What more can be learned about a topic like the origins of economic growth that has been covered so extensively? When pulling back and looking at all the connected threads, is there an order in which things must happen to spark the change?

Mark Koyama is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Research Associate at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), and Mercatus Center, Senior Scholar. He is also the co-author of two books, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth and Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom.

Greg and Mark discuss the recurring interest in the origins of economic growth and the Industrial Revolution. Mark lays out the various theories and factors that have shaped economic development across different regions and historical periods, such as geography, demography, culture, institutions, and political conditions. Greg asks why some regions like Europe succeeded in industrialization while others did not, and the role of colonialism in shaping global economic dynamics. Mark also offers insights into the ongoing relevance of economic history in understanding contemporary growth and innovation.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Walt Rostow
• Daron Acemoglu
• Demography
• Malthusianism
• Reformed Christianity
• Douglass North
• Mughal Empire
• Paul A. David

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at George Mason University
• Mercatus Center Profile
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth
• Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom
• Newsletter | MarkKoyama.com
• Google Scholar Page

The overlooked challenge of sustaining economic growth

04:45: Once you think about growth, it's hard to think about anything else. It's a question, I think, both for rich countries, which are stagnating. So, I mean, for the US in my view, but if you think about Germany or the UK, these are pretty stagnant economies right now. And so I think these are, you know, it's not just a "Oh, we've had this revolution. Now we can sit on this, wealth gradient.." No, this is an ongoing problem, and I think policymakers in most countries have totally neglected issues of growth. They've focused on all these other issues, which we think are important, and we might say we care about growth, but we really don't act like it. And, similarly, there's a need in developing countries, obviously, to sustain growth. Both the poorest countries in the world, but also middle-income countries, which can stagnate and fall into what's called a middle-income trap.

Geography’s impact on economic hubs

13:55: Geography still has this massive role, basically, even today, in the where, like the location, which locations are going to be economic hubs. But obviously, you can’t explain the why, so it’s going to be insufficient on its own, but it could be interacting with other factors.

On markets and creative destruction

42:06: You need markets, which are flexible and adaptable, so they can be disrupted by new technologies and entrepreneurs. Other people will have a more statist perspective. They’ll think that you need, maybe, the state to do more on basic science, right? Maybe more even on actual innovation to support this. But I tend to think that you need these market institutions, basically, and they need to be sufficiently vibrant.

We learn the skill of talking as toddlers and by the time we’re adults, most of us don’t think twice about the inner workings of a conversation. But the reality is, there’s a science and an art to conversing. And understanding that science could unlock so much potential in your professional and personal life. 

Alison Wood Brooks is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She also teaches a cutting-edge course at Harvard called Talk where she helps students hone their conversational skills. 

Alison and Greg talk about talking, including why this critical skill should be incorporated into more school curriculums, the complexities of effective communication, and the importance of small talk. Alison also offers tips for enhancing your conversation skills, whether in personal relationships or professional settings. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Alex Pentland
• Jeffrey Pfeffer | Pfeffer on Power podcast
• “Risky business: When humor increases and decreases status” by Alison Wood Brooks, T. Bradford Bitterly, and Maurice Schweitzer
• Nicholas Epley | unSILOed 
• Gong

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Harvard Business School
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on Instagram

Her Work:

• Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves

Why aren't people experts at communication?

01:59: Language acquisition starts very early in our lives, and we spend almost all day long, every day of our lives, practicing it. And so we get to adulthood, and we feel like we should be experts at it, that we should be really great at it. And yet, as we all know, based on our own ruminations about our own lives, and from our observations of others, we are far from perfect at communication. And the reason that we're not experts at it is because, when you look under the hood, conversation is a lot more complicated and tricky than it first appears, and it takes some rummaging under the hood to understand what's really going on here and why aren't we—why aren't we perfect at it?

What makes a successful conversation

12:12: A successful conversation is about the combination of prep—what you do ahead of time—and then how well you improvise once you're there. It's the combination of preparation and flexibility.

