How Did You Come Into Economics?

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When he was a senior in college, Ben Sutter applied to two law schools. But it so happened that i won one of these fellowships to study abroad for a few years. Once this was in britain, and once i got there, then i had to study something. And so since i had been doing economics as an undergraduate and i had found it interesting, i kept going with economics. By the time i'd then done economics at a graduate level for a couple of years in england, then i said, well, you know, this is really more interesting than what i think my lawyer friends do,. So i'm going to stick with it....

Benjamin Friedman has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, whose accomplishments include writing 150 papers, producing more than dozen books, and teaching Tyler Cowen graduate macroeconomics at Harvard in 1985. In his latest book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Ben argues that contrary to the popular belief that Western economic ideas are a secular product of the Enlightenment, instead they are the result of hotly debated theological questions within the English-speaking Protestant world of thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume.

Ben joined Tyler to discuss the connection between religious belief and support for markets, what drives varying cultural commitments to capitalism, why the rate of growth is key to sustaining liberal values, why Paul Volcker is underrated, how coming from Kentucky influences his thinking, why annuities don’t work better, America’s debt and fiscal sustainability, his critiques of nominal GDP targeting, why he wouldn’t change the governance of the Fed, how he maintains his motivation to keep learning, his next big project on artificial intelligence, and more.

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Recorded December 4th, 2020 Other ways to connect

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