On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Marshall Steinbaum on economics as a toxic discipline.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Marshall Steinbaum on economics as a toxic discipline.
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Steven D. Levitt, best known for cowriting the best-selling 2005 book Freakonomics, is retiring from the University of Chicago with a bang. On the Capitalism and Freedom podcast, Levitt gave a farewell interview where he detailed many internecine feuds in the discipline and examples of toxic abuse, with particular focus on his long-time colleague and nemesis James Heckman.
The economist Marshall Steinbaum, a University of Chicago graduate who now teaches at the University of Utah, returns to The Time of Monsters to elucidate not just the Levitt/Heckman spat but also the question of why economics is a notoriously toxic discipline, how economics has changed over the decade,s rendering both Levitt and Heckman anachronistic, and the recent backlash against anti-racist politics in the discipline.
To supplement the article, listeners can read: Noah Scheiber’s 2007 article on the intellectual origins of Freakonomics, Marshall Steinbaum’s 2020 post about racism in the University of Chicago economic department, and a recent Bloomberg story on racism and sexism in economics.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Writing in Foreign Policy, Matt Duss argues that Donald Trump’s rush to war is both
stupid and illegal. It is also wildly unpopular with the public. But he also observes that
congress has been reluctant to challenge Trump’s policy, although some progressives
have now forced the issue to a vote. Matt is a frequent guest of the show and foreign
policy expert. I talked to him about the dangers of a new war and also the larger
systematic problems of the imperial presidency.
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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.