Small talk is the start not the destination in every conversation

18:01: Small talk is a very important social ritual. You have to do it. You have to start somewhere, especially with strangers and people you haven't seen in a long time. You gotta start with, like, how are you? Like, what's going on? How are you? It'd be weird not to. The mistake that people make is staying there too long, not finding those off-ramps to move up the pyramid to something more meaningful and interesting.

The challenge of explicit goals in conversations

10:49: Often, we don't know what we want, and it might emerge as the conversation goes on or as a relationship proceeds. So that's a big problem, right? Like, we just can't possibly anticipate all of the many things that we might want. The second challenge is by making our goals explicit. Like, if we were to say all the things out loud, it would undermine much of the magic that we're actually looking for. We want a conversation to feel almost magical. [11:27]  We want to get there and do the thing without having to say out loud what our goals are. And the things that go unsaid in a conversation really matter. If we were to make everything explicit, a lot of that delight would disappear.

Where is the line between fact and fiction in the capabilities of AI? Which predictions or promises about the future of AI are reasonable and which are the creations of hype for the benefit of the industry or the company making outsized claims?

Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University, the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, and an author. His latest book is AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference.

Greg and Arvind discuss the misconceptions about AI technology, emphasizing the overestimations of AI's capabilities and the importance of understanding predictive versus generative AI. Arvind also points out the ethical and practical issues of deploying AI in fields like criminal justice and HR. Arvind and Greg also explore the challenges of regulation, the historical context of technological hype, and how academia can play a role in shaping AI's future. Arvind also reflects on his previous work on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies and shares insights into the complexities and future of AI and blockchain.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Deep Learning
• Generative Artificial Intelligence
• AISnakeOil.com | Newsletter
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies | Princeton/Coursera Course

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Princeton University
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Page

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference
• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction
• Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities
• Google Scholar Page

What can the AI community learn from medicine about testing?

28:51: Let's talk about what we can learn from medicine and what maybe we shouldn't take from them. I think that the community internalized a long time ago that the hard part of innovation is not the building, but the testing. And the AI community needs to learn that. Traditionally, in machine learning, the building was the hard part, and everybody would evaluate on the same few sets of benchmarks. And that was okay because they were mostly solving toy problems as they were building up the complexities of these technologies. Now, we're building AI systems that need to do things in the real world. And the building, especially with foundation models, you build once and apply it to a lot of different things. Right? That has gotten a lot easier—not necessarily easier in terms of technical skills, but in terms of the relative amount of investment you need to put into that, as opposed to the testing—because now you have to test foundation models in a legal setting, medical setting, [and] hundreds of other settings. So that, I think, is one big lesson.

Replacing broken systems with AI can escalate the problem

08:36: Just because one system is broken doesn't mean that we should replace it with another broken system instead of trying to do the hard work of thinking about how to fix the system. And fixing it with AI is not even working because, in the hiring scenario, what's happening is that candidates are now turning to AI to apply to hundreds of positions at once. And it's clearly not solving the problem; it's only escalating the arms race. And it might be true that human decision-makers are biased; they're not very accurate. But at least, when you have a human in the loop, you're forced to confront this shittiness of the situation, right? You can't put this moral distance between yourself and what's going on, and I think that's one way in which AI could make it worse because it's got this veneer of objectivity and accuracy.

Foundation models lower costs and could shift AI research back to academia

27:22: The rise of foundation models has meant that they've kind of now become a layer on top of which you can build other things, and that is much, much less expensive. Then, building foundation models themselves—especially if it's going to be the case that scaling is going to run out—we don't need to look for AI advances by building 1 billion models and 10 billion models; we can take the existing foundation models for granted and build on top of them. Then, I would expect that a lot of research might move back to academia. Especially the kind of research that might involve offbeat ideas. 

Raising boys in post-MeToo times is beyond challenging. So how do moms balance societal pressures with the desire to raise happy, healthy, and emotionally intelligent boys?

Ruth Whippman is a journalist and author of the books, BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity and America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks. In BoyMom, she weaves personal anecdotes with data and reporting to capture the complexities of raising emotionally healthy boys in today’s world. 

