Economics and History Podcasts That I Like

Podcasts for people who want to hear economists talk about their work

The Economic History Podcast Sean Kenny interviews economic historians. He usually begins with a question about how they got into economic history and the topics that they focus on. They then discuss specific books or papers that the guest has authored.

Some favorites: Jane Humphries on women in the workforce, Cormac O’Grada on the Industrial revolution and the Irish famine, Lisa Cook on the costs of racial discrimination and violence, Stephen Broadberry on the Great Divergence, and a couple of episodes with Nicholas Crafts on economic growth

AEA Research Highlights podcast by the American Economic Association interviews authors of forthcoming papers in the Association’s journals.

Some Favorites: Tianyi Wang on the political impact of Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts during the Great Depression, Natalie Bau on pension reform and cultural change in Indonesia and Ghana; Dean Yang on the large and lasting impact of temporary farming subsidies in Mozambique

 

Vox Dev Talks

As the name suggests the podcast focuses on economic development. I started to list some favorites, but then realized they are all so good. They are relatively short, and everyone is worth listening to.

Vox Talks Economics

Like Vox Dev there are may good ones and they are relatively short. Search for topics that you are interested in, but definitely listen to Joel Mokyr on the mechanics of the industrial revolution

Probable Causation Jennnifer Doleac’s podcast focuses on economic issues related to crime, the hosts specialty, but it is a great podcast for anyone interested empirical research focusing on causality. Whereas some shows tend to focus on the well established (old) economists, the guests on Probable Causation tend to be younger, and their discussions get into the details of the research process.

Some Favorites: Ellora Derenoncourt on the Great Migration, and Minasha Shah on criminalizing sex work.

 

Rocking Our Priors Alice Evans is not an economist or historian, but she is passionately interested in both, and many of her interviews are with economists. More than any other podcast, Evans challenges her guests to defend their claims.

Some Favorites: Suresh Naidu, David Stasavage, and Nathan Lane

 

Macro Musings Some people will see the connection to the Mercatus Center and think they are going to get Koch Bros. propaganda. Don’t. Whether you are mainstream, Austrian or MMT David Beckworth is interested in what you have to say you. The focus is, as the name suggests, on macroeconomics, but it is a pretty broad interpretation of macro. In addition, he has several good episodes with economic historians.

 

Business Scholarship Podcast  Okay this is called business scholarship and it is actually interviews with legal scholars, but Andrew K. Jennings’ podcast provides a lot of interesting stuff for economists.

 

Some Favorites: Harlwell Wells on the Civil Rights Movement and securities regulation; Elizabeth Tippett on enslaved agents; and Sarah Haan on the feminization of capital

 

Economic Rockstar This podcast is currently inactive, but I still included it on the list. He was one of the best hosts for just letting the guest speak. The episodes with Vernon Smith and Harry Markowitz are basically him asking how they got into economics followed by the guests talking for 90 minutes.

 

 

Podcasts for people who want to hear historians talk about their work

 

Age of Jackson One of the things I like most about Daniel Gullotta’s podcast is that in addition to interviewing authors of new books, he does historiographical episodes as well, covering books like Time on the Cross and the Market Revolution. There is also an interesting two parter on the controversy over Arming America.

Ben Franklin’s World Like Gullotta, Liz Covart mostly interviews authors, but also occasionally does special episodes. I really enjoyed her interview with Bernard Bailyn.

Who Makes Cents? Only one a month so there are not a lot, but there are some good ones. I recommend interviews with Shanette Garrett-Scott, Paige Glotzer, and Justene Hill Edwards

Historically Thinking This is one of the few history podcasts that is not constrained by a field in terms of time, place or subject matter. Some of my favorites are the episode on Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told and His interview with Sarah Damiano about her book To Her Credit.

New Books in History

 

A podcast for people who want to learn the principles of economics

How to Think Like an Economist

Reading the Classics in Economics

This a the blog version of a tweet thread from earlier today. It was prompted by tweets by Florian Ederer listing the classic texts he had not read and essentially arguing that everything essential is in current graduate textbooks.

