James Meadway and Kirsty Styles discuss how neoliberalism lives on today. This episode was recorded back in August 2015 and a lot has changed since then. The good news is James and Kirsty will be back for a brand new episode in a couple of weeks’ time, telling the story of the backlash against neoliberalism over the past few years. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

James Meadway and Kirsty Styles explain how neoliberalism took hold in the UK in the 1980s. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Music by Chris Zabriskie (www.chriszabriskie.com), sanmi (www.freemusicarchive.org/music/sanmi) and Christian Bjoerklund (www.freemusicarchive.org/music/Christ…n_Bjoerklund) used under Creative Commons Licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

James Meadway and Kirsty Styles explain how neoliberalism came to dominate economies around the globe. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Music by Chris Zabriskie (www.chriszabriskie.com), sanmi (freemusicarchive.org/music/sanmi/) and Christian Bjoerklund (freemusicarchive.org/music/Christian_Bjoerklund/) used under Creative Commons Licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

Economist James Meadway and journalist Kirsty Styles continue their 6-part miniseries about neoliberalism. In part 2, they tell the story of how the once obscure ideas of theorist Friedrich Hayek moved from the fringe to the mainstream, ushering in the age of neoliberalism. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Music by Chris Zabriskie (www.chriszabriskie.com) and sanmi (www.freemusicarchive.org/music/sanmi/) used under Creative Commons Licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

For the next 6 weeks, we’re doing something a bit different. We’re telling the story of neoliberalism, from the beginning. We call it A Beginner’s Guide to Neoliberalism. We first ran the series back in 2015, but it’s as relevant as ever. It’s presented by the journalist Kirsty Styles alongside James Meadway, who at the time was chief economist at the New Economics Foundation. In part 1, James and Kirsty start with a history of our economic system, the difference between capitalism and neoliberalism, and examine how neoliberalism came to dominate modern day economics. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Music by Chris Zabriskie and sanmi used under Creative Commons Licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

Knife crime is at a nine-year high. Everyone agrees: something must be done. Some politicians want more police on the streets, or tougher sentences. Others want cuts to mental health services to be reversed. One MP has suggested every knife in Britain should have a built-in GPS tracker – good luck with that. But knife crime it is a complex issue, and young people’s lives depend on policymakers getting it right. So today, Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is taking a big-picture look at the issue with one of the journalists who’s covered it more than perhaps any other: the Guardian’s editor-at-large, Gary Younge. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Produced by James Shield. Music this week is by Candlegravity and Podington Bear, used under Creative Commons licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

It’s hard to listen to the news at the moment without hearing some kind of warning about economy. Nearly all of those warnings focus on one thing – Brexit. It’s true that lots of people think Brexit is risky – but in the clamour to define what Brexit means, could we be blindsided by something else? Obviously it’s difficult to predict exactly how and when another shock to the economy might happen. But is there more we could be doing to get the economy ready for whatever might be around the corner? Guest host Hanna Wheatley is joined by NEF's Head of Economics Alfie Stirling and Senior Economist Sarah Arnold. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Produced by James Shield. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

We’re away this week, but in the meantime thought we’d listen back to one of our favourite episodes from last year. If house prices are too high for people to be able to buy houses, how can we bring them down? And can we do it without upsetting homeowners and crashing the economy? Beth Stratford is a PhD student at Leeds University. Last February she published a blog post at OpenDemocracy that was so interesting we knew we had to get her on the podcast to talk about it. She argues it just might be possible to lower house prices without crashing the economy. Joe Beswick, head of housing and land here at the New Economics Foundation, joined Beth and Ayeisha Thomas-Smith, to chat through the idea. We hope you enjoy! And we’ll be back next week with a brand new episode. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Produced by James Shield and Huw Jordan. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

The Green New Deal has rocketed to the top of the agenda in the US. It's an ambitious plan, spearheaded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to decarbonise the US economy and eliminate economic insecurity at the same time. But in fact the Green New Deal has some of its origins here at the New Economics Foundation. So what's the story behind the development of the idea? And how would a Green New Deal actually work, both in the UK and across the pond? Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined this week by: - Ann Pettifor, director of Prime Economics and one of the co-authors of the Green New Deal report published by NEF in 2008; - Miatta Fahnbulleh, chief executive of the New Economics Foundation; - Waleed Shahid, communications director of the Justice Democrats, who also worked on the campaign to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Produced by James Shield. Music this week is by Podington Bear, used under Creative Commons licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org

Public ownership is back on the agenda. Opinion polls show high levels of support for taking all kinds of things back into public hands, from the railways to water to energy, and the Labour party is committed to a vast expansion of public ownership. But if privatisation has failed, what kind of public ownership should replace it? As the critics of nationalisation are quick to say, British Rail wasn’t that great. What should be done differently this time? If these services were nationalised, would the state even know how to run them? And are there other ways of putting them back in public hands? Ayeisha Thomas-Smith is joined by Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It campaign, Hilary Wainwright, co-editor of Red Pepper magazine and fellow of the Transnational Institute, and Sahil Dutta, lecturer in political economy at Goldsmiths University. Enjoying the show? Tweet us your comments and questions @NEF! Produced by James Shield. Music this week is by Podington Bear, used under Creative Commons licence. The award-winning Weekly Economics Podcast is brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the UK's only people powered think tank. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org