Are We Going to End Poverty in a Century?

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Can you foresee a day in the long run, maybe 50 hundred years from now, when there is no poverty? "I think there's a real chance that the whole nature of work as we know it will be fundamenntally different," he says. The author has been working on his next book about how robots and artificial intelligence could change society.

In episode 162 of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael speaks with one of the nation’s preeminent experts on economic policy, Benjamin Friedman, about his new book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force — religion.

Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets — among economists as well as many ordinary citizens — is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset.