the implications of this for development policy and the potential of economic growth to reduce poverty? Service-sector tasks are typically more capital and less labour-intensive than manufacturing, which limits their ability to provide jobs and wages. But they are also higher value-added tasks, which allows them to contribute substantially to wealth generation. Some nations, notably India, are betting that they can largely skip industrialisation and jump straight to services. How might that play out? Tune in to find out. 

https://www.josteinhauge.com/about 

Hauge, J. (2020). Industrial policy in an era of global value chains: Towards a developmentalist framework drawing on the industrialisation experiences of South Korea and Taiwan. The World Economy, vol. 43, pp. 2070–2092.  DOI: 10.1111/twec.12922 

Rodrik, D. (2014). Are services the new manufactures? Project Syndicate: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-services-the-new-manufactures-by-dani-rodrik-2014-10 

On reciprocal control mechanisms—Alice Amsden (2001). The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies. Oxford University Press. 

Benjamin Selwyn (2018). Poverty chain and global capitalism. Competition and Change, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 71–97. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1024529418809067 

Jason Hickel in The Guardian on the feasibility of a global minimum wage: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/13/global-minimum-wage-ask-an-expert 

Norwegian show where fashion bloggers are sent to work in sweatshops: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/norwegian-reality-show-sends-fashion-bloggers-to-work-in-cambodian-sweatshop-20150123-12whuz.html 

Kevin Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright (2021). The Case for a New Bretton-Woods. Polity Press. https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Case+for+a+New+Bretton+Woods-p-9781509546541  

Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degree of sentience? If it's the later, then cephalopods seem curious, honeybees are capable of solving complex optimisation problems, and fish have split brains similar to those of conscious humans whose left and right hemispheres have been split by accident. Should we then conclude that are animals are conscious, albeit not in the same way as humans? What are the implications of this for ethical practice with animals in research, pets, and zoos? Heather was a zookeeper before she was a philosopher and bring a practical perspective to these issues. Heather, Walter, and Mark share a wide-ranging conversation taking in bioethics, cognitive science, and what the philosophy of mind can learn from biology. Enjoy!

Heather’s website: https://www.heatherbrowning.net/ 

Walter’s website: https://walterveit.com/ 

Heather’s PhD thesis: 41. Browning, H. (2020).  If I Could Talk to the Animals: Measuring Subjective Animal Welfare. PhD Thesis (Australian National University).
https://doi.org/10.25911/5f1572fb1b5be [Download] 

Walter’s forthcoming book: Veit, W. (Manuscript). A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Manuscript in preparation.

Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. William Collins.  

The hard and soft problem of consciousness: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness,with%20phenomenal%20qualities%20or%20qualia). 

Philosophical zombies: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ 

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 435–450. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf  

Dan Dennett against the hard problem as special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaEjLZIDqc 

Patricia Churchland against the hard problem as special:  https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/ChurchlandTheHornswoggleProblem1996.pdf 

de Haan, E. et al. (2020). Split brain: What we know now and why this is important for understanding consciousness. Neuropsychology Review, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 224–233. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-020-09439-3 

Hofstadter, D. and Dennett, D. (2001). The mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul. Basic Books. 

Robot wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psY_3k0uiRI 

Edelman, D. and Seth, A. (2009). Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach. Trends in Neuroscience, vol