The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth Imagining the macroeconomy in interwar Poland
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Małgorzata Mazurek, a historian, associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, and author of the forthcoming book “The Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968.”
Mazurek explores how, between World Wars I and II, a group of thinkers led by economists Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau began to re-envision Poland’s economy – and future. Their work, and Mazurek tells it, threatened many of the assumptions held by those in power about economic development in the mid-20th century, and would go on to influence thinkers around the world in the decades to come.
In telling the story of these thinkers, Mazurek also recounts a fascinating moment in Poland’s history, when a unique confluence of attitudes towards trade, immigration, and ethnic diversity created a laboratory for new economic ideas.