Ruth and Greg discuss the cultural expectations and modern pressures around parenting, the problem with labeling traits either feminine or masculine, the nurturing gap for boys, and why patriarchy harms men just as much as women. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• G.I. Joe
• Incel
• Jordan Peterson
• We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity’ by Ruth Whippman [New York Times]

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Profile on LinkedIn

Her Work:

• BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity
• America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks

Can we just allow everyone to be fully human without gendered traits?

39:02: I think there's all these attempts to rehabilitate masculinity and redefine it. And it's just like, can we just give it a rest and just allow everybody to be fully human? Stop assigning a gender to human traits and values. Every human needs power, agency, strength, and courage, and every human needs nurturing and relationships and care, those feminine-coded virtues. Why are we splitting them up? And when we try to say, oh, well, actually, caregiving is masculine, what are we even doing there? I mean, at what point does it just become meaningless? And we should just give up on those things altogether. At what point is it just reinforcing this idea that it's so important to be masculine that we come up with any kind of logical hack to make it work, to preserve it?

Are boys missing out on feminine-coded values that impact well-being?

08:24: Before you can encourage boys to take on those more feminine-coded attributes, you have to truly believe that those attributes have value. But I do believe that boys are genuinely missing out. I do believe that those feminine-coded values have huge worth and are hugely important for our psychological well-being and for living a happy, healthy life. And so I feel like this project of realizing that boys and men are losing out in this system is a really big part of what we need to do here.

Should we stop reinforcing masculinity as the be-all and end-all?

40:38: We should stop trying to push this positive masculinity framework. And it's not because I think it's great if people present as masculine; if they naturally like to embody all those virtues, if they come, if that's who they want to be, great. There's nothing wrong with masculinity per se. It's just that when we keep reinforcing it as the be-all and end-all of how a boy or man should be.

Understanding the invisible cultural baggage around gender

04:09: I think with kids, there's this sort of superficial idea that you can just choose whatever gender you are, but there's so much invisible cultural baggage going on in the lives of kids and adults with what we're all doing in terms of gender, all the invisible things and baggage that we bring to this project. [04:44] We're operating with this idea that we have this huge amount of control over all of these things. And both culturally and biologically, and in all kinds of different ways, we have far less control than we think we do.

What brought about the rise of cryptocurrencies, and whats the difference between tokens and money? How are some of these modern concepts of currency much older than people may think, with older and older examples being unearthed in different parts of the world?

Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and lecturer in Digital Cultures in the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She’s also the author of Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform. It’s all about how more and more traditional mone is being replaced by tokens, but this has been happening in societies for a long time.

Greg and Rachel discuss the complex and interdisciplinary nature of tokens and their relationship to money, exploring the history, regulatory implications, and the current cultural significance of token-based economies. They also examine the role of digital tokens in various sectors, from gaming to social media, and their impact on financial activities and personal relationships. Rachel explains the rise of cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and how these new forms of money shape modern culture and societal norms.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Friedrich Hayek
• Karl Polanyi
• John Searle

Guest Profile:

• RachelODwyer.com
• Faculty Profile at National College of Art and Design Dublin
• Social Profile on Instagram
• Social Profile on X

Her Work:

• Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

Where do we draw the regulatory line around money?

05:09: What I find quite interesting with tokens is that, increasingly, as we're seeing these sort of nonbank entities emerging and issuing money-like things, the token becomes a sort of regulatory sleight of hand. It becomes a way for platforms to issue money-like things, but say, well, hey, because this isn't real money, I'm not really a bank, so I'm doing everything that banks do, but because I don't have a financial license, I'm not processing payments. I'm doing everything that an employer does, but because I'm not handling money, I'm not officially an employer; therefore, I don't have any duty or responsibilities towards these people working or making a living on my platform. So there's all that sort of regulatory uncertainty sort of happening when we're dealing with tokens as opposed to money, but also, I think, as we saw in 2022 with the collapse of so many exchanges and stablecoins as well, there's this regulatory uncertainty around, what is legitimate financial activity and what is like a scam, and where do we draw the lines around those sorts of things?

Should tokens be seen as less than money?

17:25: When we start thinking about tokens as being less than money, there are all sorts of strings attached—all kinds of prescriptions, all sorts of controls attached to welfare payments, refugee payments—and all kinds of ways in which we can control prescribed behaviors when we issue tokens as opposed to "fungible," I suppose, cash or money.

