unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Ever wondered why marriage, one of the most common themes  in literature, is largely ignored by philosophers? What about the complexities of present-day marriages, with political differences, and even the dynamics of arranged marriages today?

Devorah Baum is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton, a filmmaker, and the author of several books. Her latest book is called, On Marriage. 

Devorah and Greg discuss the insights of philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who saw marriage as an obstacle to philosophy..They also examine post-nuptial life depicted in Beckett's works and the story of Sheherezad in A Thousand and One Nights. Greg asks Devorah aboutr romcoms, the role of parenthood in marriage, and about the rise of pornography. This episode promises a wealth of insights into the institution of marriage. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The hidden economics of marriage

19:31: Marriage is about marshaling a certain kind of resources. It's about orderly inheritance. It's about making sure that what the state would have to pay for, like the labor of social reproduction, is made private, brought indoors, and a lot of care work that goes on there, and so on. And then you overlay that with the language of love, altruism, and duty in the family, and you get away with stuff. So we can see that these are the conditions that have allowed. The private life of the marriage to keep the state or society well-oiled and running without having to pay some people or even recognize their labor because it's what they want to do naturally, and so on, and that's love.

One of the great malaises of contemporary culture is self-righteousness

48:13:  One of the great malaises — I would even say diseases — of contemporary culture is a culture of self-righteousness, of people feeling that they have to be right all the time and about everything. And I think there's no pleasure in it. They can be reminded by these cultural productions that being in relationships with others isn't about being right all the time. In fact, you can't be, and just to be in perpetual agreement with the people you hang out with isn't to be in any relationship at all.

Why do our romances imagine two against the world?

07:31: Our dream and our great romance of love is Romeo and Juliet, whose love affair is incompatible with a sanctioned, approved marriage. They marry, but the world doesn't approve of their marriage. And so they die, as though that marriage has no future, that love. And so I think something about our idea and our dream of love is distrustful of marriage because marriage, to be successful and to be sustained, is the sort of third. The world says, "Yes, you two can be together. We can get along with you." The world gives its blessing to the couple and says, "Yeah, we can work with you." So, something about that pollutes the ideal purity that the lovers imagine they have with each other, sort of two against the world. And that is our vision of romance.

Why are conflicts sometimes beneficial to marriage?

40:41: In the romantic mythos, we have this idea, this dream of marriage where you can be opposite, and you can make peace with your differences. Sort of, the conclusion of a romantic comedy, ideally, or the kind of romantic comedies I have, is not one where there was a master-slave sort of battle going on, and then eventually one triumphed, and the other one said, "No, you were right all along, and I was wrong all along." What makes it feel romantic and alluring is that we imagine the argument continuing after the wedding, too, because we saw how much pleasure it brought them beforehand. So you can make peace with your differences, which isn't a piece that doesn't have conflict in it, but it's a piece in which the conflict can be not only endured but to some extent enjoyed and is a source of respect and mutual education and, indeed, edification.

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Despite our culture of rugged individualism, it’s widely accepted among psychologists today that we need social connections to thrive. And neuroscience may be the key to understanding how relationships impact us on a physiological level.

Amy Banks is the founding scholar at the International Center for Growth in Connection. Her book, Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships, delves into the neuroscience of social connections and provides a toolkit for bettering the relationships in our life. 

Amy and Greg discuss why connection is fundamental to humans, Amy’s brain pathway acronym CARE, and how to repair relationships in your life so that they are more fulfilling.  

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Is there something that we can do to make people less anxiety inducing?

17:19: In a relationship that ranks pretty low on the Calm scale, it could be you, it could be them, and it could be some confluence of both of you. But what's important is having a snapshot of that. If it is the relationship actually that doesn't feel supportive, safe, where there's not a lot of mutuality, where there's not a lot of listening in addition to talking, when it doesn't have those qualities, then in order for your health and well-being to thrive, if you will, you got to have some other people. You got to have some other people to offset it, you know, we're heading into the holidays, and it often happens around families, right? Where you might be demanded or need to be someplace with people that maybe necessarily aren't on the same wavelength that you are, right? 

How can you assess the emotions you make others feel?

13:28: When do we ever ask people, 'How do I make you feel?' That actually would be a really fruitful conversation to have with a friend or relative. Or, 'You look anxious. Do I make you anxious? Is there something I do that makes you anxious?' We don't have those kinds of relational conversations.

