Podcast appearances and mentions of Alex Tabarrok

Craig and Julie have a jam packed show to start of the week! FreightWaves Finance Editor, Todd Maiden, starts things off talking railroad earnings. He breaks down how major carriers like Schneider National handily beat expectations, signaling the early stages of a capacity-constrained rate recovery. Schneider captured double-digit rate increases on contract renewals during Q2. Zak Andersoe, Chief of Staff and VP of Corporate Relations at BNSF, outlined why the railroad strongly opposes the proposed merger between Union Pacific (UP) and Norfolk Southern (NS). He explains how the merger creates an unprecedented level of market power (over 50% market share in the combined entity), which BNSF argues will ultimately raise prices and reduce competition for shippers—particularly bulk and carload shippers who lack competitive alternatives. Trent Broberg, CEO of FullBay, highlighted key trends and operational pressures across heavy-duty maintenance shops. Brian Fielkow, EVP of Risk Resources at Acrisure, detailed how safety directly drives productivity and enterprise value. Alex Tabarrok, Chair in Economics at George Mason University, presented findings from a white paper on autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption and opposition. ⁠Follow the FreightWaves Today Podcast⁠ ⁠Other FreightWaves Shows⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Craig and Julie have a jam packed show to start of the week! FreightWaves Finance Editor, Todd Maiden, starts things off talking railroad earnings. He breaks down how major carriers like Schneider National handily beat expectations, signaling the early stages of a capacity-constrained rate recovery. Schneider captured double-digit rate increases on contract renewals during Q2. Zak Andersoe, Chief of Staff and VP of Corporate Relations at BNSF, outlined why the railroad strongly opposes the proposed merger between Union Pacific (UP) and Norfolk Southern (NS). He explains how the merger creates an unprecedented level of market power (over 50% market share in the combined entity), which BNSF argues will ultimately raise prices and reduce competition for shippers—particularly bulk and carload shippers who lack competitive alternatives. Trent Broberg, CEO of FullBay, highlighted key trends and operational pressures across heavy-duty maintenance shops. Brian Fielkow, EVP of Risk Resources at Acrisure, detailed how safety directly drives productivity and enterprise value. Alex Tabarrok, Chair in Economics at George Mason University, presented findings from a white paper on autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption and opposition. Follow the FreightWaves Today Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She is not an ivory tower academic but an economist whose deep understanding of society comes from lived experience and endless curiosity. Vidya Mahambare joins Amit Varma in episode 448 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss her life and her learnings. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Vidya Mahambare on Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Great Lakes, Mint and her own website. 2. What Shapes Us? -- Vidya Mahambare's podcast. 3. Closing the income gap -- Vidya Mahambare's column on the five Es. 4. Family structure, education and women's employment in rural India -- Sowmya Dhanaraj and Vidya Mahambare. 5. Male backlash and female guilt: women's employment and intimate partner violence in urban India -- Sowmya Dhanaraj and Vidya Mahambare. 6. Women's challenging commutes in southern India: A case of the metropolitan region of Chennai -- Vidya Mahambare and Sowmya Dhanaraj. 7. Analysing the sentiment-based variation in finance ministers' communication -- Vidya Mahambare, Akash Gupta and Sowmya Dhanaraj. 8. Sowmya Dhanaraj Is Making a Difference — Episode 380 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Alice Evans Studies the Great Gender Divergence — Episode 297 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 11. A Deep Dive Into Education -- Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. 12. Puliyabaazi — Pranay Kotasthane, Saurabh Chandra and Khyati Pathak's podcast. 13. What These Labels Mean -- Episode 107 of Everything is Everything. 14. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 15. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 16. India's MSME Landscape — Some Useful Frameworks — Episode 419 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sudhir Sarnobat and Narendra Shenoy). 17. What Ails Indian Manufacturing? -- Episode 104 of Everything is Everything. 18. Is Manufacturing the Answer? -- Episode 105 of Everything is Everything. 19. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha Is the Impartial Spectator — Episode 388 of The Seen and the Unseen. 20. Varditalya Mansachya Nondi -- Sadanand Date. 21. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. EconForEverybody -- Ashish Kulkarni's blog. 23. FSI (Floor Space Index) — Episode 11 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 24. Rent Control — Episode 14 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 25. Roofs or Ceilings -- Milton Friedman. 26. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs — Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 27. Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols -- Rob Henderson. 28. A Matter of Life and Death -- Amit Varma. 29. India = Migration — Episode 128 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chinmay Tumbe). 30. India Moving — Chinmay Tumbe. 31. Biju Rao Won't Bow to Conventional Wisdom — Episode 392 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. Can Economics Become More Reflexive? — Vijayendra Rao. 33. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 34. Is Your Impact Evaluation Asking Questions That Matter? A Four Part Smell Test — Lant Pritchett. 35. The Confidence Gap — Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. 36. More from Less for More -- Raghunath Mashelkar and Sudhil Borde. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma runs a course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. And have you read Amit's newsletter? It's madly active right now! Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: 'Women at Work' by Simahina.

Dans cet épisode, je reçois Fabien Pinckaers, CEO et fondateur d'Odoo, pour une discussion autour de la construction d'un éditeur de logiciels de gestion mondial, des crises traversées en chemin, et de la vision pour l'avenir du secteur.Nous avons parlé :du premier pivot en 2010, quand Fabien est passé d'une société de services à un modèle d'éditeur pur, en levant 3 millions d'euros pour redistribuer ses revenus à des intégrateurs partenairesde la crise de trésorerie qui a suivi : deux semaines de cash restantes, une tentative de prise de contrôle par les investisseurs sur la base d'une valorisation inférieure à celle d'il y a deux ans, et la décision de licencier 30% des équipes en une nuit, liste écrite à la mainde la découverte tardive d'un principe juridique clé : en Belgique, la loi prime sur le pacte d'actionnaires, et celui qui détient la majorité des parts peut révoquer un administrateur, même nommé par les investisseursde l'étude "Effectuation", qui distingue deux types de profils de dirigeants : les CEO de formation financière qui partent d'un objectif pour en dérouler un plan, et les CEO entrepreneurs qui partent de ce qu'ils ont déjà pour maximiser la valeur à chaque étape, sans prédire le futurde la transparence radicale comme outil de management : graphiques de trésorerie communiqués publiquement pendant la quasi-faillite, moyennes de salaires publiées en ligne et configurables avant même de postulerdu deuxième pivot vers un modèle Open Core en 2014, avec 80% des applications restées open source et 20% devenues payantes, qui a stabilisé le business model mais fracturé temporairement la confiance de la communautéde l'impact de l'IA sur les équipes : 40% des tickets support traités automatiquement, temps d'upgrade des bases de données divisé par deux, et pourtant Odoo recrute 3 500 personnes sur les 12 prochains mois, convaincu que plus ses équipes sont productives, plus il en fautUn échange dense et sans filtre, où un fondateur revient sur ses erreurs de gouvernance et de communication autant que sur ses réussites, avec une vision claire sur la consolidation à venir du marché des logiciels de gestion.Recommandations de Fabien : "Modern Principles of Economics" de Alex Tabarrok et Tyler Cowen https://www.macmillanlearning.com/ed/uk "Never Split the Difference" de Chris Voss https://www.blackswanltd.com/never-split-the-difference Liens utiles: Fabien Pinckaers : https://www.linkedin.com/in/fpodoo/Odoo : https://www.odoo.com/Finscale est aussi disponible sur YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@finscale.***************************Finscale est bien plus qu'un podcast. Cet épisode est produit et animé par Solenne Niedercorn, fondatrice de Finscale.

Wyatt Thomson of OpenAI speaks with economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about AI, labor markets, and the future of economic growth. The conversation explores one of the most common fears surrounding AI: that increasingly capable systems will eliminate jobs. Cowen and Tabarrok argue instead that economic growth remains the key variable. Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new industries, and expanded living standards, even as they disrupted existing jobs and institutions. They discuss automation, comparative advantage, inequality, education, healthcare, energy, and the kinds of work that may become more valuable in an AI-driven economy. Along the way, they examine longer-term questions about abundance, ownership, AI agents, and how societies can adapt to rapid technological change.   Resources: Follow Tyler on X: https://x.com/tylercowen Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/ATabarrok Follow Wyatt on X: https://x.com/dataWyatt   Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We keep using the terms 'regulation' and 'deregulation' -- and now it's time for a primer. Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 442 of The Seen and the Unseen go discuss first principles AND get into the weeds. What is regulation? When do we need it? When do we not? What's India's journey been like? And finally, why is deregulation both important and difficult? (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out 1. Shruti Rajagopalan on Twitter, Substack, Instagram, her podcast, Ideas of India and her own website. 2. Emergent Ventures India, which is run by Shruti. 3. The 1991 Project. 4. Shruti Rajagopalan Remembers the Angle of the Light -- Episode 410 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 6. Shruti Rajagopalan Dives Into Delimitation -- Episode 336 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. All past episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Shruti Rajagopalan, in reverse chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. 8. Urinal regulation in the Factories Act, 1948. 9. Four Seasons in Rome -- Anthony Doerr. 10. Premature Imitation and India's Flailing State — Shruti Rajagopalan & Alexander Tabarrok. 11. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 12. The Curse of Knowledge. 13. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 14. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 15. The Wealth of Nations -- Adam Smith. 16. The Double 'Thank You' Moment — John Stossel. 17. Profit = Philanthropy — Amit Varma. 18. Traffic -- Tom Vanderbilt. 19. Tonight Is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel -- Barenaked Ladies. 20. Driving in a Foreign Country -- My Italian Diaries: 7 -- Amit Varma. 21. Marching For Salt -- Amit Varma. 22. The Transitional Gains Trap -- Gordon Tullock. 23. Interventionism: An Economic Analysis -- Ludwig von Mises. 24. Mises's dynamics of interventionism: Lessons from Indian agriculture -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 25. Gandhi -- Richard Attenborough. 26. Anton Howes on Trade, Innovation, and the Forgotten History of Salt -- The Ideas of India podcast. 27. Age of Invention, by Anton Howes. 28. A People's Constitution -- Rohit De. 29. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 30. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 31. The Life and Times of the Indian Economy -- Episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 32. The Road to the 1991 Industrial Policy Reforms and Beyond: A Personalized Narrative from the Trenches -- Rakesh Mohan. 33. The Use of Knowledge in Society -- Friedrich Hayek. 34. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 35. A Sixth Of Humanity -- Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. 36. Entry and Exit in Agriculture -- Episode 1 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pavan Srinath and Karthik Shashidhar). 37. Bootleggers and Baptists-The Education of a Regulatory Economist — Bruce Yandle. 38. Farmers, Technology and Freedom of Choice: A Tale of Two Satyagrahas -- Amit Varma. 39. The State of Our Farmers — Episode 86 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gunvant Patil). 40. Talking to an Empty Room -- Sharad Joshi's speeches in the Rajya Sabha. 41. Raees: An Empty Shell of a Gangster Film — Amit Varma. 42. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 43. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 44. Public Choice Theory -- Episode 121 of The Seen and the Unseen. 45. Blendjet. 46. The Whole Truth Foods protein powder that Amit has. 47. The Reflections of Samarth Bansal — Episode 299 of The Seen and the Unseen. 48. The Bad and Complex Tax -- Episode 74 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 49. India's Supreme Court -- Episode 123 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 50. Restaurant Regulations in India — Episode 18 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhu Menon). 51. India's MSME Landscape — Some Useful Frameworks -- Episode 419 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sudhir Sarnobat and Naren Shenoy). 52. What Ails Indian Manufacturing? -- Episode 104 of Everything is Everything. 53. Commands and controls: Planning for Indian industrial development, 1951–1990 -- Rakesh Mohan and Vandana Aggarwal. 54. Futures Markets in Agriculture -- Episode 12 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Shashidhar). 55. Naushad Forbes Wants to Fix India — Episode 282 of The Seen and the Unseen. 56. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 57. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 58. The Economics of Derivatives -- TV Somanathan and V Anantha Nageswaran. 59. Sorry, Wrong Number -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 60. Reforming Agricultural Land Conversion Laws in Indian States -- Shruti Rajagopalan, Shreyas Narla, Ankita Dinkar, Kadambari Shah and Ankit Bhatia. 61. The Case for Nuclear Electricity -- Episode 78 of Everything is Everything. 62. Nuclear Power Can Save the World -- Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist & Steven Pinker. 63. The Right to Property — Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 64. India's Agriculture Crisis — Episode 140 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra and Kumar Anand). 65. Economics in One Lesson — Henry Hazlitt. 66. That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen — Frédéric Bastiat. 67. The Candlemaker's Petition -- Frédéric Bastiat. 68. Marginal Revolution University. 69. Public Choice – A Primer — Eamonn Butler 70. Micromotives and Macrobehavior -- Thomas Schelling. Amit Varma runs a course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. And have you read Amit's newsletter? It's madly active right now! Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: 'The Regulated' by Simahina.

