The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth

Over the last two years, if you had asked Mark Blyth if the Biden administration would ever do anything meaningful to fight climate change, he’d have said “no.” These feelings only got stronger in 2021, after the Democrats failed to pass their first big attempt at climate legislation, known as ‘Build Back Better.’But then, something changed. The Inflation Reduction Act became law. And despite the name, it’s a decarbonization bill, and a better one than Mark ever thought we were going to get. (It might also reduce inflation, but that’s for another episode).In this episode, Mark talks with two experts about why climate legislation was finally able to get passed in the United States, and what it means for the country and the planet. Tim Sahay is a physicist, Senior Policy Manager of Green New Deal Network, and Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. Ted Fertik is a historian, and Senior Strategist for Policy and Research with the Working Families Party. As they both see it, this bill has the potential not just to curb the worst of climate change, but to transform our society. Watch Mark, Tim, and Ted’s recent event at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. (An updated slide deck for presentation can be found here.)Learn more about the Rhodes Center.Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts. 

In the last few years, globalization has gotten an increasingly a bad rap. Whether because of increasing geopolitical tensions over high end computers chips, or the realization that when you outsource your manufacturing base it’s quite hard to make things in a hurry (see: the pandemic), people across the political spectrum are calling time on ‘make it there, ship it here.’ It seems that politicians of all stripes want to roll back global supply chains and ‘friendshore’ all our wants and needs. The problem with doing so however lies at the level of the firm, as has recently been pointed out by Jonas Nahm. And for a number of reasons, it won’t be an easy transition. Jonas is an Assistant Professor of Energy, Resources, and Environment at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of the recent and excellent book Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy. On this episode, Mark talks with Jonas about all the ways that private firms, domestic institutions, and national industrial policies mesh together to produce outcomes that are more than the sum of their parts. Watch Jonas’s presentation at the Rhodes Center.Learn more about and purchase Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy.Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts. 

This episode is a little different than the type of conversation you normally have on the show. Last year, Mark spoke with Oded Galor about his book The Journey of Humanity, a long-run take on why humanity changed so little for so long, and then all of sudden changed tremendously, mostly for the better. It’s a fascinating idea, but of course nobody actually experiences that long-run journey, or compares their daily life to distant ancestors. People typically think on the much shorter timescale of a lifetime, maybe a generation or two. At that scale, for many people in America today, it can seem like much of life has gotten worse, and are continuing to do so. Put another way: it looks like the American Dream is dead.But is that true? What does it mean for a dream to die, anyway? And if it is dead, is there a way to revive it? These sound like questions for a philosopher. Someone who has thought about this a great deal is Josh Preiss. He’s a philosopher, Professor at Minnesota State University, and author of Just Work For All: The American Dream in the 21st Century. On this episode, Mark talks with Josh about the ideas behind what we call ‘The American Dream,’ and looks at the reality behind its decline: what’s gotten worse for who, and what’s needed to make things better. Learn more about and purchase Josh Preiss’s book.Watch Josh’s talk at the Rhodes Center.Find more information about all our episodes, including transcripts, on our website. 

On this episode Mark talks with Oded Galor, Professor of Economics at Brown University, and author of the new book The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality. In this book Oded survey’s 200,000 years of human history to create a theory for why societies and economies grew so slowly for so long – and why, starting about 200 years ago, that began to change very rapidly. It’s a sweeping history that puts the work of many influential economists into a new light – from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Paul Romer. But Oded’s story is about much more than economics. It’s about technology, geography, psychology, and politics. In short, it’s about the nature of humanity. Mark and Oded discuss all of this, as well as how – as we stumble through a global pandemic and catastrophic climate change – we can grow in ways that benefit us all.Learn more about and purchase Oded’s book The Journey of Humanity.Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts.

There’s a standard story economists and historians use to explain the global economy over the last 100 years: there was the gold standard, which gave way to the Bretton Woods system, which gave way to “neoliberal globalization”. But on this episode of the Rhodes Center Podcast, Mark talks with someone whose work challenges this story by attacking its foundational myth with deep archival work. James Ashely Morrison is an associate professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of the new book England’s Cross of Gold: Keynes, Churchill, and the Governance of Economic Beliefs. In it, he recounts the fight over Britain’s return to the Gold Standard after World War I, and comes to a bold conclusion: there never really was a “gold standard” – at least, not as we understand it. As James makes vividly clear, the “gold standard” was always more of an idea about a perfect state of the world, rather than an economic reality. As such, fights over it have always been less about actual monetary policy, and more about how people believe the economy is supposed to work. James’ work not only adds depth and nuance to this misunderstood turning point in 20th century economics. As he and Mark discuss, it also forces us to reconsider so many of the more contemporary stories we’ve been told about how our economy works, and why. Learn more about James’ book England’s Cross of Gold: Keynes, Churchill, and the Governance of Economic Beliefs. Watch the talk James’ gave at the Rhodes Center this Spring.  