Where did we ever get the notion that relationships were secondary? 

02:54: Our entire culture was built on this notion of separation, individuation, stand on your own two feet, and we have such a robust history, literally, politically, and psychologically, developmentally, of believing that to be the case. We've created an economic system around capitalism. That's all about competition and the survival of the fittest. There's so much that's still Darwinian in the way that we think human beings work.

The untapped potential of marginal relationships

40:41: There are a lot of marginal relationships where, once you begin to understand what the qualities of a healthy relationship are, you can begin to try to have conversations that point in that direction and see who's open to trying to interact differently. There's a lot that you can do with marginal relationships that is really more out of social ignorance, not being taught, and not malevolence when I talk to people about this. And when I do my teachings, people by and large are just relieved to hear this news about relationships, and it gives them some guideposts to begin to think about how they might try to shift, change, or grow the relationships that maybe aren't as satisfying as they would like them to be.

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Why does there seem to be such a struggle to get things done in some organizations? How can you unlock the mystery behind the persistence of bad management practices? What is the problem of inaction, and how are workplaces impacted by the human tendency to add rather than subtract?

Robert Sutton is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author and co-author of several books, including his latest book The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt, and his upcoming book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.

Bob and Greg discuss practical examples of organizational friction, examining the story of Larry Page and Google, observing the transformative leadership of Satya Nadella at Microsoft, and even sharing his personal triumphs and trials. Greg questions the place of assholes in positions of power and the impact they have on organizations. Bob talks about time management and its crucial role in the daily operations of organizations, sharing stories from companies that have triumphed and those who stumbled. 

They also discuss the potential of AI and textual analysis in identifying bottlenecks within a company. Tune in, learn, and transform your workplace.

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What are the factors that contribute to an individual being considered a workplace jerk?

21:58: So, what are some of the characteristics that lead people to turn into jerks? One is being in a hurry. The pressure to rush, rush, rush, even when it doesn't make any sense in many organizations, has increased, or at least stayed the same. Another one is sleep deprivation. I mean, if people are exhausted, they're tired. It's not like those things have gone away. And then the other thing that happens, in the other problem with assholeness is, and these are all things that can be produced in the lab easily, and it’s very contagious. Negative behaviors are more contagious than positive behaviors. And, by the way, when there are power differences in organizations, when people are powerful, objectively powerful, or feel powerful, they focus more on their own needs. They focus less on the needs of others, and they act like the rules don't apply to them.

Does being a jerk help you get ahead?

13:28:  On the whole, we can have some arguments about when being a jerk helps you get ahead. And it depends on the game: old Microsoft versus new Microsoft. I think that the jerks get ahead in the old system, but not in the new system. But when you're working for somebody like that, there's just no evidence that it helps the underlings or yelling at customers, except in some, maybe very rare, situations.

Generalists vs. specialists

51:43: Everybody doesn't have to be a generalist. You just need enough generalists to glue the thing together. And actually, great specialists are absolutely fabulous, as long as there's somebody there who understands how the system fits together. So I'm not completely opposed to specialists who don't care about anybody else. I just want them to be in a system that glues their behavior together.

Does gossip have a function in an organization?

55:11: Gossip actually has a function in an organization, and the function is that it brings out information that is not captured by formal systems and being in touch as a leader with the gossipers. It's Scuttlebutt. And, so one of the CEOs I know said what she used to always do—that she did somebody who did very well getting ahead in situations where women didn't always get ahead—was try to make friends with the people who were known gossips and complainers. She said it for two reasons. One, they tend to give you the negative information first, and the second one was a little bit more, maybe insidious, she said. Well, if you could give that person a different perspective that everything didn't suck that sometimes you could actually even change the gossip in the system.

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Management oftentimes can be a difficult and precise artform. How does leadership at a company decide how the organization should be structured? What divisions should be created? And how will the inevitable problems that arise be handled? 

John Roberts, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, is one of the leading thinkers on organizational economics and has written numerous books on the subject like The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth. 

John and Greg discuss how the discipline of organizational economics came to be, why some organizational structures are more effective than others, and why the transmission of knowledge from academic to management can be tricky. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is it essential for leaders to step back from the daily grind and adopt a broader perspective to effectively formulate strategy?