Anil Varanasi is the co-founder and CEO of Meter, which provides full-stack networking infrastructure as a service for businesses. Since founding Meter with his brother Sunil in 2015, Anil has been playing a distinctly long game in one of the most entrenched markets in technology, betting on vertical integration, business model innovation, and a multi-decade time horizon. In this conversation, he unpacks Meter's origin story, from four-plus years of heads-down R&D, and shares how his unconventional approach to planning, management, and pace keeps him excited to run the company for decades. In today's episode, we discuss: Why Anil thinks in 25-year horizons How operating in a monopolistic market shaped Meter's approach Why Meter scrapped a year of OS work during the R&D phase How Meter is rethinking networking's business model Surviving COVID, Apple's M1 transition, and “a thousand bad days” Anil's contrarian views on planning, OKRs, and management How founders can build companies they'll want to run for decades Where to find Anil: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anilcv/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/acv Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast References: ADT: ⁠https://www.adt.com⁠ Alex Honnold: ⁠https://www.alexhonnold.com⁠ Alex Tabarrok: ⁠https://x.com/ATabarrok⁠ ⁠alarm.com⁠: ⁠https://www.alarm.com⁠ Andreessen Horowitz (a16z): ⁠https://a16z.com⁠ Apple: ⁠https://www.apple.com⁠ Bloomberg: ⁠https://www.bloomberg.com⁠ Bryan Caplan: ⁠http://www.bcaplan.com/⁠ Cisco: ⁠https://www.cisco.com⁠ Coca-Cola: ⁠https://www.coca-colacompany.com⁠ George Mason University (GMU): ⁠https://www.gmu.edu⁠ Intel: ⁠https://www.intel.com⁠ Julia Galef: ⁠https://x.com/juliagalef⁠ Martin Casado: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/⁠ Meraki: ⁠https://meraki.cisco.com⁠ Meter: ⁠https://www.meter.com⁠ Michela Giorcelli: ⁠https://x.com/M_Giorcelli⁠ Nicholas Bloom: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-bloom-stanford/⁠ Raffaella Sadun: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/raffaella-sadun-3a182225/⁠ Sanjit Biswas: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjitbiswas/⁠ Sunil Varanasi: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-varanasi-662a01253/⁠ Tyler Cowen: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-cowen-166718/⁠ Twitch: ⁠https://www.twitch.tv⁠ Timestamps: (01:27) Meter's unusual timeframes (04:06) “We don't do OKRs” (06:32) How to plan without planning (08:31) Track your unhappy customers (11:43) How Meter's journey began (15:02) Dissecting the 2010s SaaS boom (17:06) The networking industry trap (21:44) Meter's first roadblock (22:07) Why Shenzhen accelerated Meter's progress (26:29) The process to get a sales-ready product (31:02) Why you should own the full stack (32:45) The surprising thing you should innovate (35:03) Avoiding the one-trick pony trap (37:39) The secret to finding an excellent market (43:48) How COVID's constraints propelled growth (48:25) Why founders need to know their customers (49:34) Why Meter didn't sell via traditional channels (51:44) You need “seller-market fit” (54:51) The danger of meta-work (56:25) Decoupling management from authority (1:02:17) When the person is the problem (1:05:05) The inherent value of going slowly (1:09:41) Running a company for as long as possible

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin ✓ Claim : Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Tyler Cowen is a leading economist, author, and professor, currently holding the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, where he also serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. Widely recognized for his influential economic ideas, Cowen co-authors the long-running blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, and together they have also created Marginal Revolution University, which offers accessible, world-class economics education online. Cowen has also authored several books, including "The Great Stagnation," which analyzes the slowdown in economic growth, and "Average Is Over," exploring the future of work and inequality. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tyler Cowen returns to continue his conversation in Part Two. Tyler Cowen is a leading economist, author, and professor, currently holding the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, where he also serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. Widely recognized for his influential economic ideas, Cowen co-authors the long-running blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, and together they have also created Marginal Revolution University, which offers accessible, world-class economics education online. Cowen has also authored several books, including "The Great Stagnation," which analyzes the slowdown in economic growth, and "Average Is Over," exploring the future of work and inequality. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Tyler Cowen is a leading economist, author, and professor, currently holding the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, where he also serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. Widely recognized for his influential economic ideas, Cowen co-authors the long-running blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, and together they have also created Marginal Revolution University, which offers accessible, world-class economics education online. Cowen has also authored several books, including "The Great Stagnation," which analyzes the slowdown in economic growth, and "Average Is Over," exploring the future of work and inequality. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Prediction markets are a hot topic again — even cartoon characters are talking about them (South Park). But beyond the buzz, what is a prediction market, exactly? How do they work, how are they designed, and what makes them work?We answer all these questions and more in this deep-dive featuring experts Alex Tabarrok (professor of economics at George Mason University) and Scott Kominers (a16z crypto research partner and Harvard Business School professor), in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.While we originally covered this topic during last year's election, the discussion is more relevant than ever today, as we go into the claims people make about prediction markets — what they're good for (and not); how they fit in with other trends like AI, futarchy, and the crisis in scientific publishing; and where blockchains and crypto come in.This is your definitive explainer on the topic.for transcript, links, and more: https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/podcast/prediction-markets-explained/ As a reminder: None of the following should be taken as business, investment, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen also discuss AI and the state of the world economy. Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger. Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University, and is the co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the blog Marginal Revolution. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen discuss the likely economic futures of Europe, Asia, and Africa; how the United States should approach competition with China; and what role young people should ascribe to personal financial advancement in their career choices. ⁠ This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clar⁠⁠i⁠⁠t⁠⁠y⁠⁠.⁠ Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: ⁠http://www.persuasion.community⁠ Podcast production by ⁠Jack Shields⁠, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ Twitter: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@joinpersuasion⁠ Youtube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 469. This is my appearance on Adam Haman's podcast and Youtube channel, Haman Nature (Haman Nature substack), episode HN 149, “Free The DRUGS! Stephan KINSELLA Counters Economist Alex TABARROK On Price Controls | Hn 149” (recorded June 25,  2025). Tabarrok seems to be generally pro-free market and an Austrian or fellow traveler. However, although he sometimes criticizes existing IP law, he is not opposed to intellectual property (IP), unlike all the cool Austro-libertarians. (( The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism. )) And he often proposes changes to IP law—sometimes outrageously goofy ones, such as his truly insane idea of replacing the patent system with $3.5 trillion worth of taxpayer subsidies (if you take his logic for a taxpayer funded "medical innovation price fund" to its limit apply it to all forms of patented innovation and other forms of IP like copyright) (( $30 Billion Taxfunded Innovation Contracts: The “Progressive-Libertarian” Solution; Libertarian Favors $80 Billion Annual Tax-Funded “Medical Innovation Prize Fund; What's Worse: $80 Billion or $30 Million?. )) or based on simplistic assertions or confusions like the idea that we can empirically know that we are on the "wrong side" of the optimal patent term length on his ridiculous "Tabarrok Curve." (( Tabarrok: Patent Policy on the Back of a Napkin; The Overwhelming Empirical Case Against Patent and Copyright; Optimal Patent and Copyright Term Length. )) So even though he's not against IP and thus not a very good libertarian, and he's not a Misesian since he seems to think utility is cardinal, measurable, and knowable, (( "The Problem with Intellectual Property" (2025), Part III.B.2. )) and he's not an IP law expert either, he keeps trotting out proposals to “reform” IP, such as, I guess, banning free trade or urging that the US engage in IP imperialism to twist the arms of other countries like Australia (see below) to adopt the stronger US patent protections that Tabarrok seems to want to reform. (( See various posts on US style IP Imperialism. )) Read more at Tabarrok and Murphy: Why Are US Drug Prices So High? ... Shownotes, links, grok summary, and transcript below. https://youtu.be/gNRsjF3UXT4?si=2T9-4aE3cMPRoMD1 GROK SUMMARY: In the Haman Nature episode featuring patent attorney and libertarian legal theorist Stephan Kinsella, hosted by Adam Haman, the discussion centers on the high cost of prescription drugs in the United States and the misconceptions surrounding proposed solutions, including critiques of arguments made by economist Alex Tabarrok. Kinsella challenges the notion that former President Trump's executive order would effectively lower drug prices, arguing that the issue stems from a complex interplay of government regulations, subsidies, and intellectual property (IP) laws, particularly pharmaceutical patents. He disputes the idea that other countries "free ride" on a supposed U.S. "free market" system, emphasizing that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is far from a free market due to patent-driven monopolies that inflate prices and restrict competition. Kinsella's critique, informed by his extensive work on IP (e.g., his discussions in the Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 469, and articles on c4sif.org), highlights how these monopolies distort market dynamics and prevent natural price equalization through arbitrage across borders. The conversation also addresses Tabarrok's arguments, as discussed in his interview with Bob Murphy, particularly the concept of the "Tabarrok Curve," which posits an optimal level of IP protection to maximize innovation. Kinsella rejects this, asserting that pharmaceutical patents are not the definitive case for IP necessity, as they often delay generic drugs, skew research toward profitable rather than essential medicines, and raise costs for consumers. He points to industries like fashion and software,