 

Smith’s Wealth of Nations: I read it all, and I can’t say I recommend that. On the other hand, the first two chapters are still one of the best descriptions of markets as a means for large numbers of people, who don’t even know each other, to cooperate in ways that make them all better off. By the way, unlike the book, the chapters are very short. It is free at econlib.org

 

Marx’s Das Kapital: Read the first volume. Maybe the good stuff is in the later volumes. I do recommend The Communist Manifesto as a short clear introduction to his theory of history.

 

Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: I read it but can’t say that it had much of an impact on me. It may be that I had encountered most of the interesting ideas before and just found the book a slog. Some people regard Keynes as a great writer, but I didn’t think the General Theory provided evidence of that.

 

Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: I read it. You should read Schumpeter, but the best place to start is his “The Creative Response in Economic History” in the Journal of Economic History (1947).

 

Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, Friedman’s Free to Choose and Capitalism and Freedom. Read them all. First two are quick reads. Best reason to read them is to see that while the authors were pro market they were not as anti-government as many of their followers.

 

Veblen. I’ve read Theory of the Leisure Class and Theory of Business Enterprise, and several of his papers. I do recommend Theory of the Leisure Class, but don’t read it for the social criticism, as many people have. Read it for the argument in favor of a broader economics. Veblen is arguing that you can’t just study the choices people make, given tastes, technology, and resources. You need understand how tastes, technology and resources change over time.

Does all this make me a better or worse economist? I have no idea. I read them to satisfy my own curiosity. In retrospect some of the time spent on Smith, Marx and Keynes could have been better spent on something else.

I think Ederer was in a way correct. The essentials of current economic theory and empirical research methods are in the graduate level textbooks. A person can become a successful economist without reading older texts, but that does that mean they shouldn’t read any of the classics.

 

I think it would be good for economics if economists learned that what are considered legitimate questions and methods in economics have changed over time. The appropriate set of questions and the appropriate methods for answering them are part of the culture of the discipline, a culture that evolves over time. Current textbooks provide a very limited view of what it means to study how people choose to allocate scarce resources.

The Financial History of Slavery in the United States

 

This post was prompted by Sharon Ann Murphy’s recent publication of "The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States," in the Journal of Southern History (Murphy 2021). The paper has been getting a lot of attention on twitter. As it should. But it got me thinking more broadly about the progress that has been made in the last decade or so on the financial history of slavery in the United States.

For a long time, claims about slavery and finance in the United States were more likely to be asserted than established with evidence. This has been changing. Richard Kilbourne (1995) is often cited as a pioneer in the study of finance and slavery, and one of the factors he highlighted was the role of local sources of credit in financing slavery in the United States. Kilbourne had focused on one parish in Louisiana. Bonnie Martin, using thousands of mortgages from Virginia, South Carolina and Louisiana found that the use of credit was pervasive and that much of the finance for local sales came from “neighbors,” often the person selling the enslaved people (Martin 2010 and 2016). Clegg (2018) provided further evidence on slave mortgages and foreclosure sales and argued that the reliance on credit and threat of foreclosure were a significant force driving slaveholders toward capitalist behavior. Murphy examined the impact of such foreclosures during the Panic of 1819 on the lives of enslaved people (Murphy 2020).

While these papers frequently emphasized local finance, studies that focused on the westward expansion of cotton production and slavery were more likely to emphasize the role of nation or even international financial networks and institutions.  Schermehorn, for instance, found that slave traders involved in interstate sales often had to rely on long distance business connections, large banks with correspondents in major cities, and the Bank of the United States to move funds from one part of the country to another.  In Murphy’s recent paper on the First and Second Banks, she carefully documents the many instances in which bankers violated general norms of good banking and the rules of the Bank to support the purchase of plantations and slaves (Murphy 2021b).  Similarly, Saunt showed how financiers in New York and Boston were quick to take advantage of the opportunity to speculate in the new cotton territory opened up by the Indian Removal Act.