38:43: Opportunities for senior managers to get away from things for a while are important and underdeveloped. My guess is that classroom education isn't the right way because the tendency is to prepare for the class. You've got more time than usual, but you don't really have a chance to sit back. But it might be an element of it. So, some combination of small group class activities where there are a bunch of your peers, and you're talking about big ideas, coaching where you have somebody who asks good questions.

Is culture the most important thing in an organization?

13:56: I've come to the position that probably the most important thing in an organization is the culture...If you have a strong culture that really determines the way people think, the way people interact, what things they'll do and what things they won't do, what they'll put up with, how much they focus on today versus tomorrow, and a whole range of things, that can be much more important than the formal architecture or the established routines.

Differentiating information and communication technology

29:16: People didn't see communication technology and information technology as separate things. They just saw them as the internet. One of them encourages centralization. The other encourages decentralization. But that was a big part of what was going on—that we weren't asking the right questions. We were just talking about technology. We weren't talking about the specific technologies that were involved.

Navigating the complexities of decentralized decision-making in a dynamic Environment

21:04: You can't run a centralized, top-down, hierarchic organization of any size. Even if the technology weren't changing on you, the environment is changing on you. Even with the best communication technology and the best information technology, you can't get the information from here to here. So you have to make a lot of decisions within the bowels of the business. And that means you have to make sure that the system is set up so that these decisions here are compatible with the other guy's making. That's a delicate thing to do. 

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How can economics shape our understanding of healthcare? How can cognitive biases lead even seasoned doctors into harmful errors, and what potential does machine learning have to mitigate these mistakes? 

Anupam B. (Bapu) Jena is a professor of Health Care Policy and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, host of the Freakonomics M.D. podcast, and the author of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. He has an MD in medicine and a PhD in economics. 

Bapu and Greg discuss the impact of timing on healthcare. From the intriguing effect of birthdate on ADHD diagnosis and how patient outcomes in medical care correlate to how recently a physician was in residency to the puzzling improvement of cardiology patient outcomes when there are fewer cardiologists present. They discuss the lessons learned from Covid through both medical and economic lenses and why the effectiveness trajectory of surgeons differs from that of other physicians. This is a fascinating dive into the data side of medicine, with several surprising takeaways for any listener.  

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On the intersection between medicine and behavioral economics

25:30: One of the things that I've thought about the intersection of behavioral economics and medicine is that it may not be surprising that the types of things that behavioral economists will often study show what they do, right? Because when the stakes are not high, it's not hard to sort of rely on that autonomous part of your brain that tells you that someone who's 40 is different than someone who's 39. Why does it matter? You go to the grocery store, something $7.99 versus $8, and yes, you're more likely to buy it when it's $7.99 versus $8. But you wouldn't think that if that applied to life-saving chemotherapy, you'd be more likely to buy the chemotherapy that's $7,999 versus $8,000. You would think, wow, life-saving chemotherapy. I'm going to figure out which therapy I need. I'm not just going to let a mind trick or heuristic move me in one way or the other.

What do we need to do in order to do medicine better?

47:20: What you really want to train doctors to do is be able to create differential diagnoses, like clinically problem solve, and understand that when things aren't lining up the way they should, to know that they need to search further to figure out the answer. In that aspect of problem solving, I think economists do very well because the nature is, the work is different in that respect in medicine; I think we rely too much on pattern recognition to sort of help us understand answers to questions. And there's like a reasoning that is sometimes not taught.

Do we demand too much from our doctors?

28:48: It's easy to miss things, right? And it's easy to not realize what's the big thing that you need to be looking for versus the small thing. And you get that with experience. I think with experience, you do better there, but it's certainly the case that even with experienced doctors, they still miss things, and I think that's where computers can be really helpful. They can be in the background, as they see. The data that is generated on a daily basis for a person, seeing what the past medical history of that person is, seeing the trajectory of all of those things, like how are the labs looking over time, what is the imaging looking like over time, what are the nurses' notes saying about delirium or agitation, are there more mentions of that as we're going on? A computer could see all that information and put it together in a way that a human being might not be able to. And at the very minimum, I think it could offer us some good insights that can help us consider things that we weren't considering.

On the origins of Anupam's study

18:21: It was another data point to tell people that sometimes less is more, but what I think it did more of, and probably what most of my studies do more of, instead of moving the needle in terms of one specific clinical practice, is just getting the medical world more in tune with these ideas of natural experiments and trying to just be a little bit more curious and innovative when we come up with approaches to studying questions because a lot of what we study in medicine is critically important. I mean, it matters for our health; sometimes it matters for life and death. We have the ability to do randomized trials, and those are great, but sometimes we can't do them, or we don't do them. And we can't phone it in for those other types of analyses. We've got to be as curious, as intellectual, and as creative as we can be to try to figure out the right answer.