Audio file, also on Apple and SpotifyTyler Cowen, Ph.D, is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is the author of 17 books, most recently Talent.: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Tyler has been recognized as one of the most influential economists of the past decade. He initiated and directs the philanthropic project Emergent Ventures, writes a blog Marginal Revolution, and a podcast Conversations With Tyler, and also writes columns for The Free Press." He is writing a new book (and perhaps his last) on Mentors. “Maybe AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] is like porn — I know it when I see it. And I've seen it.”—Tyler CowenOur conversation on acquiring information, A.I., A.G.I., the NIH, the assault on science, the role of doctors in the A.I. era,, the meaning of life, books of the future, and much more.Transcript with linksEric Topol (00:06):Well, hello. This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I am really thrilled today to have the chance to have a conversation with Tyler Cowen, who is, when you look up polymath in the dictionary, you might see a picture of him. He is into everything. And recently in the Economist magazine 1843, John Phipps wrote a great piece profile, the man who wants to know everything. And actually, I think there's a lot to that.Tyler Cowen (00:36):That's why we need longevity work, right?Eric Topol (00:39):Right. So he's written a number of books. How many books now, Tyler?Tyler Cowen:17, I'm not sure.Eric Topol:Only 17? And he also has a blog that's been going on for over 20 years, Marginal Revolution that he does with Alex Tabarrok.Tyler Cowen (00:57):Correct.Eric Topol (00:57):And yeah, and then Conversations with Tyler, a podcast, which I think an awful lot of people are tuned into that. So with that, I'm just thrilled to get a chance to talk with you because I used to think I read a lot, but then I learned about you.“Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or fivebooks. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract byMartin Luther. “—John Phipps, The Economist's 1843I've been reading more from the AIs lately and less from books. So I'll get one good book and ask the AI a lot of questions.Eric Topol (01:24):Yeah. Well, do you use NotebookLM for that?Tyler Cowen (01:28):No, just o3 from OpenAI at the moment, but a lot of the models are very good. Claude, there's others.Eric Topol (01:35):Yeah, yeah. No, I see how that's a whole different way to interrogate a book and it's great. And in fact, that gets me to a topic I was going to get to later, but I'll do it now. You're soon or you have already started writing for the Free Press with Barri Weiss.Tyler Cowen (01:54):That's right, yes. I have a piece coming out later today. It's been about two weeks. It's been great so far.“Tyler Cowen has a mind unlike any I've ever encountered. In a single conversation, it's not at all unusual for him to toggle between DeepSeek, GLP-1s, Haitian art, sacred Tibetan music, his favorite Thai spot in L.A., and LeBron James”—Bari WeissYeah, so that's interesting. I hadn't heard of it until I saw the announcement from Barri and I thought what was great about it is she introduced it. She said, “Tyler Cowen has a mind unlike any I've ever encountered. In a single conversation, it's not at all unusual for him to toggle between DeepSeek, GLP-1s, Haitian art, sacred Tibetan music, his favorite Thai spot in L.A., and LeBron James. Now who could do that, right. So I thought, well, you know what? I need independent confirmation of that, that is as being a polymath. And then I saw Patrick Collison, who I know at Stripe and Arc Institute, “you can have a specific and detailed discussion with him about 17th-century Irish economic thinkers, or trends in African music or the history of nominal GDP targeting. I don't know anyone who can engage in so many domains at the depth he does.” So you're an information acquirer and one of the books you wrote, I love the title Infovore.Tyler Cowen (03:09):The Age of the Infovore, that's right.Eric Topol (03:11):I mean, have people been using that term because you are emblematic of it?“You can have a specific and detailed discussion with him about 17th-century Irish economic thinkers, or trends in African music or the history of nominal GDP targeting. I don't know anyone who can engage in so many domains at the depth he does.”—Patrick CollisonIt was used on the internet at some obscure site, and I saw it and I fell in love with that word, and I thought I should try to popularize it, but it doesn't come from me, but I think I am the popularizer of it.Yeah, well, if anybody was ingesting more information and being able to work with it. That's what I didn't realize about you, Tyler, is restaurants and basketball and all these other fine arts, very impressive. Now, one of the topics I wanted to get into you is I guess related to a topic you've written about fair amount, which is the great stagnation, and right now we're seeing issues like an attack on science. And in the past, you've written about how you want to raise the social status of scientists. So how do you see this current, I would even characterize as a frontal assault on science?Tyler Cowen (04:16):Well, I'm very worried about current Trump administration policies. They change so frequently and so unpredictably, it's a little hard to even describe what they always are. So in that sense, it's a little hard to criticize them, but I think they're scaring away talent. They might scare away funding and especially the biomedical sciences, the fixed costs behind a lot of lab work, clinical trials, they're so high that if you scare money away, it does not come back very readily or very quickly. So I think the problem is biggest perhaps for a lot of the biomedical sciences. I do think a lot of reform there has been needed, and I hope somehow the Trump policies evolve to that sort of reform. So I think the NIH has become too high bound and far too conservative, and they take too long to give grants, and I don't like how the overhead system has been done. So there's plenty of room for improvement, but I don't see so far at least that the efforts have been constructive. They've been mostly destructive.Eric Topol (05:18):Yeah, I totally agree. Rather than creative destruction it's just destruction and it's unfortunate because it seems to be haphazard and reckless to me at least. We of course, like so many institutions rely on NIH funding for the work, but I agree that reform is fine as long as it's done in a very thought out, careful way, so we can eke out the most productivity for the best investment. Now along with that, you started Emergent Ventures where you're funding young talent.Tyler Cowen (05:57):That's right. That's a philanthropic fund. And we now have slightly over 1000 winners. They're not all young, I'd say they're mostly young and a great number of them want to go into the biomedical sciences or have done so. And this is part of what made me realize what an incredible influx of talent we're seeing into those areas. I'm not sure this is widely appreciated by the world. I'm sure you see it. I also see how much of that talent actually is coming from Canada, from Ontario in particular, and I've just become far more optimistic about computational biology and progress in biology and medical cures, fixes, whatever you want to call it, extending lives. 10 years ago, I was like, yeah, who knows? A lot of things looked pretty stuck. Then we had a number of years where life expectancy was falling, and now I think we're on the verge of a true golden age.Eric Topol (06:52):I couldn't agree with you more on that. And I know some of the people that you funded like Anne Wylie who developed a saliva test for Covid out of Yale. But as you say, there's so many great young and maybe not so young scientists all over, Canada being one great reservoir. And now of course I'm worried that we're seeing emigration rather than more immigration of this talent. Any thoughts about that?Tyler Cowen (07:21):Well, the good news is this, I'm in contact with young people almost every day, often from other countries. They still want to come to the United States. I would say I sign an O-1 letter for someone about once a week, and at least not yet has the magic been dissipated. So I'm less pessimistic than some people are, but I absolutely do see the dangers. We're just the biggest market, the freest place we have by far the most ambitious people. I think that's actually the most significant factor. And young people sense that, and they just want to come here and there's not really another place they can go that will fit them.Eric Topol (08:04):Yeah, I mean one of the things as you've probably noted is there's these new forces that are taking on big shouldering. In fact, Patrick Collison with Arc Institute and Chan Zuckerberg for their institute and others like that, where the work you're doing with Emergent Ventures, you're supporting important projects, talents, and if this whole freefall in NIH funding and other agency funding continues, it looks like we may have to rely more on that, especially if we're going to attract some talent from outside. I don't know how else we're going to make. You're absolutely right about how we are such a great destination and great collaborations and mentors and all that history, but I'm worried that it could be in kind of a threatened mode, if you will.Tyler Cowen (08:59):I hope AI lowers costs. As you probably know at Arc, they had Greg Brockman come in for some number of months and he's one of the people, well, he helped build up Stripe, but he also was highly significant in OpenAI behind the GPT-4 model. And to have Greg Brockman at your institute doing AI for what, six months, that's a massive acceleration that actually no university had the wisdom to do, and Arc did. So I think we're seeing just more entrepreneurial thinking in the area. There's still this problem of bottlenecks. So let's say AI is great for drug discovery as it may be. Well, clinical trials then become a bigger bottleneck. The FDA becomes a bigger bottleneck. So rapid improvement in only one area while great is actually not good enough.Eric Topol (09:46):Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that effect in Arc Institute because we both know Patrick Hsu, who's a brilliant young guy who works there and has published some incredible large language models applied to life science in recent months, and it is impressive how they used AI in almost a singular way as compared to as you said, many other leading institutions. So that is I think, a really important thing to emphasize.Tyler Cowen (10:18):Arc can move very quickly. I think that's not really appreciated. So if Patrick Hsu decides Silvana Konermann, Patrick Collison, if they decide something ought to be bought or purchased or set in motion, it can happen in less than a day. And it does happen basically immediately. And it's not only that it's quicker, I think when you have quicker decisions, they're better and it's infectious to the people you're working with. And there's an understanding that the core environment is not a bureaucratic one. So it has a kind of multiplier effect through the institution.Eric Topol (10:54):Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's always been a philosophy in your mind to get stuff done, get s**t done, whatever you want to call it. They're getting it done. And that's what's so impressive. And not just that they've got some new funds available, but rather they're executing in a way that's parallel to the way the world's evolving in the AI front, which is I think faster than most people would ever have expected, anticipated. Now that gets me to a post you had on Marginal Revolution just last week, which one of the things I love about Marginal Revolution is you don't have to read a whole lot of stuff. You just give the bullets, the juice, if you will. Here you wrote o3 and AGI, is April 16th AGI day? And everybody's talking about artificial general intelligence is here. It's going to be here five years, it's going to be seven years.Eric Topol (11:50):It certainly seems to be getting closer. And in this you wrote, “I think it is AGI, seriously. Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be? As I've argued in the past, AGI, however you define it, is not much of a social event per se. It still will take us a long time to use it properly. Benchmarks, benchmarks, blah blah blah. Maybe AGI is like porn — I know it when I see it. And I've seen it.” I thought that was really well done, Tyler. Anything you want to amplify on that?Tyler Cowen (12:29):Look, if I ask at economics questions and I'm trained as an economist, it beats me. So I don't care if other people don't call it AGI, but one of the original definitions of AGI was that it would beat most experts most of the time on most matters, say 90% or above, and we're there. So people keep on shifting the goalposts. They'll say, well, sometimes it hallucinates or it's not very good at playing tic-tac toe, or there's always another complaint. Those are not irrelevant, but I'll just say, sit down, have someone write at a test of 20 questions, you're a PhD, you take the test, let o3 take the test, then have someone grade, see how you've done, then form your opinion. That's my suggestion.Eric Topol (13:16):I think it's pretty practical. I mean, enough with the Turing test, I mean, we've had that Turing test for decades, and I think the way you described it is a little more practical and meaningful these days. But its capabilities to me at least, are still beyond belief eke out of current, not just the large language models, but large reasoning models. And so, it's just gotten to a point where and it's accelerating, every week there's so many other, the competition is good for taking it to the next level.Tyler Cowen (13:50):It can do tasks and it self improves. So o3-pro will be out in a few weeks. It may be out by the time you're hearing this. I think that's obviously going to be better than just pure o3. And then GPT-5 people have said it will be this summer. So every few months there are major advances and there's no sign of those stopping.Eric Topol (14:12):Absolutely. Now, of course, you've been likened to “Treat Tyler like a really good GPT” that is because you're this information meister. What do you ask the man who you can ask anything? That's kind of what we have when we can go to any one of these sites and start our prompts, whatever. So it's kind of funny in some ways you might've annotated this with your quest for knowledge.Tyler Cowen (14:44):Well, I feel I understand the thing better than most people do for that reason, but it's not entirely encouraging to me personally, selfishly to be described that way, whether or not it's accurate. It just means I have a lot more new competition.Eric Topol (14:59):Well, I love this one. “I'm not very interested in the meaning of life, but I'm very interested in collecting information on what other people think is the meaning of life. And it's not entirely a joke” and that's also what you wrote about in the Free Press thing, that most of the things that are going to be written are going to be better AI in the media and that we should be writing books for the AI that's going to ingest them. How do you see this human AI interface growing or moving?Tyler Cowen (15:30):The AI is your smartest reader. It's your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, what is it that I know that's not on the historical record anywhere? That's not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there's no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you'd call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It's now much higher. And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won't make the AI any better. So everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind.Eric Topol (16:26):So you obviously have all throughout your life in reading lots of books. Will your practice still be to do the primary reading of the book, or will you then go to o3 or whatever or the other way around?Tyler Cowen (16:42):I've become fussier about my reading. So I'll pick up a book and start and then start asking o3 or other models questions about the book. So it's like I get a customized version of the book I want, but I'm also reading somewhat more fiction. Now, AI might in time become very good at fiction, but we're not there now. So fiction is more special. It's becoming more human, and I should read more of it, and I'm doing that.Eric Topol (17:10):Yeah, no, that's great. Now, over the weekend, there was a lot of hubbub about Bill Gates saying that we won't need doctors in the next 10 years because of AI. What are your thoughts about that?Tyler Cowen (17:22):Well, that's wrong as stated, but he may have put it in a more complex way. He's a very smart guy of course. AI already does better diagnosis on humans than medical doctors. Not by a lot, but by somewhat. And that's free and that's great, but if you need brain surgery for some while, you still need the human doctor. So human doctors will need to adjust. And if someone imagines that at some point robots do the brain surgery better, well fine. But I'm not convinced that's within the next 10 years. That would surprise me.Eric Topol (17:55):So to that point, recently, a colleague of mine wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about six studies comparing AI alone versus doctors with AI. And in all six studies, the AI did better than the doctors who had access to AI. Now, you could interpret that as, well they don't know how to use AI. They have automation bias or that is true. What do you think?Tyler Cowen (18:27):It's probably true, but I would add as an interpretation, the value of meta rationality has gone up. So to date, we have not selected doctors for their ability to work with AI, obviously, but some doctors have the personal quality, it's quite distinct from intelligence, but if just knowing when they should defer to someone or something else, and those doctors and researchers will become much more valuable. They're sufficiently modest to defer to the AI and have some judgment as to when they should do that. That's now a super important quality. Over time, I hope our doctors have much more of that. They are selected on that basis, and then that result won't be true anymore.Eric Topol (19:07):So obviously you would qualify. There's a spectrum here. The AI enthusiasts, you and I are both in that group, and then there's the doomsayers and there's somewhere middle ground, of course, where people are trying to see the right balance. Are there concerns about AI, I mean anything about that, how it's moving forward that you're worried about?Tyler Cowen (19:39):Well, any change that big one should have very real concerns. Maybe our biggest concern is that we're not sure what our biggest concern should be. One simple effect that I see coming soon is it will devalue the status of a lot of our intellectuals and what's called our chattering class. A lot of its people like us, we won't seem so impressive anymore. Now, that's not the end of the world for everyone as a whole, but if you ask, what does it mean for society to have the status of its elites so punctured? At a time when we have some, I would say very negative forces attacking those elites in other ways, that to me is very concerning.Eric Topol (20:25):Do you think that although we've seen what's happening with the current administration with respect to the tariffs, and we've already talked about the effects on science funding, do you see this as a short-term hit that will eventually prevail? Do you see them selectively supporting AI efforts and finding the right balance with the tech companies to support them and the competition that exists globally with China and whatnot? How are we going to get forward and what some people consider pretty dark times, which is of course, so seemingly at odds with the most extraordinary times of human support with AI?Tyler Cowen (21:16):Well, the Trump people are very pro AI. I think that's one of the good things about the administration, much pro AI and more interested than were the Biden people. The Biden people, you could say they were interested, but they feared it would destroy the whole world, and they wanted to choke and throttle it in a variety of ways. So I think there's a great number of issues where the Trump people have gone very badly wrong, but at least so far AI's not one of them. I'd give them there like an A or A+ so far. We'll see, right?Eric Topol (21:44):Yeah. As you've seen, we still have some of these companies in some kind of a hot seat like Meta and Google regarding their monopolies, and we saw how some of the tech leaders, not all of them, became very supportive, potentially you could interpret that for their own interests. They wanted to give money to the inauguration and also get favor curry some political favor. But I haven't yet seen the commitment to support AI, talk about a golden age for the United States because so much of this is really centered here and some of the great minds that are helping to drive the AI and these models. But I wonder if there's more that can be done so that we continue to lead in this space.Tyler Cowen (22:45):There's a number of issues here. The first is Trump administration policy toward the FTC, I think has not been wonderful. They appointed someone who seems like would be more appropriate for a democratic or more left-leaning administration. But if you look at the people in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, they're excellent, and there's always different forces in any administration. But again, so far so good. I don't think they should continue the antitrust suit against Google that is looking like it's going against Google, but that's not really the Trump administration, that's the judiciary, and that's been underway for quite some while. So with Trump, it's always very hard to predict. The lack of predictability, I would say, is itself a big problem. But again, if you're looking for one area where it's good, that would be my pick.Eric Topol (23:35):Yeah, well, I would agree with that for sure. I just want to see more evidence that we capitalize on the opportunities here and don't let down. I mean, do you think outlawing selling the Nvidia chips to China is the way to do this? It seems like that hurts Nvidia and isn't China going to get whatever they want anyway?Tyler Cowen (24:02):That restriction, I favored when it was put in. I'm now of the view that it has not proved useful. And if you look at how many of those chips get sold, say to Malaysia, which is not a top AI performer, one strongly suspects, they end up going to China. China is incentivized to develop its own high-quality chips and be fully independent of Western supply lines. So I think it's not worked out well.Eric Topol (24:29):Yeah, no, I see that since you've written so much about this, it's good to get your views because I share those views and you know a lot more about this than I would, but it seems like whether it's Malaysia or other channels, they're going to get the Blackwell chips that they want. And it seems like this is almost like during Covid, how you would close down foreign travel. It's like it doesn't really work that well. There's a big world out there, right?Tyler Cowen (25:01):It's an interesting question. What kind of timing do you want for when both America and China get super powerful AI? And I don't think you actually want only America to have it. It's a bit like nuclear weapons, but you don't want China to have it first. So you want some kind of staggered sequence where we're always a bit ahead of them, but they also maybe are constraining us a bit. I hope we're on track to get that, but I really, really don't want China to have it first.Eric Topol (25:31):Yeah, I mean I think there's, as you're pointing out aptly is a healthy managed competition and that if we can keep that lead there, it is good for both and it's good for the world ideally. But getting back, is there anything you're worried about in AI? I mean because I know you're upbeat about its net effective, and we've already talked about amazing potential for efficiency, productivity. It basically upends a lot of economic models of the past, right?Tyler Cowen (26:04):Yes. I think it changes or will change so many parts of life. Again, it's a bit difficult to specify worries, but how we think of ourselves as humans, how we think of our gods, our religions, I feel all that will be different. If you imagine trying to predict the effects of the printing press after Gutenberg, that would've been nearly impossible to do. I think we're all very glad we got the printing press, but you would not say all of it went well. It's not that you would blame the printing press for those subsequent wars, but it was disruptive to the earlier political equilibrium. I think we need to take great care to do it better this time. AI in different forms will be weaponized. There's great potential for destruction there and evil people will use it. So of course, we need to be very much concerned.Eric Topol (26:54):And there's obviously many of these companies have ways to try to have efforts to anticipate that. That is alignments and various safety type parallel efforts like Ilya did when he moved out of OpenAI and others. Is that an important part of each of these big efforts, whether it's OpenAI, Google, or the rest of them anthropic that they put in resources to keep things from going off the tracks?Tyler Cowen (27:34):That's good and it's important, but I think it's also of limited value because the more we learn how to control AI systems directly, the bad guys will have similar lessons, and they will use alignment possibly to make their AIs bad and worse and that it obeys them. So yeah, I'd rather the good guys make progress on what they're trying to do, but don't think it's going to solve the problem. It creates new problems as well.Eric Topol (28:04):So because of AI, do you think you'll write any more books in the future?Tyler Cowen (28:11):I'm writing a book right now. I suspect it will be my last. That book, its title is Mentors. It's about how to mentor individuals and what do the social sciences know about mentoring. My view is that even if the AI could write the book better than I can, that people actually want to read a book like that from a human. I could be wrong, but I think we should in the future, restrict ourselves to books that are better by a human. I will write every day for the rest of my life, but I'm not sure that books make sense at the current moment.Eric Topol (28:41):Yeah, that's a really important point, and I understand that completely. Now, when you write for the Free Press, which will be besides the Conversations with Tyler podcast and the Marginal Revolution, what kind of things will you be writing about in the Free Press?Tyler Cowen (28:56):Well, I just submitted a piece. It's a defense of elitism. So the problem with our elites is that they have not been elitist enough and have not adhered strictly enough to the scientific method. So it's a very simple point. I think to you it would be pretty obvious, but it needs to be said. It's not out there enough in the debate that yes, sometimes the elites have truly and badly let us down, but the answer is not to reject elitism per se, but to impose higher elitist standards on our sometimes supposed elites. So that's the piece I just sent in. It's coming out soon and should be out by the time anyone hears this.Eric Topol (29:33):Well, I look forward to reading that. So besides a polymath, you might be my favorite polymath, Tyler you didn't know that. Also, you're a futurist because when you have that much information ingested, and now of course with a super performance of AI to help, it really does help to try to predict where we're headed. Have I missed anything in this short conversation that you think we should touch on?Tyler Cowen (30:07):Well, I'll touch on a great interest of yours. I like your new book very much. I think over the course of the next 40 years working with AI, we will beat back essentially every malady that kills people. It doesn't mean you live forever. Many, many more people will simply die of what we now call old age. There's different theories as to what that means. I don't have a lot of expertise in that, but the actual things people are dying from will be greatly postponed. And if you have a kid today to think that kid might expect to live to be 97 or even older, that to me is extremely plausible.Tyler Cowen (30:45):I won't be around to see it, but that's a phenomenal development for human beings.Eric Topol (30:50):I share that with you. I'm sad that I won't be around to see it, but exactly as you've outlined, the fact that we're going to be able to have a huge impact on particularly the age-related diseases, but also as you touched on the genetic diseases with genome editing and many other, I think, abilities that we have now controlling the immune system, I mean a central part of how we get into trouble with diseases. So I couldn't agree with you more, and that's a really good note to finish on because so many of the things that we have discussed today, we share similar views and we come at it from totally different worlds. The economist that has a very wide-angle lens, and I guess you'd say the physician who has a more narrow lens aperture. But thank you so much, Tyler for joining me today.Tyler Cowen (31:48):My pleasure. Let me close by telling you some good news. I have AI friends who think you and I, I'm 63 will be around to see that, I don't agree with them they don't convince me, but there are smart people who think the benefits from this will come quite soon.Eric Topol (32:03):I sure hope they're right.Tyler Cowen (32:05):Yes.*******************************************SUPER AGERS, my new book, was released on May 6th. It's about extending our healthspan, and I introduce 2 of my patients (one below, Mrs. L.R.) as exemplars to learn from. This potential to prevent the 3 major age-related diseases would not be possible without the jumps in the science of aging and multimodal A.I. My op-ed preview of the book was published in The NY Times last week. Here's a gift link. I did a podcast with Mel Robbins on the book here. Here's my publisher ‘s (Simon and Schuster) site for the book. If you're interested in the audio book, I am the reader (first time I have done this, quite an experience!)The book was reviewed in WSJ. Here's a gift linkThere have been many pieces written about it. Here's a gift link to the one in the Wall Street Journal and here for the one in the New York Times .**********************Thanks for reading and subscribing to Ground Truths.If you found this interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths— newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, joins Jonah Goldberg to discuss the exceptional nature of American democratic capitalism and debate the merits of all sorts of borders. Later in the episode, Jonah gets a crash course in crypto and asks Alex about the future and ethics of AI and large language models. Show Notes: — Alex's piece on Liberal Fascism and CurtisYarvin The Remnant is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch's offerings—including Jonah's G-File newsletter, weekly livestreams, and other members-only content—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She's an economist, an institution-builder, an ecosystem-nurturer and one of our finest thinkers. Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 410 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about her life & times -- and her remarkable work. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Shruti Rajagopalan on Twitter, Substack, Instagram, her podcast, Ideas of India and her own website. 2. Emergent Ventures India. 3. The 1991 Project. 4. Life Lessons That Are Priceless -- Episodes 400 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Other episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Shruti Rajagopalan, in reverse chronological order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. 6. The Day Ryan Started Masturbating -- Amit Varma's newsletter post explaining Shruti Rajagopalan's swimming pool analogy for social science research. 7. A Deep Dive Into Education -- Episode 54 of Everything is Everything. 8. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 9. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 10. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything is Everything. 11. Where Has All the Education Gone? -- Lant Pritchett. 12. Lant Pritchett Is on Team Prosperity — Episode 379 of The Seen and the Unseen. 13. The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Adam Smith. 14. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith. 15. Commanding Heights -- Daniel Yergin. 16. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 17. Free to Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 18. Economics in One Lesson -- Henry Hazlitt. 19. The Road to Serfdom -- Friedrich Hayek. 20. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 21. The Use of Knowledge in Society -- Friedrich Hayek. 22. Individualism and Economic Order -- Friedrich Hayek. 23. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything.  24. Richard E Wagner at Mercatus and Amazon. 25. Larry White and the First Principles of Money -- Episode 397 of The Seen and the Unseen. 26. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 27. Marginal Revolution. 28. Paul Graham's essays. 29. Commands and controls: Planning for indian industrial development, 1951–1990 -- Rakesh Mohan and Vandana Aggarwal. 30. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 31. India: Planning for Industrialization -- Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai. 32. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration -- Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith. 33. Cows on India Uncut. 34. Abdul Karim Khan on Spotify and YouTube. 35. The Surface Area of Serendipity -- Episode 39 of Everything is Everything. 36. Objects From Our Past -- Episode 77 of Everything is Everything. 37. Sriya Iyer on the Economics of Religion -- The Ideas of India Podcast. 38. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 39. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Pratap Bhanu Mehta: 1, 2. 40. Rohit Lamba Reimagines India's Economic Policy Emphasis -- The Ideas of India Podcast. 41. Rohit Lamba Will Never Be Bezubaan — Episode 378 of The Seen and the Unseen. 42. The Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog. 43. Cost and Choice -- James Buchanan. 44. Philip Wicksteed. 45. Pratap Bhanu Mehta on The Theory of Moral Sentiments -- The Ideas of India Podcast. 46. Conversation and Society — Episode 182 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Russ Roberts). 47. The Common Sense of Political Economy -- Philip Wicksteed. 48. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy — Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 49. Sudhir Sarnobat Works to Understand the World — Episode 350 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 51. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 52. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 54. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 55. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan — Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 56. Breaking Through — Isher Judge Ahluwalia. 57. Breaking Out — Padma Desai. 58. Perestroika in Perspective -- Padma Desai. 59. Shephali Bhatt Is Searching for the Incredible — Episode 391 of The Seen and the Unseen. 60. Pics from the Seen-Unseen party. 61. Pramod Varma on India's Digital Empowerment -- Episode 50 of Brave New World. 59. Niranjan Rajadhyaksha Is the Impartial Spectator — Episode 388 of The Seen and the Unseen. 60. Our Parliament and Our Democracy — Episode 253 of The Seen and the Unseen (w MR Madhavan). 61. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Pranay Kotasthane: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 62. The Overton Window. 63. When Ideas Have Sex -- Matt Ridley. 64. The Three Languages of Politics — Arnold Kling. 65. Arnold Kling and the Four Languages of Politics -- Episode 394 of The Seen and the Unseen. 66. The Double ‘Thank You' Moment — John Stossel. 67. Economic growth is enough and only economic growth is enough — Lant Pritchett with Addison Lewis. 68. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 69. What Does It Mean to Be Libertarian? — Episode 64 of The Seen and the Unseen. 70. The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom -- David Boaz. 71. Publish and Perish — Agnes Callard. 72. Classical Liberal Institute. 73. Shruti Rajagopalan's YouTube talk on constitutional amendments. 74. What I, as a development economist, have been actively “for” -- Lant Pritchett. 75. Can Economics Become More Reflexive? — Vijayendra Rao. 76. Premature Imitation and India's Flailing State — Shruti Rajagopalan & Alexander Tabarrok. 77. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 78. Invisible Infrastructure -- Episode 82 of Everything is Everything. 79. The Sundara Kanda. 80. Devdutt Pattanaik and the Stories That Shape Us -- Episode 404 of The Seen and the Unseen. 81. Y Combinator. 82. Space Fields. 83. Apoorwa Masuk, Onkar Singh Batra, Naman Pushp, Angad Daryani, Deepak VS and Srijon Sarkar. 84. Deepak VS and the Man Behind His Face — Episode 373 of The Seen and the Unseen. 85. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away -- The Beatles. 86. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 87. Data For India -- Rukmini S's startup. 88. Whole Numbers And Half Truths — Rukmini S. 89. The Moving Curve — Rukmini S's Covid podcast, also on all podcast apps. 90. The Importance of Data Journalism — Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 91. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 92. Prosperiti. 93. This Be The Verse — Philip Larkin. 94. The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal -- Gurcharan Das. 95. Zakir: 1951-2024 -- Shruti Rajagopalan. 96. Dazzling Blue -- Paul Simon, featuring Karaikudi R Mani. 97. John Coltrane, Shakti, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan, Pannalal Ghosh, Nikhil Banerjee, Vilayat Khan, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bhimsen Joshi, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Esperanza Spalding, MS Subbulakshmi, Lalgudi Jayaraman, TN Krishnan, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Ranjani-Gayatri and TM Krishna on Spotify. 98. James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Israel Kirzner, Mario Rizzo, Vernon Smith, Thomas Schelling and Ronald Coase. 99. The Calculus of Consent -- James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. 100. Tim Harford and Martin Wolf. 101. The Shawshank Redemption -- Frank Darabont. 102. The Marriage of Figaro in The Shawshank Redemption. 103. An Equal Music -- Vikram Seth. 104. Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 - Zubin Mehta and the Belgrade Philharmonic. 105. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's violin concertos. 106. Animal Farm -- George Orwell. 107. Down and Out in Paris and London -- George Orwell. 108. Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift. 109. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass -- Lewis Carroll. 110. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 111. The Gulag Archipelago -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 112. Khosla Ka Ghosla -- Dibakar Banerjee. 113. Mr India -- Shekhar Kapur. 114. Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi -- Satyen Bose. 114. Finding Nemo -- Andrew Stanton. 115. Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny. 116. Michael Madana Kama Rajan -- Singeetam Srinivasa Rao. 117. The Music Box, with Laurel and Hardy. 118. The Disciple -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 119. Court -- Chaitanya Tamhane. 120. Dwarkesh Patel on YouTube. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Learn' by Simahina.

Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen also discuss AI and the state of the world economy. Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger. Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University, and is the co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the blog Marginal Revolution. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen discuss the likely economic futures of Europe, Asia, and Africa; how the United States should approach competition with China; and what role young people should ascribe to personal financial advancement in their career choices. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're revisiting this special Christmas episode of The Curious Task from 2019. ---  Alex Aragona chats with Alex Tabarrok on this very special Christmas episode of The Curious Task as he explores whether gift giving is inefficient, and if there are better ways to give to others. References from Episode 21 with Alex Tabbarok You can watch a video of Alex Tabbarok and Tyler Cowen discuss gift giving here Giving to my Wild Self article can be found here

with @atabarrok @skominers @smc90We've heard a lot about the premise and the promise of prediction markets for a long time, but they finally hit the main stage with the most recent election. So what worked (and didn't) this time? Are they better than pollsters, journalists, domain experts, superforecasters?So in this conversation, we tease apart the hype from the reality of prediction markets, from the recent election to market foundations... going more deeply into the how, why, and where these markets work. We also discuss the design challenges and opportunities, including implications for builders throughout. And we also cover other information aggregation mechanisms -- from peer prediction to others -- given that prediction markets are part of a broader category of information-elicitation and information-aggregation mechanisms.Where do (and don't) blockchain and crypto technologies come in -- and what specific features (decentralization, transparency, real-time, open source, etc.) matter most, and in what contexts? Finally, we discuss applications for prediction and decision markets -- things we could do right away to in the near-to distant future -- touching on everything from corporate decisions and scientific replication to trends like AI, DeSci, futarchy/ governance, and more?Our special expert guests are Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University and Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center; and Scott Duke Kominers, research partner at a16z crypto, and professor at Harvard Business School  -- both in conversation with Sonal Chokshi.RESOURCES(from links to research mentioned to more on the topics discussed)The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek (American Economic Review, 1945)Everything is priced in by rsd99 (r/wallstreetbets, 2019)Idea Futures (aka prediction markets, information markets) by Robin Hanson (1996)Auctions: The Social Construction of Value  by Charles SmithSocial value of public information by Stephen Morris and Hyun Song Shin (American Economic Review, December 2002)Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research by Anna Dreber, Thomas Pfeiffer, Johan Almenberg, Siri Isaksson, Brad Wilson, Yiling Chen, Brian Nosek, and Magnus Johannesson (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 2015)A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem by Dražen Prelec, Sebastian Seung, and John McCoy (Nature, January 2017)Targeting high ability entrepreneurs using community information: Mechanism design in the field by Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin Roth (American Economic Review, March 2022)Information aggregation mechanisms: concept, design, and implementation for a sales forecasting problem by Charles Plott and Kay-Yut Chen, Hewlett Packard Laboratories (March 2002)If I had a million [on deciding to dump the CEO or not] by Robin Hanson (2008)Futarchy: Vote values, but bet beliefs by Robin Hanson (2013)From prediction markets to info finance by Vitalik Buterin (November 2024)Composability is innovation by Linda Xie (June 2021)Composability is to software as compounding interest is to finance by Chris Dixon (October 2021)resources & research on DAOs, a16z crypto  

Aurélie Ouss talks about how changing who pays for incarceration affects sentencing decisions. “Misaligned incentives and the scale of incarceration in the United States” by Aurélie Ouss. OTHER RESEARCH WE DISCUSS IN THIS EPISODE: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. "The rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment" by David H. Autor and Mark G. Duggan. "Incentives to provide local public goods: fiscal federalism, Russian style" by Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. "Political Economy at Any Speed: What Determines Traffic Citations?" by Michael D. Makowsky and Thomas Stratmann. "Local Government Dependence on Criminal Justice Revenue and Emerging Constraints" by Shannon R.Graham and Michael D.Makowsky. "More Tickets, Fewer Accidents: How Cash-Strapped Towns Make for Safer Roads" by Michael D. Makowsky and Thomas Stratmann. "To Serve and Collect: The Fiscal and Racial Determinants of Law Enforcement" by Michael D. Makowsky, Thomas Stratmann, and Alex Tabarrok. "Finders keepers: forfeiture laws, policing incentives, and local budgets" by Katherine Baicker and Mireille Jacobson. "When Punishment Doesn't Pay: Cold Glow and Decisions to Punish" by Aurélie Ouss and Alexander Peysakhovich. "Correctional ‘Free Lunch'? Cost Neglect Increases Punishment in Prosecutors" by Eyal Aharoni, Heather M. Kleider-Offutt, and Sarah F. Brosnan. "Organizational structure, police activity and crime" by Itai Ater, Yehonatan Givati, and Oren Rigbi. "Incarceration and Crime: Evidence from California's Public Safety Realignment Reform" by Magnus Lofstrom and Steven Raphael. "Impacts of Private Prison Contracting on Inmate Time Served and Recidivism" by Anita Mukherjee.