From 2019 to 2021, Frances Haugen worked as a Product Manager in Facebook’s Civic Integrity Department. During that time she got an inside view into how Facebook’s algorithms are deliberately designed to influence its users. She also saw something deeply worrying: that this influence was often used to grow Facebook’s profits at the expense of users' safety and wellbeing. In 2021 she anonymously leaked tens of thousands of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. Since then she’s testified before Congress on the matter, and helped start a global movement to better understand and regulate Big Tech. On this episode Mark talks with Frances about her experience whistleblowing on one of the world’s most powerful companies, and what she thinks we need to do to create social media platforms that are compatible with a functioning democracy. Learn more about and listens to the Watson Institute's other podcasts.

In the last few years we’ve seen critiques of free trade from across the political spectrum. Trump focused on the US-China trade imbalance, while the left focuses its ire on free trade agreements themselves. It’s, of course, not the first time that protectionist ideas have found currency in a globalizing economy.  In the late 18th century a theory known as ‘neomercantilism’ began to thrive in a number of western countries. It was a theory, most famously espoused by the German thinker Friedrich List, that focused on protectionism and government activism to create an industrial state. But as Eric Helleiner, a political science professor at the University of Waterloo explores in his new book ‘The Neomercantilists,’ this movement did not start in Europe and diffuse out to the rest of the world. Rather, it was a truly global phenomenon, with intellectual roots springing up everywhere from Africa to Asia to Latin America.On this episode Mark talks with Eric about the neglected intellectual traditions that gave rise to varieties of neomercantilism. Eric’s analysis not only helps explain the protectionist revivals of today. It also challenges Western readers’ assumptions about how economic theory develops, and how economic ideas gain influence around the world. Watch Eric’s live conversation with Mark here. Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts. 

On this episode Mark talks with Dr. Fiona Hill about her new book There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. A foreign policy expert and key witness in President Trump’s first impeachment trial, she reflects on growing up in the deindustrializing North of England in the 1980s and how that upbringing attuned her to developments in both Russia and America that we are coping with today. This talk was recorded in late February 2021. Learn more about and purchase There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First CenturyWatch Fiona Hill’s full talk at the Rhodes Center on YouTube. 

The Rhodes Center Podcast explores the most important issues in finance and economics through straightforward, candid conversations with the world’s leading experts. The show is hosted by Mark Blyth, political economist and Director of the Rhodes Center, at the Watson Institute at Brown University. On this episode Mark talks with Manuela Moschella about the recent transformations to central bank policy and orthodoxy. Central banking used to be straightforward - fix short term rates and get price stability. 2008 changed that. Engineering asset price instability and massive bailouts became the norm and, despite all that, deflation, not inflation became the problem. The Fed and the ECB were late in waking up to that fact, and just when they did, COVID hit and inflation came back. So Mark asks Manuela: what is a central banker to do? Manuela is an Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the Scuola Normale Superiore and Associate Fellow at the Europe Programme at Chatham House. Watch Manuela’s talk at the Rhodes Center. Learn more about the Watson Institute’s other podcasts. 

On this episode Mark talks with Elizabeth Popp Berman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, and author of Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy. In it, she explains how in the middle of the 20th century a new kind of economic thinking took hold among policymakers at all levels of government. It replaced bold visions of justice and equality with a more technocratic style, one whose goals could be summed up in one word: efficiency. Over the last half century this quest for efficiency has guided policies in everything from public education to defense to environmental management. It’s dominance is also reflected in the wild proliferation of MPA programs that exist in American universities today that have cost-benefit analysis at their heart. Elizabeth and Mark discuss where this thinking came from, and why it appealed (and continues to appeal) to so many policymakers. They also talk about what’s lost in this focus on efficiency, and why it isn’t the panacea its advocates claim. Watch Elizabeth's talk at the Rhodes Center. Learn more about the Watson Institute's other podcasts.