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Far from just making things pretty, design has become an essential part of strategy and now has a dynamic role in organizations. It’s not just about design; it's about the transformative power of design.

Vijay Kumar is Charles Owen Endowed Chair and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also the author of 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, a comprehensive toolbox that equips you with the understanding and tools to tackle your projects with a design mindset.

Vijay and Greg dive into the complexities of design education, blending intuitive, collaborative, and scientific techniques, and how systems thinking is an absolute must-have for success. Vijay brings to light how top-down leadership, when married with bottom-up innovation champions, can shift mindsets towards innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The levels of impact of innovation 

14:04:  In my work, I think of these impacts in organizations at three levels: creating awareness, which is creating the basic awareness about how innovation happens, and looking at some examples and looking at successes and failures is good, that awareness gives you some basics to start your journey. But the next level is experience, awareness alone is not enough for you to practice. The experience level is: can we give people some experience, a hands-on experience? [15:27] Now, the next level is creating competence. Like creating competence, you have to go into a deeper level of understanding of all these methods, and it is a multi-year or perpetual activity that you need to engage and to absorb the competence of innovation methods and tools to make new things happen.

Rethinking design innovation in a world of minimalism

12:48: The idea of design innovation, on a minimalistic level, loses its richness; it loses the essence of the power of design. The simplification is that the whiteboards, post-it notes, and a one-day workshop. But the fact and the impact are so minimal in my understanding.

How can we encourage innovative thinking?

09:19: The executives or the leaders who have bought into the idea of the importance of innovation can make a big difference in influencing their team and the other folks working in the organization by constantly giving examples or demonstrations or talking about the impact the design of the innovation could have on the company's offerings. That's one direction—the top-down direction of influence.

How do we foster ownership?

29:08: Ownership of people's actions takes place when they first-hand experience the value of something. So the engineers that are doing research on the field suddenly become part of the field, doing interviews, talking to customers, and getting insights. So, they take ownership of that process by immersing themselves in that context. So ownership is a big part of my belief that, in order to give ownership, you have to make people participate in these diverse types of activities.

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How do human senses compare to those of animals? In what ways are they similar, how are they different, and how do they help us make sense of the world?

Ashley Ward is a Professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Sydney, Australia, and also the author of several books about animal behavior. His latest book is titled Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses.

Ashley and Greg discuss the complex labyrinth of sensory perceptions, illuminating how vision, taste, and smell can shape our understanding of the world. Ashley dissects the extraordinary ways animals and plants detect threats and communicate, the surprising power of smell in social insect communication, and interesting theories about the evolution of human behaviors like kissing and hand-shaking. They dive into animal behavior and group decision-making, including swarm intelligence and the dynamics of animal hierarchies in this fascinating exploration of animal behavior and sensory experiences.

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Can we train ourselves to smell fear and excitement?

08:53: So, there's a huge value to interacting directly with other people, and an awful lot of cues are provided that go beyond the visual and hearing when we communicate by language. As to whether we can smell fear and excitement, the evidence suggests that we do produce different chemicals when we are in an aroused emotional state, such as when we're terrified by something or when we're thrilled about something. And those kinds of subtle cues can be collected by other animals. Dogs are an obvious example. And we might think that we're simply not capable of this. Our sense of smell, let's say, is not sophisticated enough to pick it up, but it does vary enormously from person to person. And there are people who have such an exquisite sense of smell that they can start to pick up these cues.

Information is a vital currency to animals

47:20: Information is a vital currency for all animals, and by pooling that information in whichever way, they can develop much, much better strategies. That applies to humans: If we're trying to make excellent decisions, then the best way to do that is to take a broad view of the information that's out there. Now, there are two ways of getting that information. You can either go out there and collect it all yourself, which is incredibly time-consuming. Often, in many cases, totally impossible, or you can use social information, which is readily available and relatively cheap, and as long as you get enough of it, it's very accurate. This is what the animals are doing. 