Why is the housing market in India so expensive? Why is buying a house a decision fraught with risk and uncertainty? How can we find clues about the nexus between the builders and the politicians? This week, we speak to Vaidehi Tandel, an urban economist, who has researched into the issues that plague India's housing market.भारत में घर इतने महंगे क्यों है? घर खरीदना जोखिम और अनिश्चितता से भरा फैसला क्यों है? बिल्डरों और राजनेताओं के बीच सांठगांठ के बारे में सुराग कैसे मिलेंगे? इस सप्ताह पुलियाबाज़ी पर हमारे साथ जुडी अर्बन अर्थशास्त्री वैदेही टंडेल, जिन्होंने भारत के रियल एस्टेट को प्रभावित करने वाले मुद्दों पर शोध की है। वे मैनचेस्टर यूनिवर्सिटी में अर्बन इकोनॉमिक्स और रियल एस्टेट के विषय पढ़ाती हैं। We discuss:* Magical cities* Why are cities more productive?* Are Indian cities dense?* How to improve housing supply?* Issues with FSI constraints* Is the CBD-centric model good or bad?* Why are our urban areas dilapidated?* Vacant lands in cities* Litigations in Real Estate* Lemons in Housing Market* Impact of RERA* Real Estate in China* Rationalisation of building codesReadings:Do Mandatory Disclosures Squeeze the Lemons? The Case of Housing Markets in India by Vaidehi Tandel, Sahil Gandhi, Anupam Nanda & Nandini AgnihotriBuilding networks: Investigating the quid pro quo between local politicians & developers by Vaidehi Tandel, Sahil Gandhi and Alex TabarrokToo slow for the urban march: Litigations and the real estate market in Mumbai, India by Sahil Gandhi, Vaidehi Tandel, Alex Tabarrok and Shamika Ravi Related Puliyabaazi about Cities and Urbanisation:भारत का भविष्य हमारे शहर तय करेंगे। Managing India's Cities ft. Devashish Dhar, Authorएक अच्छे शहर का मतलब क्या है? Urbanisation Done Right.If you have any questions for the guest or feedback for us, please comment here or write to us at puliyabaazi@gmail.com. If you like our work, please subscribe and share this Puliyabaazi with your friends, family and colleagues.substack: Website: https://puliyabaazi.inGuest: @VaidehiTandelHosts: @saurabhchandra @pranaykotas @thescribblebeeTwitter: @puliyabaazi Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puliyabaazi/Subscribe & listen to the podcast on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Castbox, AudioBoom, YouTube, Spotify or any other podcast app. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.puliyabaazi.in

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI #81: Alpha Proteo, published by Zvi on September 12, 2024 on LessWrong. Following up on Alpha Fold, DeepMind has moved on to Alpha Proteo. We also got a rather simple prompt that can create a remarkably not-bad superforecaster for at least some classes of medium term events. We did not get a new best open model, because that turned out to be a scam. And we don't have Apple Intelligence, because it isn't ready for prime time. We also got only one very brief mention of AI in the debate I felt compelled to watch. What about all the apps out there, that we haven't even tried? It's always weird to get lists of 'top 50 AI websites and apps' and notice you haven't even heard of most of them. Table of Contents 1. Introduction. 2. Table of Contents. 3. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. So many apps, so little time. 4. Language Models Don't Offer Mundane Utility. We still don't use them much. 5. Predictions are Hard Especially About the Future. Can AI superforecast? 6. Early Apple Intelligence. It is still early. There are some… issues to improve on. 7. On Reflection It's a Scam. Claims of new best open model get put to the test, fail. 8. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Bots listen to bot music that they bought. 9. They Took Our Jobs. Replit agents build apps quick. Some are very impressed. 10. The Time 100 People in AI. Some good picks. Some not so good picks. 11. The Art of the Jailbreak. Circuit breakers seem to be good versus one-shots. 12. Get Involved. Presidential innovation fellows, Oxford philosophy workshop. 13. Alpha Proteo. DeepMind once again advances its protein-related capabilities. 14. Introducing. Google to offer AI podcasts on demand about papers and such. 15. In Other AI News. OpenAI raising at $150b, Nvidia denies it got a subpoena. 16. Quiet Speculations. How big a deal will multimodal be? Procedural games? 17. The Quest for Sane Regulations. Various new support for SB 1047. 18. The Week in Audio. Good news, the debate is over, there might not be another. 19. Rhetorical Innovation. You don't have to do this. 20. Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult. Do you have a plan? 21. People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone. How much ruin to risk? 22. Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone. Moving faster. 23. Six Boats and a Helicopter. The one with the discord cult worshiping MetaAI. 24. The Lighter Side. Hey, baby, hey baby, hey. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility ChatGPT has 200 million active users. Meta AI claims 400m monthly active users and 185m weekly actives across their products. Meta has tons of people already using their products, and I strongly suspect a lot of those users are incidental or even accidental. Also note that less than half of monthly users use the product monthly! That's a huge drop off for such a useful product. Undermine, or improve by decreasing costs? Nate Silver: A decent bet is that LLMs will undermine the business model of boring partisans, there's basically posters on here where you can 100% predict what they're gonna say about any given issue and that is pretty easy to automate. I worry it will be that second one. The problem is demand side, not supply side. Models get better at helping humans with translating if you throw more compute at them, economists think this is a useful paper. Alex Tabarrok cites the latest paper on AI 'creativity,' saying obviously LLMs are creative reasoners, unless we 'rule it out by definition.' Ethan Mollick has often said similar things. It comes down to whether to use a profoundly 'uncreative' definition of creativity, where LLMs shine in what amounts largely to trying new combinations of things and vibing, or to No True Scotsman that and claim 'real' creativity is something else beyond that. One way to interpret Gemini's capabilities tests is ...

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the co-author of Marginal Revolution, one of the most popular and long-running blogs on the internet.    In this episode of World of DaaS, Alex and Auren discuss: The decline of American dynamismChallenges to innovationCrime and bail reformPreparing for the next pandemicLooking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.  You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Alex Tabarrok on X at @ATabarrok.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

Why is our political discourse so polarised? Why do we shout past each other instead of talking to each other? Arnold Kling joins Amit Varma in episode 394 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his life, the state of the world and how a fourth language has joined the three he mentioned in his seminal book on political discourse. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Arnold Kling on Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon and his own website. 2. In My Tribe -- Arnold Kling on Substack. 3. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 4. Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics -- Arnold Kling. 5. Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work -- Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. 6. Not What They Had in Mind: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008 -- Arnold Kling. 7. Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care -- Arnold Kling. 8. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 9. David Boaz and the state of libertarianism -- Arnold Kling. 10. Splinter Groups -- Arnold Kling. 11. Seeing Like a State -- James C Scott. 12. A Million Mutinies Now -- VS Naipaul. 13. The Median Voter Theorem. 14. India Needs Decentralization -- Episode 47 of Everything is Everything. 15. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 16. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 17. Stage.in. 18. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 19. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution -- CP Snow. 20. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 21. Arnold Kling's extended biographical note on himself. 22. The Best and the Brightest -- David Halberstam. 23. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame. 24. The State of AI with Marc & Ben -- The A16Z Podcast. 25. The Cash Nexus -- Niall Ferguson. 26. Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's blog. 27. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Alex Tabarrok: 1, 2, 3, 4. 28. Stubborn Attachments -- Episode 106 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tyler Cowen). 29. Conversation and Society — Episode 182 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Russ Roberts). 30. This Be The Verse — Philip Larkin. 31. Free to Choose -- The documentary series by Milton Friedman. 32. The Anxious Generation -- Jonathan Haidt. 33. The Life and Times of the Indian Economy — Episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 34. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 35. Arnold Kling's July 19 post on JD Vance. 36. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 37. Eric Weinstein Won't Toe the Line — Episode 330 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web -- Bari Weiss. 39. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence — Amit Varma. 40. The Experience Machine. 41. What is Populism? — Jan-Werner Müller. 42. The Populist Playbook — Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 43. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Matt Y's Declaration of Independence -- Arnold Kling. 45. Lies, Damned Lies, and Productivity Data -- Arnold Kling. 46. Everything Is Amazing & Nobody Is Happy -- Louis CK. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Don't Fight' by Simahina.

Our cities have changed -- but the ways in which they are governed and imagined can take time to catch up. Shashi Verma joins Amit Varma in episode 386 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe his journey in thought and action -- and his pioneering work in reshaping urban transport. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Shashi Verma on LinkedIn and Centre for London. 2. Shashi Verma on Transport in the 21st Century -- Episode 83 of Brave New World, hosted by Vasant Dhar. 3. The Brave New Future of Electricity -- Episode 40 of Everything is Everything. 4. Guns, Germs and Steel -- Jared Diamond. 5. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 6. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 7. Deepak VS and the Man Behind His Face — Episode 373 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. How We Do the Small Things -- Amit Varma. 9. Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance — Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck. 10. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 11. Confronting Constraints: Shashi Verma & Transport for London Tackle a Tough Contract -- Harvard case study. 12. Firms, Contracts, and Financial Structure -- Oliver Hart. 13. India: The Dabhol Power Corporation -- Shashi Verma's case study for Harvard Kennedy School. 14. The Practice of Medicine — Episode 229 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Lancelot Pinto). 15. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 16. Dunbar's number. 17. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities -- Greg Woolf. 18. The Complete Sherlock Holmes -- Arthur Conan Doyle. 19. Urban Governance in India — Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 20. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 21. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 23. The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs. 24. The Power Broker — Robert Caro. 25.  Michael Beesley and Cost Benefit Analysis -- CD Foster. 26. Pritika Hingorani Wants to Fix Our Cities -- Episode 361 of The Seen and the Unseen. 27. Reclaim the Sky -- Episode 11 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 28. Status Quo Bias. 29. Parkinson's Law — C Northcote Parkinson. 30. Seen/Unseen episodes with singing by Karthik Muralidharan and Ashwini Deshpande -- and no singing by TM Krishna. 31. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages — Peggy Mohan. 32. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 33. Pyaasa -- Guru Dutt. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘London Calling' by Simahina.

Economics and public policy touch all our lives, and have humanitarian consequences. But isn't it damn boring? No! Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane join Amit Varma in episode 374 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk policy and comics -- and how they came together in their book, We the Citizens. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) I strongly recommend that you check out the courses and the output of the Takshashila Institution. What they do is nothing less than a great public service to India. Also check out: 1. Khyati Pathak on Twitter, Instagram, Substack and her own website of comics. 2. Anupam Manur on Twitter, LinkedIn and the Takshashila Institution. 3. Pranay Kotasthane on Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon and the Takshashila Institution. 4. We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic -- Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur and Pranay Kotasthane. 5. Puliyabaazi — Pranay Kotasthane and Khyati Pathak's podcast (co-hosted with Saurabh Chandra). 6. Anticipating the Unintended — Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's newsletter. 7. Missing In Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy — Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley. 8. The Long Road From Neeyat to Neeti — Episode 313 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane & Raghu S Jaitley). 9. Pranay Kotasthane Talks Public Policy — Episode 233 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. The Semiconductor Wars -- Episode 358 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane & Abhiram Manchi). 11. Older episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Pranay Kotasthane: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 12. Protectionism -- Episode 59 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Anupam Manur). 13. The Incredible Curiosities of Mukulika Banerjee — Episode 276 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Toan Truong's Twitter thread on learning how to learn. 15. Harvard's CS50 course. 16. A Bushel is equal to "2 kennings, 4 pecks, or 8 dry gallons." 17. A trade deficit with a babysitter (2005) — Tim Harford. 18. 1984 -- George Orwell. 19. The Double ‘Thank-You' Moment — John Stossel. 20. There's no speed limit -- Derek Sivers. 21. A Deep Dive Into the Indian Military -- Episode 31 of Everything is Everything. 22. A Deep Dive Into Ukraine vs Russia — Episode 335 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 23. The State of the Ukraine War -- Episode 14 of Everything is Everything. 24. The Economics of Arms -- Keith Hartley. 25. The Indian Armed Forces — Episode 175 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Lt Gen Prakash Menon). 26. India in the Nuclear Age — Episode 80 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Lt Gen Prakash Menon). 27. Guns vs Butter. 28. This Passing Moment -- Amit Varma on Opportunity Cost. 29. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 30. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration -- Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith. 31. What's Wrong With Indian Agriculture? -- Episode 18 of Everything is Everything. 32. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on agriculture (in reverse chronological order): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 33. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 34. India's Massive Pensions Crisis — Episode 347 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah & Renuka Sane). 35. The Reformers -- Episode 28 of Everything is Everything. 36. The Overton Window. 37. Yugank Goyal Is out of the Box -- Episode 370 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Deepak VS and the Man Behind His Face -- Episode 373 of The Seen and the Unseen. 39. Radical Markets -- Eric Posner and E Glen Weyl. 40. Karejwa -- Varun Grover, Ankit Kapoor and Sumit Kumar. 41. Parsai -- Mansi Sharma and Sumit Kumar. 42. So Below -- Sam Wallman. 43. Manjula Padmanabhan is a Forever Outsider -- Episode 372 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Irfan, the Keeper of Memories -- Episode 368 of The Seen and the Unseen. 45. The Life and Times of Ira Pande -- Episode 369 of The Seen and the Unseen. 46. Understanding the State -- Episode 25 of Everything is Everything. 47. When Should the State Act? -- Episode 26 of Everything is Everything. 48. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of The Seen and the Unseen. 49. Swapna Liddle and the Many Shades of Delhi -- Episode 367 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. Radically Networked Societies — Episode 158 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane). 51. भारतीय भाषाओँ में हमारे अतीत के सुराग़ -- Episode 106 of Puliyabaazi (w Peggy Mohan). 52. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 53. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages — Peggy Mohan. 54. We, The Citizens: A Review -- Ashish Kulkarni. 55. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. 56. Our Population Is Our Greatest Asset -- Episode 20 of Everything is Everything. 57. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 58. Anupam Manur's piece on water pricing in Bangalore. 59. The Great Redistribution (2015) — Amit Varma. 60. Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist — Bruce Yandle. 61.  ये लिबरल आख़िर है कौन? — Episode 37 of Puliyabaazi (w Amit Varma). 62. We the Living -- Ayn Rand. 63. so you want to be a writer? -- Charles Bukowski. 64. Vijay Kelkar's legendary CD Deshmukh Lecture. 65. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 66. Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed? -- Devesh Kapur. 67. Milton Friedman on India. 68. The Dalit Emancipation Manifesto of 1951 — Babasaheb Ambedkar. 69. How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time -- Hal Varian. 70. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 71. We Want More FSI -- Episode 11 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 72. Defending the Undefendable -- Walter Block. 73. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 74. Free To Choose -- Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. 75. Capitalism and Freedom -- Milton Friedman. 76. Milton Friedman Speaks -- Collected speeches in a YouTube playlist. 77. The Economist. 78. Free Trade under Fire -- Douglas Irwin. 79. The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye -- Sonny Liew. Amit's newsletter is explosively active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘The Artist' by Simahina.

