Joe Henrich is Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. He is the author of The Secret of Our Success and The Weirdest People in the World.

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Sir Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and coauthor of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

Read the full transcript at: josephnoelwalker.com/deaton

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David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist.

Read the full transcript at: https://josephnoelwalker.com/atlashugged

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John Hempton is co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Bronte Capital.

Selected links

• Follow John: Blog | Twitter
• 'Approaches to Studying Policy Representation', paper by David Broockman
• 'Indebted Demand', paper by Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub and Amir Sufi

Topics discussed

• Lessons from past market cycles. 4:51
• Astarra-Trio. 10:43
• Retail investors: Welcome to the party. 24:14
• When John met Jim (Simons). 28:13
• Can you predict market tops? 33:00
• Are there any good reasons for believing this time really is different? 40:37
• The Dunning-Kruger effect is everywhere. 52:18
• A behavioural model of the coronavirus. 55:45
• The illusion of the political centre. 1:10:19
• How inequality may be distorting monetary policy, and vice versa. 1:23:00
• SPAC attack. 1:26:03
• The puzzle of Middleby. 1:31:15
• Bull masturbating. 1:33:01
• 2020: a year of puzzles. 1:42:30

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Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist and director emeritus of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.

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David Hirshleifer is a professor of finance and currently holds the Merage chair in Business Growth at the University of California.

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Vernon Smith won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002. This is his second appearance on the show.

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Anne Goldgar is an historian and holds the Van Hunnick Chair in European History at the University of Southern California Dornsife.

Selected links

• Follow Anne: Website | Twitter
• Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden, by Anne Goldgar

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Ed Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Selected links

• Follow Ed: Website
• 'A Nation Of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation And American History', 2013 Ely Lecture by Ed Glaeser
• One Hundred Years Of Land Values In Chicago, by Homer Hoyt
• The Land Boomers, by Michael Cannon
• '25 years of housing trends' report by Aussie Home Loans

Topics discussed

• A potted history of real estate speculation in the United States. 8:51
• How would Ed describe the Great Convulsion of the 2000s to an alien observer? 13:40
• Why is real estate well-suited to being a speculative asset? 16:04
• If speculators aren't crazy, what are they? 17:00
• Was the Great Convulsion primarily driven by credit availability? 20:44
• What would a good Bayesian have thought in response to the 2000s housing market in the US? 22:23
• Radical uncertainty and its implications for rationality in the context of housing markets. 24:06
• Are extrapolative beliefs rational? 26:22
• Are housing bubbles irrational? 29:51

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Martha Olney is an economist and Teaching Professor in Berkeley's Economics Department.

Selected links

• Follow Martha: Website | Twitter
• Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s, by Martha Olney
• Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression, by Peter Temin
• Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920 – 1940, by Roland Marchand
• Traitor to his Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H. W. Brands
• 'The Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion: Evidence from the U.S. Mortgage Default Crisis', paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi

Topics discussed

• How did Martha become interested in the history of consumer credit? 3:28
• The birth of consumer credit. 6:54
• How consumer credit companies and advertisers midwifed a change in cultural attitudes regarding borrowing. 16:41
• What is the relationship between the increase in inequality and the rise in consumer credit during the 1920s? 31:34
• Political elites in the Great Depression versus the Great Recession. 47:35
• How did studying the 1920s prepare Martha for the Great Recession? 54:58
• If private debt is capitalism's Achilles Heel, what should we do about it? 57:54

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