Decoding scents

38:51: Our perception—our sensation of smell—is produced by a mosaic of different activations in the receptors. We have 400 different smell receptors, and each smell is a composite of different activation patterns. Receptor numbers 189, 157, and 14 might all be activated, giving you the smell of a tangerine. But if it's not 14, 15, then maybe that's a lemon or something. And that's the difficulty. There are so many different permutations of inputs that go into each smell. There's a very difficult matter to untangle that and find the exact right receptor activation pattern which corresponds to each different smell.

Taste complexity across species

43:30: The pattern is that the more carnivorous an animal is, the fewer the different kinds of tastes, the less sensitive its sense of taste is, and the more herbivorous an animal is, conversely. The more complex and sophisticated their sense of taste is. So cows have a much better sense of taste than we do. We sit somewhere in the middle. We have approximately the same complexity in our sense of taste as a pig does. We're more complex than cats and dogs. We're less complex than rabbits and cows.

• Movie Theaters Smell Like People’s Feelings
• Hand Shaking and Smell
• Quorum Decision-Making in Foraging Fish Shoals
• Convoy battles of World War II
• Jack the Railway Baboon
• Assateague Island
• Bayesian inference
• Synesthesia

• Faculty Profile at The University of Sydney
• Ashley Ward's Website
• Ashley Ward on LinkedIn
• Ashley Ward on X

• Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses
• The Social Lives of Animals
• Questions and Answers on Saltwater Aquarium Fishes: Understanding Behavior for Successful Fishkeeping
• Questions and Answers on Freshwater Aquarium Fishes: Everything You Need to Know to Successfully Raise Healthy
• Google Scholar Articles
• ResearchGate Articles

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Ever wondered why allergies seem to be on the rise? How about the intriguing link between the industrial revolution and our own immune responses?

Theresa MacPhail is an Associate Professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, a medical anthropologist, and author of several books. Her latest is called Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World.

Theresa and Greg discuss the history of allergy research, the evolution of anaphylaxis, and the astounding revelations from her book, Allergic. Theresa talks with Greg about food labeling laws and the spike in pollen counts due to climate change. She also provides fascinating perspectives on how exposure to new pollutants, changing diets, and the advent of antibiotics have potentially disrupted our immune system's natural functioning. They dive into the importance of early investment in understanding conditions like asthma, food allergies, and eczema, alongside the potential dangers of overusing antibiotics. They also discuss what smarter societal immune responses would look like in preparation for future pandemics. 

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The Importance of early adrenaline intervention in anaphylaxis

13:59: What adrenaline does is it stops that histamine process. So the earlier you get a shot of adrenaline, the better your survival rates, which a lot of people don't know. It takes only 30 minutes for somebody to go from perfectly fine to dead on arrival at the hospital if you don't intervene in some way. And they have a serious anaphylactic response. So time is of the essence, and doing everything you possibly can, which is something I've been talking a lot about when I'm talking about the book because that's something that's easy for people to know and can make a big difference just in the interim while we're trying to figure out the larger problem of can we help our immune systems adjust to this modern world that we're living in, that clearly our immune systems are not thrilled about.

Debunking the germ theory

47:20: We take it for granted that everything's bad—bacteria and viruses are bad. And it turns out that not really; some of those bacteria and some of those viruses are actually helpful, and we need them to function appropriately.

On training our immune system

28:38: Our immune systems need this training by age three. So, before around age three, our immune systems get set in their ways. And before that, they're pretty malleable, so they can be exposed to tiny amounts of things and learn to cope with it fairly well. But then, if you get massive changes after that, which is why you move from one coast to the other, through your immune system, because it was trained on the stuff that was around you when you were growing up. And then, if you transport yourself to a new area thousands of miles away, your body has to, in essence, decide about new things with a mature immune system that isn't as flexible.

Can we develop an allergy later in life?

30:347: The orthodoxy of immunology was that you couldn't develop an allergy later in life. And that has been turned on its head. So if you look at most of the modern research, there is an adult-onset food allergy. There just is. There are adult-onset, other types, and forms of allergy. And what you always had genetically was the predisposition.

• Anaphylaxis
• Histamine
• Fertile Crescent Region
• Venomous Animals
• Alpha-gal Allergy
• Atopy
• Adult Onset Allergies
• IGE Antibody

• Faculty Profile at Stevens Institute of Technology
• Speaker’s Profile on Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau
• Theresa MacPhail's Website
• Theresa MacPhail on LinkedIn
• Theresa MacPhail  on Twitter

• Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World
• The Viral Network: A Pathography of the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic
• The Eye of the Virus
• Google Scholar Page
• Articles on Noema
• Articles on The Guardian

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How do you measure the true productivity of a country’s economy? What gets missed if the only metric being examined is the GDP? 