So what if he is an academic? He is also an an original thinker with deep insights about education, elections, colonisation, politics, history, society. Yugank Goyal joins Amit Varma in episode 370 of The Seen and the Unseen to throw thought-bomb after thought-bomb at all of us. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Yugank Goyal on Twitter, LinkedIn, EPW, Flame University and Google Scholar. 2. Who Moved My Vote? -- Yugank Goyal and Arun Kumar Kaushik. 3. Documenting India: The Centre for Knowledge Alternatives. 4. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 5. Robert Sapolsky's biology lectures on YouTube. 6. Harvard's CS50 course. 7. Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. 8. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 9. The Superiority of Economists -- Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan. 10. Publish and Perish — Agnes Callard. 11. The Long Divergence — Timur Kuran. 12. The Incredible Insights of Timur Kuran — Episode 349 of The Seen and the Unseen. 13. Suyash Rai Embraces India's Complexity — Episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Premchand on Amazon and Wikipedia. 15. Dead Poet's Society -- Peter Weir. 16. Maithili Sharan Gupt and Jaishankar Prasad. 17. Kafan -- Premchand. 18. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 19. Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? — AK Ramanujan. 20. The Intimate Enemy -- Ashis Nandy. 21. The Colonial Constitution — Arghya Sengupta. 22. Arghya Sengupta and the Engine Room of Law -- Episode 366 of The Seen and the Unseen. 23. The History of British India -- James Mill. 24. SN Balagangadhara (aka Balu) on Amazon and Wikipedia. 25. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 26. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Manu Pillai: 1, 2, 3, 4. 27. Pride and Prejudice -- Jane Austen. 28. Ranjit Hoskote is Dancing in Chains -- Episode 363 of The Seen and the Unseen. 29. The UNIX Episode -- Episode 32 of Everything is Everything. 30. The Evolution of Everything -- Matt Ridley. 31. The Evolution of Everything -- Episode 96 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Matt Ridley). 32. The Evolution of Cooperation -- Robert Axelrod. 33. Kantara -- Rishab Shetty. 34. Early Indians — Episode 112 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tony Joseph). 35. Early Indians — Tony Joseph. 36. Who We Are and How We Got Here — David Reich. 37. Alice Evans Studies the Great Gender Divergence — Episode 297 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. The People of India -- Herbert Risley. 39. Rahul Matthan Seeks the Protocol — Episode 360 of The Seen and the Unseen. 40. Gangs of Wasseypur -- Anurag Kashyap. 41. Why Children Labour (2007) -- Amit Varma. 42. Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped — Amit Varma. 43. Intimate City — Manjima Bhattacharjya. 44. Manjima Bhattacharjya: The Making of a Feminist — Episode 280 of The Seen and the Unseen. 45. A Life in Indian Politics — Episode 149 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jayaprakash Narayan). 46. Politics — A limerick by Amit Varma. 47. India's Far From Free Markets (2005) — Amit Varma in the Wall Street Journal. 48. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. 49. Public Choice Theory Explains SO MUCH -- Episode 33 of Everything is Everything. 50. Ramayana, the 1987 serial, on Wikipedia and YouTube. 51. 300 Ramayanas — AK Ramanujan. 52. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi — Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 53. The BJP Before Modi — Episode 202 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 54. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 55. Cycle -- Prakash Kumte. 56. Mulshi Pattern -- Pravin Tarde. 57. The Heathen in His Blindness -- SN Balagangadhara. Amit's newsletter is explosively active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Look Inside the Box' by Simahina.

Cities are that miraculous technology that bring people together to make us all better, richer, happier. But bad planning, or even too much planning, can turn them into hellholes. Pritika Hingorani joins Amit Varma in episode 361 of The Seen and the Unseen to share her insights on how we should think about cities, how governments do policy, and what economics can bring to urban planning. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Pritika Hingorani at Artha Global and Twitter. 2. The Importance of Cities — Episode 108 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Reuben Abraham & Pritika Hingorani). 3. Global Health Impacts for Economic Models of Climate Change -- Pritika Hingorani and Vaidehi Tandel. 4. Financing urban infrastructure for an evolving India -- Pritika Hingorani, Sharmadha Srinivasan & Harshita Agrawal. 5. Reforming Urban India -- Pritika Hingorani et al. (Page 14 of this report has the map Pritika mentions in the episode.) 6. India Infrastructure Report: Making Housing Affordable -- Various authors. 7. Bombay: The Cities Within -- Sharada Dwiwedi and Rahul Mehrotra. 8. Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities -- Alain Bertaud. 9. The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs. 10. Norwegian Wood -- Haruki Murakami. 11. Absolutely on Music -- Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa. 12. Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami on Amazon. 13. Piercing -- Ryu Murakami. 14. Pranay Kotasthane Talks Public Policy -- Episode 233 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength — Amit Varma. 16. Miniature early episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on FSI and Rent Control with Alex Tabarrok, and Slums with Pavan Srinath. 17. The Mystery of Capital —  Hernando De Soto. 18. The Incredible Insights of Timur Kuran — Episode 349 of The Seen and the Unseen. 19. The Power Broker -- Robert Caro. 20. Urban expansion: theory, evidence and practice -- Shlomo Angel. 21. Atlas of Urban Expansion. 22. Islamic Empires: Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization -- Justin Marozzi. 23. The City and the City -- China Miéville. 24. The Faltering Escalator of Urban Opportunity -- David Autor. 25. The Shane Parrish tweet on WFH. 26. Securing the Home Market -- Alice Amsden. 27. The Elusive Quest for Growth -- William Easterly. 28. Participatory Democracy — Episode 160 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 29. Cities and Citizens — Episode 198 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 30. Helping Others in the Fog of Pandemic -- Episode 226 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 31. Parkinson's Law. 32. Karthik Muralidharan Examines the Indian State -- Episode 290 of The Seen and the Unseen. 33. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State — Amit Varma. 34. Urban Governance in India -- Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 35. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 36. The Skeptical Environmentalist — Bjorn Lomborg. 37. London 1870-1914: A City at Its Zenith -- Andrew Saint. 38. Modi's Lost Opportunity — ep 119 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Salman Soz). 39. Wanting — Luke Burgis. 40. Luke Burgis Sees the Deer at His Window — Episode 337 of The Seen and the Unseen. 41. We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates (2008) — Amit Varma. 42. Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India's First Women in Medicine — Kavitha Rao. 43. Kavitha Rao and Our Lady Doctors — Episode 235 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. The Memoirs of Dr Haimabati Sen — Haimabati Sen (translated by Tapan Raychoudhuri). 45. Living London History -- The blog Pritika mentions. 46. Good Bye, Lenin -- Wolfgang Becker. This episode is sponsored by the Pune Public Policy Festival 2024, which takes place on January 19 & 20, 2024. The theme this year is Trade-offs! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘These Are People' by Simahina.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Scaling laws for dominant assurance contracts, published by jessicata on November 30, 2023 on LessWrong. (note: this post is high in economics math, probably of narrow interest) Dominant assurance contracts are a mechanism proposed by Alex Tabarrok for funding public goods. The following summarizes a 2012 class paper of mine on dominant assurance contracts. Mainly, I will be determining how much the amount of money a dominant assurance contract can raise as a function of how much value is created for how many parties, under uncertainty about how much different parties value the public good. Briefly, the conclusion is that, while Tabarrok asserts that the entrepreneur's profit is proportional to the number of consumers under some assumptions, I find it is proportional to the square root of the number of consumers under these same assumptions. The basic idea of assurance contracts is easy to explain. Suppose there are N people ("consumers") who would each benefit by more than $S > 0 from a given public good (say, a piece of public domain music) being created, e.g. a park (note that we are assuming linear utility in money, which is approximately true on the margin, but can't be true at limits). An entrepreneur who is considering creating the public good can then make an offer to these consumers. They say, everyone has the option of signing a contract; this contract states that, if each other consumer signs the contract, then every consumer pays $S, and the entrepreneur creates the public good, which presumably costs no more than $NS to build (so the entrepreneur does not take a loss). Under these assumptions, there is a Nash equilibrium of the game, in which each consumer signs the contract. To show this is a Nash equilibrium, consider whether a single consumer would benefit by unilaterally deciding not to sign the contract in a case where everyone else signs it. They would save $S by not signing the contract. However, since they don't sign the contract, the public good will not be created, and so they will lose over $S of value. Therefore, everyone signing is a Nash equilibrium. Everyone can rationally believe themselves to be pivotal: the good is created if and only if they sign the contract, creating a strong incentive to sign. Tabarrok seeks to solve the problem that, while this is a Nash equilibrium, signing the contract is not a dominant strategy. A dominant strategy is one where one would benefit by choosing that strategy (signing or not signing) regardless of what strategy everyone else takes. Even if it would be best for everyone if everyone signed, signing won't make a difference if at least one other person doesn't sign. Tabarrok solves this by setting a failure payment $F > 0, and modifying the contract so that if the public good is not created, the entrepreneur pays every consumer who signed the contract $F. This requires the entrepreneur to take on risk, although that risk may be small if consumers have a sufficient incentive for signing the contract. Here's the argument that signing the contract is a dominant strategy for each consumer. Pick out a single consumer and suppose everyone else signs the contract. Then the remaining consumer benefits by signing, by the previous logic (the failure payment is irrelevant, since the public good is created whenever the remaining consumer signs the contract). Now consider a case where not everyone else signs the contract. Then by signing the contract, the remaining consumer gains $F, since the public good is not created. If they don't sign the contract, they get nothing and the public good is still not created. This is still better for them. Therefore, signing the contract is a dominant strategy. What if there is uncertainty about how much the different consumers value the public good? This can be modeled as a Bayesi...

She's covered US-India relations as a foreign correspondent for more than 30 years -- and now she's told that momentous story in a book. Seema Sirohi joins Amit Varma in episode 357 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about her life as a journalist -- and the love-hate relationship between countries that she saw at close quarters. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out 1. Seema Sirohi on Twitter, Economic Times, India Today and Amazon. 2. Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story -- Seema Sirohi. 3. The Luxury Travel Expert on YouTube. 4. The Front Page -- Billy Wilder. 5. The Bhopal Gas Tragedies -- Episode 35 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 6. Playboy Stories: The Best of Forty Years of Short Fiction -- Edited by Alice K Turner. 7. Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. 8. Persuasion -- Founded and edited by Yascha Mounk. 9. 9/11 and Pakistan's economy (2006) -- Amit Varma on the Al Faeda nickname. 10. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working — Jonathan Rauch. 11. Kicking Schoolbags (2006) -- Amit Varma. 12. The Three Globalizations -- Episode 17 of Everything is Everything. 13. Dawn of the third globalisation? -- Ajay Shah. 14. Caste -- Isabel Wilkerson. 15. A People's History of the United States -- Howard Zinn. 16. A Tale of Love and Darkness -- Amos Oz. 17. The Bureau, The Americans, Kohrra and Made in Heaven. 18. To Sir, With Love (the book) -- ER Braithwaite. 19. To Sir, With Love (the film) -- James Clavell.. 20. Doctor Zhivago -- David Lean. 21. A Dry White Season -- Euzhan Palcy. 22. Cry Freedom --  Richard Attenborough's film on Steve Biko. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Foreign Correspondent' by Simahina.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Update to "Dominant Assurance Contract Platform", published by moyamo on September 23, 2023 on LessWrong. This is an update to The Economics of the Asteroid Deflection Problem (Dominant Assurance Contracts) How the fundraiser went TL;DR I got $2172.67 dollars even though I only asked for $629. My prediction of how the fundraiser would go I expected that I would get ~1000 views on my website, of which 1% would decide to fund me, with an average donation of $90. 1000×1%×$90=$900. I expected that I would get a large initial sum of money and then it would slowly crawl upwards, until getting funded in the last few minutes. Manifold markets seemed more pessimistic than me (see how on the 28th August there was only a 26% chance I'd raise more than $829) so I lowered the price to $629. This turned out to be unnecessary. How the fundraiser actually went After initially posting on Lesswrong, the conversion rate of people visiting to funding my project was 20%. This was much higher than I expected. On 2 September, Alex Tabarrok posted my project on marginalrevolution.com (Thanks!). After which the number of visits skyrocketed. The conversion rate lowered to 4%, but this was still higher than the 1% I expected, especially since people kept donating to the project even after it was funded. After the goal was reached After the the goal was reached on 2 September, people kept donating! I was not expecting this. I'm really grateful to everyone who donated. In the end, I got 1300 visits, most from when it was posted on marginal revolution. What I am going to do I asked for $639 to work for a month, but since I got more than triple this I'm going to work for 3 months (up to 15 December)! What I need I need a name I'm running a contest on manifold.markets to name my platform. I will PayPal $25 to the person who suggests the winning name I need producers of public goods If you are interested in using my platform get funding for something you want to create please fill out this google form. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_tabarrok_how_ideas_trump_crises ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/113-academic-words-reference-from-alex-tabarrok-how-ideas-trump-crises-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/STEsz-IUzY4 (All Words) https://youtu.be/MNzYpTziKGs (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/Blp0Wvk1G84 (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