Is scrip a double exploitation of workers?

23:29: I guess scrip is kind of a catch-22 because you're potentially being exploited when whoever's employing you is getting a profit—they're earning more than it costs to pay you and to sort of buy maybe the materials that it costs to produce whatever you're making. But scrip is double exploitation because they're paying you in their own special token that you can only redeem, basically, in the company store.

Programmable money ties payments to identity, unlike anonymous cash

38:56: A lot of what's happening with programmable money is tying the means of payment to your identity or to particular sorts of credentials. And I think with CBDCs, we're seeing more and more proposals for money that can be programmed, as they're saying, at issuance—that when that money is issued, there are potentially various terms and conditions hard-coded into it versus your dumb cash, which is just an anonymous, dumb bearer instrument that doesn't care and doesn't know who's holding it, who's bearing it, so long as it's bared up.

With more and more data available about each of us all the time, what are the consequences of rapid data-driven decision making by organizations, and what are the implications of it for democracy and social well being?

William Davies teaches Politics at Goldsmiths University of London and is the author of several books, including Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason.

Greg and William discuss how the ongoing crises are misunderstood by elites, and reasons behind the decline in public trust toward experts. William goes over the impact of advancements in behavioral economics, and how modern political and economic phenomena are influenced by historical and sociological contexts. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Brexit
• Friedrich Hayek
• Daniel Kahneman
• Amos Tversky
• Frankfurt School
• Michel Foucault
• Scientific Management
• Elton Mayo
• Mary Poovey
• Dominic Cummings
• Boris Johnson
• Jeremy Bentham
• Thomas Hobbes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Goldsmiths University of London
• WilliamDavies.blog
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
• The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
• The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society) 
• Economic Science Fictions

True happiness lies in quality time, not more work or consumption

53:18: This science of happiness proves, not that surprisingly, that actually spending time doing things that we consider to be intrinsically worthwhile, like hanging out with our families or pursuing activities in the outdoors that we enjoy doing, is more likely to make us happy than simply working more and consuming more. This is not a mystery. Most people intuitively understand this, but that would then point towards a set of policy goals regarding work-life balance and the rights to log off and to not always be at the beck and call of your manager, and that thing. So, those are more about empowering people than just fixing them the whole time.

How social media weaponizes our comparisons to others

30:35: I think one of the things that a lot of political psychology and economic psychology demonstrate quite convincingly, and I think that this is something that social media platforms weaponize, is that, when we compare ourselves to others, it makes us far more unhappy than economics.

Why culture mass surveillance aligns with conspiracy theory

46:35: [The] culture of mass surveillance goes hand in hand with a mentality of conspiracy theory because a conspiracy theorist believes, in some ways, quite correctly, that there's all this other stuff going on; you don't yet know about it, but someone else knows about it, and they're right! And that, in a way, has always been a feature of conspiracy theory, of social life. There's always been more to political institutions than meets the eye, but what there wasn't in the past was this capacity for vast quantities of data to suddenly come spewing out and often discrediting quite famous and quite powerful people.

How is artificial intelligence reshaping social dynamics, knowledge sharing, and the workplace in the digital age?

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is a fellow at Stanford University’s Human Centered AI Institute and helped create the MIT Media Lab. He’s the author of numerous books including, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter, and most recently, The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America. 

Sandy and Greg discuss the evolution of social physics and computational social science, the importance of knowledge sharing in the age of AI, and AI’s implications on connectivity and curiosity. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Brownian motion 
• Republic of Letters 
• Raj Chetty 
• Charles A. O’Reilly III

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn
• Human Centered AI Institute at Stanford University

His Work:

• Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
• Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter
• Building the New Economy: Data as Capital
• Global Fintech: Financial Innovation in the Connected World
• The Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America 

What impedes the transmission of good ideas from one part of the organization to the other? 

