The Ways in Which Markets Fail

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Eo: I'm sure different people are going to have different top ten lists for the ways in which markets fail. The first i guess, a, the first i guessis is a climate change. A laber market failures in unemployment - that's when things don't work as they're supposed to. You only have one job, you can't tell in advance what it's going to be like. And there's all sorts of difficulties with the notion that we'll look, if there's too many of one kind of workers, their wage goes down and so forth. That’s sort of, i suppose, the one, that's the one that, in some sense,

The idea of an “interest rate” might seem mundane and practical, in comparison to our usual topics around here, but there is a profound philosophical idea lurking in the background: if you lend me money now against the promise of me paying you back more in the future, I am relating the different values that a certain sum has to me at different moments in time. Traditionally, the interest rates set by the government have been a major tool for influencing the economy, but in recent decades they have increasingly fallen near zero. John Quiggin relates this change to the shift from manufacturing to an information economy, and we talk about what that means for the public interest in having information be reliable and widely available. And yes, there is a bit about crypto.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

John Quiggin received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of New England. He is currently a VC Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Among his books are Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us and Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.