For the past 20 years, they have run the world's largest economics blog. This is the story of how they publish every day, generate ideas when they're stuck, and plan to teach millions of people the basics of supply & demand. Tyler and Alex's newsletter: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Tyler's website: https://tylercowen.com/ Tyler's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylercowen Alex's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ATabarrok Alex's website: https://alextabarrok.com/  Want to learn more about the next cohort with Write of Passage? Click here: https://writeofpassage.school/hiw Want to learn more about How I Write? Website: https://writeofpassage.school/how-i-write/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidPerellChannel/videos Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSboniFAeGA8v9NpoPv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Eric, Dan, and Dylan discuss the coup attempt in Russia over the weekend, as the Wagner Group paramilitary organization marched from its position in Ukraine toward Moscow before suddenly calling off the revolt. What does this mean for Russian president Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine? Do we have reason to believe this was an actual revolt or coup attempt—or something orchestrated by Putin for his own purposes? Then the guys recap the tragic story of the OceanGate Titan submarine, which imploded while on a trip taking people to view the wreck of the Titanic. Is this, like the story of the Titanic itself, the high cost of hubris? Why do so many people so quickly retreat into making jokes about an awful tragedy?Subscribe to our podcasts Taking Putin Down a Peg | The Morning DispatchDoes Britain Have High or Low State Capacity? | Alex Tabarrok, Marginal RevolutionReal estate is China's economic Achilles heel | Noah Smith, NoahpinionOn Differences Between Urban & Rural China | Dan WangThe Hong Konger: Jimmy Lai's Extraordinary Struggle for FreedomTitan sub implosion: What we know about catastrophic event | BBC Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He gave up a staggeringly successful career to live a quiet life -- and now he shares his wisdom with us. Murali Neelakantan joins Amit Varma in episode 329 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about the life he has lived and the lessons he has learnt. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Murali Neelankantan on Twitter and LinkedIn. 2. An Idea of a Law School -- NR Madhava Menon, Murali Neelakantan and Sumeet Malik. 3. Akshaya Mukul and the Life of Agyeya -- Episode 324 of The Seen and the Unseen. 4. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Wanting — Luke Burgis. 6. It is immoral to have children. Here's why — Amit Varma. 7. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 8. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Sara Rai Inhales Literature — Episode 255 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. Casino Royale -- Martin Campbell. 11. Schrödinger's cat. 12. Dance Dance For the Halva Waala — Episode 294 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jai Arjun Singh and Subrat Mohanty). 13. Right to Education: Just another law -- Meera Neelakantan. 14. The Life and Times of Abhinandan Sekhri — Episode 254 of The Seen and the Unseen. 15. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 16. The Prem Panicker Files — Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Prem Panicker). 17. Major Navneet Vats SM. 18. Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don't Have To — David Sinclair. 19. The Lifespan Podcast by David Sinclair. 20. The Adda at the End of the Universe — Episode 309 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Sathaye and Roshan Abbas). 21. Loss Aversion. 22. Aandhi -- Gulzar. 23. Nowhere Near -- Yo La Tengo. 24. Dil Hi To Hai Na Sang o Hishat -- Abida Parveen. 25. Ranjish hi Sahi -- Mehdi Hasan. 26. Old Man -- Neil Young. 27. Oscar Wilde on Amazon and Wikipedia. 28. Tum Itna Jo Muskura Rahe Ho -- Jagjit Singh. 29. Bonjour Tristesse -- Françoise Sagan. 30. Everybody Lies — Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 31. Politics and the Sociopath (2014) — Amit Varma. 32. History of European Morals — WEH Lecky. 33. The Expanding Circle — Peter Singer. 34. Dunbar's number. 35. Rankthings.io by Aella and David. 36. Aella on Twitter and Substack. 37. Ye Humse Na Hoga -- Javed Akhtar. 38. All You Who Sleep Tonight -- Vikram Seth. 39. GCN +. 40. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 41. The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto — Episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen. 42. SVB, Banking and the State of the Economy -- Episode 323 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah and Mohit Satyanand). 43. Ashutosh Salil and the Challenge of Change -- Episode 312 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped — Amit Varma. 45. One Bad Law Goes, but Women Remain Second-Class Citizens — Amit Varma. 46. ये लिबरल आख़िर है कौन? — Episode 37 of Puliyabaazi (w Amit Varma, on Hayek). 47. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (on isomorphic mimicry, with Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 48. The Long Road From Neeyat to Neeti — Episode 313 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley). 49. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy — Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. Restaurant Regulations in India — Episode 18 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhu Menon). 51. The Wealth of Nations -- Adam Smith. 52. The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Adam Smith. 53. Humesha Der Kar Deta Hoon Main -- Muneer Niazi. 54. The Economics and Politics of Vaccines — Episode 223 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 55. Rustom -- Tinu Suresh Desai on the Nanavati case. 56. Natasha Badhwar Lives the Examined Life — Episode 301 of The Seen and the Unseen. 57. The Nurture Assumption — Judith Rich Harris. 58. Mohit Satyanand on Twitter and Substack. 59. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Mohit Satyanand: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 60. Richard Dawkins on unpleasant gods. 61. Pushpesh Pant Feasts on the Buffet of Life -- Episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen. 62. Three Hundred Verses: Musings on Life, Love and Renunciation -- Bhartrihari. 63. Drug Price Controls -- Episode 29 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pavan Srinath). 64. The Dark Side of Indian Pharma — Episode 245 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Dinesh Thakur). 65. Bottle of Lies — Katherine Eban. 66. The Truth Pill: The Myth of Drug Regulation in India -- Dinesh Thakur and Prashant Reddy. 67. Fire in the Blood -- Dylan Mohan Gray. 68. New York Stories -- Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen. 69. The Ideas of Our Constitution — Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 70. Kumārasambhava -- Kalidasa. 71. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking -- Susan Cain. 72. Goodbye, Mr Chips -- Sam Wood. 73. Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil -- Jim Goddard. 74. What Money Can't Buy -- Michael Sandel. 75. Tum Bilkul Hum Jaise Nikle -- Fehmida Riaz. 76.  Kuchh Log Tumhein Samjhaaenge -- Fehmida Riaz. 77. The Four Quadrants of Conformism — Paul Graham. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘This is the World' by Simahina.

He taught international relations for a living, and he lived Indian culture -- food, clothes, music, films, languages, the whole package. Pushpesh Pant joins Amit Varma in episode 326 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life, his times and this beautiful country he loves so much. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Pushpesh Pant on Amazon, Twitter and YouTube. 2. India: Cookbook -- Pushpesh Pant. 3. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande — Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 4. Sara Rai Inhales Literature — Episode 255 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Chandrahas Choudhury's Country of Literature — Episode 288 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto — Episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life — Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Devi : Tales Of The Goddess In Our Time -- Mrinal Pande. 9. Amader Shantiniketan — Shivani (translated by Ira Pande). 10. 2001: A Space Odyssey — Stanley Kubrick. 11. In Praise of Slowness -- Carl Honore. 12. Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India and Other Essays --  Farokh Erach Udwadia. 13. Things to Leave Behind -- Namita Gokhale. 14. Raag Pahadi -- Namita Gokhale, translated by Pushpesh Pant. 15. Roshan Abbas and the Creator Economy — Episode 239 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. The Adda at the End of the Universe — Episode 309 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Sathaye and Roshan Abbas). 17. Natasha Badhwar Lives the Examined Life — Episode 301 of The Seen and the Unseen. 18. Lahron Ke Rajhans (Hindi) -- Mohan Rakesh. 19. India: A Sacred Geography -- Diana Eck. 20. Caste, Gender, Karnatik Music — Episode 162 of The Seen and the Unseen (w TM Krishna). 21. An Equal Music -- Vikram Seth. 22. The Wonder That Was India -- AL Basham. 23. Dhano Dhanne -- Jaya Varma and the Chandigarh Choir. 24. Ira Pande's obituary of Jaya Varma. 25. Ira Pande on Amazon. 26. Akshaya Mukul and the Life of Agyeya -- Episode 324 of The Seen and the Unseen. 27. Constantine Cavafy, André Gide and Jean Genet. 28. The Counterfeiters -- André Gide. 29. Death in Venice -- Thomas Mann. 30. Collected Poems 1954 - 2004 -- Dom Moraes. 31. From Cairo to Delhi With Max Rodenbeck — Episode 281 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. Phir Ek Din Aisa Aayega -- Ali Sardar Jafri. 33. Zindagi -- Kiran Ahluwalia. 34. The Case Against Sugar — Gary Taubes. 35. In a Silent Way — Episode 316 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Gaurav Chintamani). 36. Kishore Mahbubani on Amazon. 37. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — Luis Buñuel. 38. Chance and Necessity -- Jacques Monod. 39. Try Anything Twice -- Peter Cheyney. 40. Rakesh Raghunathan on YouTube. 41. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 42. Cooking the world's oldest known curry -- Soity Banerjee. 43. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Stage.in. 45. The Slow Fire Chef on Twitter. 46. Marginal Revolution posts on books. 47. The Myth of the Holy Cow -- DN Jha. 48. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 49. The Lady's Dressing Room -- Jonathan Swift. 50. My Friend Dropped His Pants -- Amit Varma. 51. A Paean to the Paan -- Pushpesh Pant. 52. Vairagya Shatak (Hindi) -- Bhartihari. 53. Bhaja Govindam -- Adi Shankara. 54. Rainer Maria Rilke and Meer Taqi Meer. 55. Titash Ekti Nadir Naam -- Ritwik Ghatak. 56. Jukti Takko Aar Gappo -- Ritwik Ghatak. 57. Teesri Kasam -- Basu Bhattacharya. 58. Duniya Banane Wale -- Song from Teesri Kasam. 59. Guide — Vijay Anand. 60. Caurapañcāśikā -- Bilhana. 61. Dagar Brothers, Siyaram Tiwari, Vidya Rao and TM Krishna. 62. A Southern Music — TM Krishna. 63. The Raga-Ness of Ragas -- Deepak S Raja.. 64. NAD - Understanding Raga Music -- Sandeep Bagchee. 65. Form in Indian and Western Music -- Chetan Karnani. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘The Feast' by Simahina.

What happened at SVB? Is our banking system in crisis? What are we to make of our economy? Ajay Shah and Mohit Satynanand join Amit Varma in episode 323 of The Seen and the Unseen to tackle these complicated questions and more. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Ajay Shah (Twitter, Substack) and Mohit Satyanand (Twitter, Substack). 2. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 3. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Mohit Satyanand: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 4.  Ajay Shah on currencies and crypto (1, 2, 3), an RBI misstep, the third globalisation, NBFCs and banks (1, 2), digital payments, the resolution corporation (1, 2), interest rate mismatch, voting in the MPC, the importance of low and stable inflation and the mispricing of risks. 5. Two Economic Crises (2008 & 2019) — Episode 135 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mohit Satynanand). 6. The State of Our Economy -- Episode 252 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra and Mohit Satyanand). 7. The Importance of Finance -- Episode 125 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 8. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 9. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 10. Josh Felman Tries to Make Sense of the World -- Episode 321 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 12. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 13. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. The Long Road From Neeyat to Neeti — Episode 313 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley). 15. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 16. Premature Imitation and India's Flailing State — Shruti Rajagopalan & Alexander Tabarrok. 17. Public Opinion — Walter Lippman. 18. The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads — Walter Lippman. 19. Watching the Wheels -- John Lennon. (Amit also loves Chris Cornell's version.) 20. You're Missing — Bruce Springsteen. 21. The End of Silicon Valley (Bank) -- Ben Thompson on Stratechery. 22. This Banking Crisis Won't Wreck the Economy -- Tyler Cowen. 23. SVB Took the Wrong Risks -- Matt Levine. 24. Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market -- Walter Bagehot. 25. Moral Hazard and the Cantillon Effect. 26. Beware of the Useful Idiots — Amit Varma. 27. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 28. Austrian Economics: An Introduction -- Steven Horwitz. 29. Friedrich Hayek: The ideas and influence of the libertarian economist -- Eamonn Butler. 30.The End of History? — Francis Fukuyama's essay. 31. The End of History and the Last Man — Francis Fukuyama's book. 32. Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology -- Chris Miller. 33. The Double ‘Thank-You' Moment — John Stossel. 34. Why Pramila Devi Uses Her Chappals Sparingly -- Sayantan Bera. 35. Where Are the Customers' Yachts? -- Fred Schwed Jr. 36. South India Would Like to Have a Word — Episode 320 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nilakantan RS). 37. Jimi Hendrix on YouTube Music, Spotify and Wikipedia. 38. Neil Young on YouTube Music, Spotify and Wikipedia. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘The Madness of Money' by Simahina.

He's a renowned economist, he's worked in the IMF, he's an Asia specialist and he loves India. Josh Felman joins Amit Varma in episode 321 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life, his times, and all that he has learnt about economics and human beings. This episode is co-hosted by Ajay Shah. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Josh Felman on Twitter, Project Syndicate, JH Consulting and The Marginal Economist. 2. Why India Can't Replace China -- Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman. 3. Three Globalization Shocks Could Hurt China and Help India -- Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman. 4. India's Size Illusion -- Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman. 5. India's Stalled Rise --  Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman. 6. Are Intellectuals Killing Convergence? -- Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman. 7. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah) 8. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah.. 9. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 10. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 11. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 12. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 13. What a Long Strange Trip It's Been — Episode 188 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arvind Subramanian). 14. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 15. Demystifying GDP — Episode 130 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 16. Pandemonium in India's Banks — Episode 212 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tamal Bandyopadhyay.) 17. The State of Our Economy (Nov 2021) -- Episode 252 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra and Mohit Satyanand.) 18. Taking Stock of Our Economy (May 2021) — Episode 227 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ila Patnaik). 19. The Indian Economy in 2019 — Episode 153 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 20. Two Economic Crises (2008 & 2019) — Episode 135 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mohit Satynanand). 21. The Long Road From Neeyat to Neeti -- Episode 313 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley). 22. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 23. The Importance of Data Journalism — Episode 196 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 24. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism — Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 26. Maya on IMDb and Wikipedia. 27. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 28. Stage.in. 29. Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things -- Gurwinder. 30. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization --  Bryan Ward-Perkins. 31. Richard Clarida and Thomas Laubach. 32. Thomas Laubach remembered by Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah. 33. Parkinson's Law — C Northcote Parkinson. 34. That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen — Frédéric Bastiat. 35. A History of European Morals — WEH Lecky. 36. I, Pencil — Leonard Read. 37. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome — Mary Beard. 38. Mussolini: A Biography — Dennis Mack Smith. 39. Mussolini — RJB Bosworth. 40. The Great Dictator — Charlie Chaplin. 41. The chair-raising scene between Adenoid Hynkel and Benzino Napaloni. 42. Far Far Away on IMDb and Wikipedia — Amos Why. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘A Man, A Dog and the World' by Simahina.