Life insurance also exhibited a mix of firms from the North and the South. Life insurance for enslaved people appears to have begun with firms in the South, but later firms from the North offered policies as well (Murphy 2005, and Ryder 2012).

While most studies have focused on how slave based production of commodities like cotton and sugar were financed, several authors have examined the ways in which enslaved people were used to finance other types of ventures.  Gonzalez, Marshall and Naidu (2017) showed how slave ownership, being able to provide enslaved people as collateral, facilitated the finance of other businesses in the Chesapeake. Murphy examines a case in which enslaved people were used directly to finance industrial investment in the South (2021a).

Another line of research that has only recently begun to be explored is the use of credit, and limitations on their access to credit, influenced the economic lives of enslaved people (Hilliard 2013, and Edwards 2021)

And there is more on the way, the Columbia University Press Studies in the History of American Capitalism series has two forthcoming books that explore aspect of financial history and slavery (Boodry forthcoming, and Pardo forthcoming).

         Clearly, a lot of work has been done. Still, it is important to note, as Murphy does, that many of the big questions are still unanswered. If you want to make claims about the relative importance of slavery to financial institutions or the relative importance of financial institutions to slavery, or the relative importance of northern institutions relative to southern Institutions we aren’t there yet. In addition, as with much of the literature on slavery in America, the time before the cotton boom could use more attention.

Boodry, Kathryn. Forthcoming. The Thread: Slavery, Cotton and Atlantic Finance from the Louisiana Purchase to Reconstruction.

Clegg, John J. "Credit market discipline and capitalist slavery in antebellum South Carolina." Social Science History 42, no. 2 (2018): 343-376.

Edwards, Justene Hill. Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina. Columbia University Press, 2021.

Hilliard, Kathleen M. Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power's Purchase in the Old South. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

González, Felipe, Guillermo Marshall, and Suresh Naidu. "Start-up nation? Slave wealth and entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland." The Journal of Economic History 77, no. 2 (2017): 373-405.

Kilbourne, Richard Holcombe. Debt, investment, slaves: credit relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885. University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Martin, Bonnie. "Slavery's invisible engine: mortgaging human property." The journal of southern history 76, no. 4 (2010): 817-866.

Martin, Bonnie. "Neighbor-to-Neighbor Capitalism." In Slavery's Capitalism, pp. 107-121. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Murphy, Sharon Ann. "Securing human property: Slavery, life insurance, and industrialization in the upper south." Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 4 (2005): 615-652.

Murphy, Sharon Ann. "Collateral Damage: The Impact of Foreclosure on Enslaved Lives during the Panic." Journal of the Early Republic 40, no. 4 (2020): 691-696.

Murphy, Sharon Ann. "Enslaved Financing of Southern Industry: The Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina, 1836–1850." Enterprise & Society (2021): 1-44.

 

Murphy, Sharon Ann. 2021. "The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States." Journal of Southern History, 87 (3) 385-426.

Pardo, Rafael. The Color of Bankruptcy: Financial Failure and Freedom in the Age of American Slavery.

Ryder, Karen Kotzuk. “Permanent property”: Slave life insurance in the antebellum Southern United States, 1820–1866. University of Delaware, 2012.

Saunt, Claudio. "Financing Dispossession: Stocks, Bonds, and the Deportation of Native Peoples in the Antebellum United States." Journal of American History 106, no. 2 (2019): 315-337.

Schermerhorn, Calvin. "Slave Trading in a Republic of Credit: Financial Architecture of the US Slave Market, 1815–1840." Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 4 (2015): 586-602.

 

P.S.

 Its not really relevant to the post, but I found Saunt’s paper particularly interesting because I had written about some of the same New York businessmen using the same sorts of finance to speculate in lands in western New York in the 1830s. Hansen, B. Institutions, Entrepreneurs, and American Economic History: How the Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company Shaped the Laws of Business from 1822 to 1929. Springer, 2009.

 

And, I apologize in advance to anyone that should have been included but was not and to anyone who was included but whose work I failed to accurately or adequately portray.