Robert J. Gordon is a professor of social sciences and economics at Northwestern University. His work focuses on the history of labor and capital productivity and has written numerous books, including, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War. 

Robert and Greg discuss why the GDP doesn’t give a full picture of a country’s economic growth and productivity, why the years between 1929 and 1950 saw the most rapid growth, and whether or not we’ll see another growth spurt in the age of AI. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Is our productivity running low?

37:46:  If we compare the forecasts of productivity growth that are baked into the government's budget forecasts and economic forecasts, our productivity over the last nearly 20 years has been running somewhat slower than they're assuming for the future. So, there's room for productivity growth to improve by a substantial amount without really changing the overall outlook for this enormous increase in public debt. That is going to go together with higher interest rates and severely impede the ability of future governments to finance Medicare, Social Security, and the general operations of government.

Understanding the US productivity growth

09:39: The fact is that the economy was producing well under its capacity in the 1930s, and it's a black box to figure out how much the economy was capable of. But we were producing at full capacity in 1929, and we certainly were in 1948, and so the growth rate between those two years was by far the most rapid that we have had.

On measuring total factor productivity

09:19: One of the fuzzy dividing lines in measuring total factor productivity is how much of the innovation is attributed to the capital and treated as an increase in the quantity of the capital, thus diminishing that ratio I just expressed. And how much of it comes out as the difference between output and input growth, and that dividing line is somewhat the quality of capital.

ChatGPT and the potential job losses for future productivity gains

32:34: To interpret ChatGPT and the potential for job losses for future productivity gains, it helps to break down the economy into three groups of workers. One group produces goods in mines, in farms, in factories, and they're producing objects with other objects. They're not involved in creating textual or visual material. So, the impact in the goods sector is going to be fairly minor, certainly compared to the development of automation. 

• The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible! by Otto Bettmann
• Alexander J. Field’s work
• Opportunity Insights group at Harvard

• Faculty Profile at Northwestern University
• Professional Profile on National Bureau of Economic Research
• Speaker’s Profile on TEDTalk
• Robert J. Gordon's Website
• Robert J. Gordon on LinkedIn

• The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

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In ancient times, debtors were treated with severe punishment, even sometimes being dismembered. So when did things start to shift towards debt forgiveness leading up to the modern-day concept of filing for bankruptcy?

David Skeel is the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He’s the author of several books that look at the history of corporate law, debt, and bankruptcy, including Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From and Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America. 

He and Greg discuss the origins of debt forgiveness in the world, how Christianity and the Bible played a role in that shift, and the proper amount of risk corporate leaders should take. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

A biblical perspective on debt and bankruptcy

17:40:  There's a verse in the Old Testament that says you cannot take as collateral a debtor's millstone. And the idea there is that is the tool of the trade. There's another verse that says if you take the debtor's cloak as collateral, you've got to give it back at the end of the day. The idea being that the debtor's going to need that to keep warm. Even going back thousands of years, a sense that there needs to be a balancing. You need to make it possible for creditors to get repaid, but you also need to be aware of the humanity of the debtor and the needs of the debtor.

Debt is like sex and fire

09:28: Debt is like sex and fire; both of them were important in the ancient world and are important now, but they also have some dangerous downsides if they're misused. And that's the picture you get of debt: that people need debt is inevitable, but it's easy for people to get in over their heads, and there needs to be a way to deal with that possibility.

How do you respond to risk-taking?

29:43: One simple response to the risk-taking concern is to be mindful of regulations that create bad incentives in that respect, such as tax rules. And also, things like disclosure can make a difference.

Sometimes lots of failures is an indication of a good economy or a good system, not a bad one

23:32: There is empirical evidence that shows that in countries where you have a more generous bankruptcy system and more generous availability of a fresh start, you do get more entrepreneurship. There is a direct relationship between the two, but risk-taking can sometimes be problematic.

• Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence by Bruce Mann
• Thomas H. Jackson
• Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978

• Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania
• David Skeel on X

• Icarus in the Boardroom: The Fundamental Flaws in Corporate America and Where They Came From (Law and Current Events Masters)
• The New Financial Deal
• Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America
• True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World 

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