13:34: Organizations are always, today, siloed, and they're siloed for a variety of reasons. One is that we're not so smart. We can only understand a certain amount really well, and when it gets more complex than that, we go create another silo. We break it apart and create another silo, and people don't like to share things out of their silo because that means they're not valuable anymore. You like to control the staff and believe that your expertise is valuable. And if someone comes and says, "Well, give me all your data," that's like, "Hey, we're going to fire you in a month," right? People don't like to do that. And the data that they have is not contextualized, right? It means something to them, but somebody else looking at it will say, "Well, I don't know, it's a bunch of ones and zeros. What does that mean?" Right? You need to know what it's measuring and why. The intention is usually not in the data; it's in the context around it.

Does the rise of new AI tools stimulate curiosity or potentially dampen it?

59:34: The phenomenon of people not meeting other humans because they're all on social media is real and disturbing, and AI can make it worse. That's not quite the same thing as being curious. They are curious, just about things that are not actually in their physical environment or likely to affect them in that sort of immediate way.

Why smaller teams move faster and learn better

44:52: The smaller teams are necessary to move fast. If you have a big team, it's really hard to get everybody educated and on the same page. But with software and the sort of things that they do, you can do it with small teams. And so, you can have small teams, which means you can get consensus about what to do pretty fast. And, of course, the connections to everybody else mean you can look for opportunities and learn from other people much better than other people. So, it's a win-win thing. You get people that are able to put things out there quicker; they're able to learn from all the other people that have done it better. And it works pretty well.

How does the present reckon with the historical legacies of notable figures of the past? How do you contextualize the actions of people from other generations today? How do we deal with the information learned through methods that are unacceptable today?

Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California.

Greg and Andrew discuss the renaming of Berkeley buildings originally named after problematic historical figures, with a focus on Alfred Kroeber. The discussion explores Kroeber's contributions to linguistics and anthropology, his controversial involvement with Indigenous peoples and remains, and his work with the Yurok language. Andrew provides an insightful examination of the broader implications of these issues for contemporary relations between universities and Indigenous communities.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Alfred Kroeber
• Yurok Language
• Franz Boas
• Umwelt
• West Berkeley Shellmound
• Elgin Marbles
• Phoebe Hearst

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley
• Profile on Wikipedia
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California

Is Alfred Kroeber's legacy in language and storytelling overlooked?

48:26: One of the reasons why I think Kroeber's real legacy have not been seen so clearly in anthropology because I think his most important legacy going forward is about language and about storytelling, narrative, and oral history. And those are things that are less part of the anthropology world today and more part of the linguistics world. But he's usually identified as an anthropologist. So linguists tend to be a bit unaware of what he did. And anthropologists look only at the culture side of what he did and find it less interesting. So, this kind of separation has, I think, been part of the difficulty.

Understanding inequality today requires tracing its roots to the past

41:21: I think the law has evolved in California. I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the way the law has evolved is that geographical and national ownership is sufficient. So, you no longer have to show that certain ancestral remains are somehow intangibly associated with you culturally, simply that they are found in the area that is your tribal area. That makes it more analogous to the Etruscan situation.

How Alfred Kroeber helped revive indigenous cultures

25:49: I think one of the important uses that have been made of [Alfred Kroeber]'s material is not for world culture but for those cultures where there's a massive archive of material from their grandparents or great-grandparents that they can use in cultural and language revival projects today. It's like the thing that [Alfred Kroeber] didn't see as possible—the survival of Indigenous cultures—that he, in fact, helped to make possible.

When did the gaps in wealth distribution across the globe significantly widen? What is the role of human capital investment?Was the Industrial Revolution to blame? Or can the roots of economic inequality be traced back even further in human history? 

Oded Galor is a professor of economics at Brown University, the founder of the Unified Growth Theory, and author of the book, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality. His work covers the history of economic development throughout human history, as well as the consequences of that development – vast global inequality.

Oded and Greg discuss the significant historical factors that have shaped wealth distribution across the globe, Oded’s Unified Growth Theory, addressing the long-term impacts of population dynamics, and why diversity is a key but precise ingredient in economic development. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Malthusianism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Brown University
• Professional Website

His Work:

• The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
• Unified Growth Theory
• Discrete Dynamical Systems
• Inequality and Economic Development: The Modern Perspective 

The interplay of institutions, culture, and geography in inequality

30:59: When I view institutions, I view them as a byproduct of the process of development. And this will be true for cultural elements as well. Naturally, at a certain point, there are certain externalities in societies that people cannot fully internalize, and the society is forming some cultural norms that allow individuals to coordinate and act based on cumulative knowledge and cumulative wisdom generated in the course of the history of this group over time. These cultural norms can feed into institutions. Institutions can cause some adaptations in cultural norms. But in terms of the hierarchy of factors, the way that I view the world is that, if we think about inequality today, it is affected by deep-rooted factors, institutions, and culture that are reinforcing one another. But, underlying institutions and culture are geographical elements and human diversity that affecting the nature of the institutions, the nature of cultural characteristics, and their interaction.

Understanding inequality today requires tracing its roots to the past

04:45: In order to understand the rules of inequality today, we have to develop theories that will enable us to link the present and the past. Namely, we have to focus on those initial conditions that created the precondition for economic development and ultimately created much of the inequality we see today.

There is no universal policy that would fit all nations

24:57: One of the main insights of “The Journey of Humanity” is that, in fact, there is no universal policy that would fit all nations. In fact, the design of policy will have to be reflective of the history of each nation, the geography of each nation, and the evolutionary processes that occur there and lead this society into its current position. Once we understand these processes, we can design policies that will foster economic development and basically target societies in a differential way.

The role of diversity in economic development

43:49: Diversity is an incredible force in the context of economic development. Based on our estimates, it accounts for about one-sixth of the variations in inequality across the globe today. And much of the variation in diversity, as we see it across the globe today, was determined very much in the distant past. They were determined due to the exodus of humans from Africa during a time when humans started to populate the planetary assessor.

Ever considered how something as simple as a notebook could shape history?

Roland Allen from Thames & Hudson chronicles the substantial history of a humble tool in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper which traces the roots of jotting things down all the way back to medieval Florence and beyond. 

Roland and Greg chat about the earliest forms of notetaking on things like papyrus and wax tablets, the great thinkers in history who were prolific notetakers, and the enduring importance of writing things by hand in a digital world. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Recommended Resources:

• Giotto
• Petrarch
• Zibaldone
• Erasmus
• John Collett
• Samuel Pepys
• Bob Graham

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Profile on LinkedIn

His Work:

• The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Why writing by hand engages your brain

29:18: The brain, as you know, it's all about connections. It's not about really what one part of the brain does; it's about how different modules in the brain relate to each other. And when you write in a physical notebook, you activate more parts of the brain than when you type. So, for instance, you tend to activate the hippocampus, which is your mental map, and you activate that when you're writing in a notebook. And they reckon this is because a notebook isn't just a thing; it's also a kind of place. And so, when you put an idea on the page, you're locating it on this kind of mapped reality, which is the pages of your notebook. And if you think about this, when you're flicking through a notebook, you quite often think to yourself, "Oh, I know this is on the left side at the bottom," or, "I know this was in blue, not black," or, "I know that it was a doodle in a corner of the page." And you don't get that when you're typing. And they think it might be to do with the fact that, as you scroll up, or as your document scrolls up the screen away from whatever it is—the leading edge of what you're typing—it just vanishes into the machine.

Why slowing down improves your writing

26:57: It is much easier to tap into a laptop. It's much easier to edit on a laptop. And it's much easier to word process, produce a thousand words of text on a laptop. But to make it good takes work, and if the process of writing is a little bit difficult if you're forced by the labor of handwriting, which is slow and hard work, to actually think through every word carefully as you order it, as you make your sentence, this I think is a really good discipline, and it will give you better quality results.

The power of handwritten note taking

28:12: When you're note-taking, there's a real advantage to the physical labor of picking a phrase, a sentence, a reference; you excerpt it, you choose it. And because it takes that two minutes to write down a long quote or something like that, or longer, you have to focus on every word as you do it. You can't just control C, control V. Yeah, or Apple C, Apple V, all of the quotes you need, and just dump them into your document. If you do it by hand, you digest them. You get to know them. And that's the best way, I think, to understand something that's been written by someone else—to copy it out because you have to really engage with it.