India is run in a top-down way with a Northern bias -- and this is a problem. Nilakantan RS joins Amit Varma in episode 320 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss how and why our Southern states perform so much better -- and are punished for it. Also discussed: virtue ethics, the charms of Madras and the dangers of storytelling. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out:1. Nilakantan RS on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. 2. South vs North: India's Great Divide -- Nilakantan RS. 3. Chandrahas Choudhury's Country of Literature — Episode 288 of The Seen and the Unseen. 4. Lessons in Investing (and Life) — Episode 208 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Deepak Shenoy). 5. Crossing Over With Deepak Shenoy -- Episode 271 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life — Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. Aadha Gaon — Rahi Masoom Raza.. 8. From Cairo to Delhi With Max Rodenbeck — Episode 281 of The Seen and the Unseen. 9. Phineas Gage. 10. The Great Man Theory of History. 11. Pandemonium in India's Banks — Episode 212 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tamal Bandyopadhyay). 12. Rukmini Sees India's Multitudes — Episode 261 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rukmini S). 13. On Bullshit — Harry Frankfurt. 14. The Facts Do Not Matter — Amit Varma. 15. Facts Don't Matter. Stories do -- Amit Varma. 16. It is immoral to have children. Here's why -- Amit Varma. 17. Better Never to Have Been -- David Benator. 18. Wanting — Luke Burgis. 19. René Girard on Amazon and Wikipedia. 20. The Life and Times of Shanta Gokhale — Episode 311 of The Seen and the Unseen. 21. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable -- Timothy Cleveland. 23. Consider the Hamiltonian. 24. The Life and Times of Jerry Pinto — Episode 314 of The Seen and the Unseen. 25. Murder in Mahim — Jerry Pinto. 26. Mallikarjun Mansur and Bhimsen Joshi on Spotify. 26. Paul Krugman on the internet in 1998. 27. The naked man with an egg -- Amit Varma's prompt and ChatGPT's reply. 28. The Liberal Nationalism of Nitin Pai -- Episode 318 of The Seen and the Unseen. 29. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 30. Adam Gopnik, Michel Martin, Paul Harding and Timothy Gowers. 31. Tinkers -- Paul Harding. 32. Eraserhead -- David Lynch. 33. There's a Name for the Blah You're Feeling: It's Called Languishing -- Adam Grant. 34. The variants on Chess.com. 35. A Summons to Memphis -- Peter Taylor. 36. Virtue Ethics on Wikipedia, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 37. VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India — Narayani Basu. 38. India's Greatest Civil Servant — Episode 167 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Narayani Basu). 39. A Venture Capitalist Looks at the World — Episode 213 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Sajith Pai). 40. The Indus Valley Playbook — Sajith Pai. 41. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 42. Understanding Indian Healthcare — Episode 225 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 43. Karthik Muralidharan Examines the Indian State — Episode 290 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44.  Our Unlucky Children (2008) — Amit Varma. 45.  Fund Schooling, Not Schools (2007) — Amit Varma. 46. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 47. Centrally Sponsored Government Schemes — Episode 17 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane). 48. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength — Amit Varma. 49. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. 50. Athenian Democracy and Socrates. 51. Plato (or Why Philosophy Matters) -- Episode 109 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rebecca Goldstein). 52. Our Parliament and Our Democracy — Episode 253 of The Seen and the Unseen (w MR Madhavan). 53. The Anti-Defection Law — Episode 13 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Barun Mitra).. 54. Urban Governance in India — Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 55. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mahadev Govind Ranade and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar. 56. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal, Nishant Jain, Deepak Shenoy, Abhijit Bhaduri and Gaurav Chintamani. 57. The Walk -- Robert Walser. 58. So Long, See You Tomorrow -- William Maxwell. 59. All Aunt Hagar's Children -- Edward P Jones. 60. The Known World -- Edward P Jones. 61. Slow Man -- JM Coetzee. 62. The Changeling -- Kenzaburo Oe. 63. Earthlings -- Sayaka Murata. 64. Birth of a Theorem -- Cedric Villani. 65. Gilead -- Marilynne Robinson. 66. If I Survive You -- Jonathan Escoffery. 67. Donnie Darko -- Richard Kelly. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Conflict' by Simahina.

Public policy may seem arcane and complicated, a field only for geeks. But all our lives are shaped by it. Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley join Amit Varma in episode 313 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe their efforts to make policy great again. (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Missing In Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy -- Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S Jaitley. 2. Anticipating the Unintended — Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's newsletter. 3. Puliyabaazi — Pranay Kotasthane's podcast (with Saurabh Chandra). 4. Raghu Sanjaylal Jaitley's Father's Scooter -- Episode 214 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Pranay Kotasthane Talks Public Policy -- Episode 233 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. Foreign Policy is a Big Deal — Episode 170 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane & Manoj Kewalramani). 7. Older episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Pranay Kotasthane: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 8. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 9. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 10. Angus Maddison's chart on GDP through the ages. 11. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 12. What Have We Done With Our Independence? — Episode 186 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pratap Bhanu Mehta). 13. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 14. Bhaktamal -- Nabha Dass. 15. The Three Languages of Politics — Arnold Kling. 16. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 17. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao — Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 18. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia — Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 19. The Overton Window. 20. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 21. Where Did Development Economics Go Wrong? -- Shruti Rajagopalan speaks to Lant Pritchett on the Ideas of India podcast. 22. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 23. Public Opinion — Walter Lippmann. 24. Democracy in America — Alexis De Tocqueville. 25. Yeh Jo Public Hai Sab Janti Hai -- Song from Roti. 26. Price Controls Lead to Shortages and Harm the Poor -- Amit Varma. 27. Amit Varma's prescient 2017 tweet on the price caps on stents. 28. Varun Grover Is in the House — Episode 292 of The Seen and the Unseen. 29. Tu Kisi Rail Si — Lyrics by Varun Grover. 30. Gyan Prakash on the Emergency — Episode 103 of The Seen and the Unseen. 31. The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People -- Michael Shermer. 32. History of European Morals — WEH Lecky. 33. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress — Peter Singer. 34. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century — Francis Fukuyama. 35. The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama. 36. Political Order and Political Decay — Francis Fukuyama. 37. The Right to Property -- Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 38. The Baptist, the Bootlegger and the Dead Man Walking — Amit Varma. 39. Bootleggers and Baptists-The Education of a Regulatory Economist — Bruce Yandle. 40. Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra) and Gol Maal (Hrishikesh Mukherjee). 41. A People's Constitution— Rohit De. 42. Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped -- Amit Varma. 43. We All Gamble. Make It Legal -- Devangshu Datta. 44. Yes We Cannabis! -- Devangshu Datta. 45. Prohibition doesn't work. Tax Alcohol Instead -- Devangshu Datta. 46. Legalise Prostitution to Fight Trafficking -- Amit Varma. 47. Sea of Poppies -- Amitav Ghosh. 48. Elite Imitation in Public Policy — Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 49. Rent Control — Ep 14 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alex Tabarrok). 50. A Theory of Justice — John Rawls. 51. Anarchy, State and Utopia — Robert Nozick. 52. Politics and Money -- Amit Varma's limerick. 53. The Great Redistribution — Amit Varma. 54. Power and Prosperity — Mancur Olson. 55. Swaminathan S Aiyar at Times of India, Amazon and his own website. 56. The Lost Decade — Puja Mehra. 57. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 58. Episode of The Seen and the Unseen on GST: 1, 2, 3. 59. DeMon, Morality and the Predatory Indian State — Episode 85 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 60. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills — Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 61. A Game Theory Problem: Who Will Bell The Congress Cat? — Amit Varma. 62. Kashi Ka Assi — Kashinath Singh. 63. A Beast Called Government (2007) -- Amit Varma. 64. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma. 65. Policy Paradox – The Art of Political Decision Making — Deborah Stone. 66. Bara -- UR Ananthamurthy 67. Sookha -- MS Sathyu's film based on Bara, 68. Russia, Ukraine, Foreign Policy -- Episode 268 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane and Nitin Pai). 69. Nuclear Power Can Save the World — Joshua S Goldstein, Staffan A Qvist and Steven Pinker. 70. The Third Pillar -- Raghuram Rajan. 71. Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar : A citizen-first approach -- Rohini Nilekani. 72. The Double ‘Thank-You' Moment — John Stossel. 73. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 74. Frédéric Bastiat's writings at Bastiat.org and Amazon. 75. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 76. ये लिबरल आख़िर है कौन? — Episode 37 of Puliyabaazi (w Amit Varma, on Hayek). 77. Econ Talk — Russ Roberts's podcast. 78. Conversation and Society — Episode 182 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Russ Roberts). 79. The Economist as Scapegoat -- Russ Roberts. 80. Bollywood's New Capitalist Hero (2007) -- Amit Varma. 81. Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! -- Saaed Mirza. 82. Scam 1992 -- Hansal Mehta. 83. Bharat Ane Nenu -- Koratal Siva. 84. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 85. Education in India — Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 86. Our Unlucky Children (2008) — Amit Varma. 87. Fund Schooling, Not Schools (2007) — Amit Varma. 88. Participatory Democracy — Episode 160 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 89. Cities and Citizens — Episode 198 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 90. Helping Others in the Fog of Pandemic — Episode 226 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 91. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength — Amit Varma. 92. Profit = Philanthropy — Amit Varma. 93. The Solution -- Bertolt Brecht. 94. Abby Philips Fights for Science and Medicine -- Episode 310 of The Seen and the Unseen. 95. Who Broke Our Republic? — Episode 163 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Kapil Komireddi). 96. The Multitudes of Our Maharajahs -- Episode 244 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Manu Pillai). 97. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 98. Sansar Se Bhage Phirte Ho -- Song from Chitralekha with lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi. 99. Crimemaster Gogo in the house! Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Graveyard of Good Intentions' by Simahina.

Last week I brought you my favorite episode from the archives, with Samo Burja. I asked on twitter for my audience's favorite episode and unsurprisingly it is this one. There's no doubt that part of this is because Tyler is the most well-known guest on this podcast. But listening to the episode in hindsight, my impression of it is better than it was before. It remains true that I didn't have the time to ask many questions I was interested in (I have whole sections of prep labelled “Georgism”, “economics^2“, “global hierarchies“ that were left untouched, and there was much more on immigrant subcommunities). Nonetheless, it seems to be like my podcast contained much novelty on an avenue of the Tyler Cowen thought, at least in public, and preceeded some popular marginal revolution posts, such as https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html. Tyler Cowen is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and writer of the legendary blog Marginal Revolution alongside Alex Tabarrok. We discuss talent, Ontario, immigrants, institutional trust, power attractors, the Intellectual Dark Web, public health, the internet, generation Z, the significance of social change versus technology, upsides of wokeness, populism, imposter syndrome, self-deception, and corporate hiring.Marginal Revolutionhttps://marginalrevolution.com/Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Grosshttps://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Identify-Energizers-Creatives-Winners/dp/1250275814From the New World Episode with Zvi Mowshowitz:From the New World Episode with Robin Hanson: Get full access to From the New World at cactus.substack.com/subscribe

Mary Theroux is Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of the Independent Institute. She was married to the late David Theroux. In this episode, she gives the background on how she and David met, and the early years of the Independent Institute. Along the way she touches on many topics including the CS Lewis Society, the war fever on America's right wing, and the problem of homelessness. Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: The https://youtu.be/rGiL7bz9WAs (YouTube version) of this interview. A nice tribute to David Theroux https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/david-theroux-rip.html (from Alex Tabarrok). Tabarrok on https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2003/10/bounty_hunters_.html (bounty hunters.) David's article on https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=2846 (C.S. Lewis). Independent Institute's https://www.beyondhomeless.org/ (documentary on homelessness). Their series https://www.independent.org/lovegov/ (Love Gov). Bob's https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_14_02_03_murphy.pdf (article on Nordhaus' carbon tax) in The Independent Review, and his book https://www.independent.org/store/book.asp?id=116&s=na#t-2 (Choice) (published by Independent). http://bobmurphyshow.com/contribute (Help support) the Bob Murphy Show. The audio production for this episode was provided by http://podsworth.com/ (Podsworth Media).

Her pioneering work has helped us understand how caste and gender remain huge problems in India. But her past goes beyond numbers, into a rich history of aajobas and aajis and theatre and song. Ashwini Deshpande joins Amit Varma in episode 298 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss how she used her economist's gaze to understand our social problems -- and how films and music also played their part. (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Ashwini Deshpande on Twitter, Ashoka, Google Scholar, Amazon and her own website. 2. The Grammar of Caste -- Ashwini Deshpande. 3. Why are Indian Women not employed? -- Ashwini Deshpande's talk for Manthan. 4. What Women Do: Is it even "work"? -- A seminar by Ashwini Deshpande at Ashoka. 5.  The New Grammar of Caste -- Ashwini Deshpande's talk at JNU. 6. Gender and Caste Discrimination and Affirmative Action in India -- Ashwini Deshpande speaks to Shruti Rajagopalan on the Ideas of India podcast. 7. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad -- Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. Select episodes of The Seen and the Unseen that discussed gender with Shrayana Bhattacharya, Paromita Vohra, Kavita Krishnan, Urvashi Butalia, Namita Bhandare, Manjima Bhattacharjya, Mahima Vashisht and Alice Evans. 9. Amit Varma's tweet with Ashwini Deshpande's viral and potentially award-winning vocal performance. 10. Archaeology and the Public Purpose -- Nayanjot Lahiri. 11. Rahimatpur: Town along the Kamandalu -- GP Deshpande. 12. Satyashodhak (out-of-print book) (YouTube) -- GP Deshpande. 13. Uddhwasta Dharmashala (Marathi) (English)-- GP Deshpande. 14. Thelma and Louise -- Ridley Scott. 15. Jyoti Subhash, Amruta Subhash, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Ebrahim Alkazi, Rohini Hattangadi, Jayadev Hattangadi, Manohar Singh, Sai Paranjpye, Arun Joglekar, Shriram Lagoo and Amol Palekar. 16. Ghashiram Kotwal -- Vijay Tendulkar. 17. Jai Santoshi Maa -- Vijay Sharma. 18. English Vinglish -- Gauri Shinde. 19. Satyajit Ray and Manmohan Desai. 20. Qurbani -- Feroz Khan. 21. Dance Dance For the Halva Waala -- Episode 294 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Jai Arjun Singh and Subrat Mohanty). 22. Dance Dance — Babbar Subhash. 23. Aagaya Aagaya Halwa Wala — Song from Dance Dance. 24. Ek Aur Ek Gyarah -- David Dhawan. 25. Baba Sehgal and ML Sondhi. 26. The Man Who Resides in Music -- PL Deshpande on Malikarjun Mansur, translated by Ashwini Deshpande. 27. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy -- Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 28. Chhoti Si Baat -- Basu Chatterjee. 29. Raj Kumar's famous dialogue from Waqt. 30. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande and Manik Bhide. 31. Yuval Noah Harari on Amazon. 32. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. 33. Womaning in India With Mahima Vashisht -- Episode 293 of The Seen and the Unseen. 34. Kaushik Basu and Amazon, Twitter, Wikipedia and his own website. 35. Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? -- Marianne Bertrand & Sendhil Mullainathan. 36. Race At Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market -- Devah Pager and Bruce Western. 37. Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do -- Devah Pager and Lincoln Quillian. 38. The Economics of Discrimination -- Gary Becker. 39. How Gary Becker Saw the Scourge of Discrimination -- Kevin Murphy. 40. The Theory of Discrimination -- Kenneth Arrow. 41. What Has Economics to Say About Racial Discrimination? -- Kenneth Arrow. 42. Who gains from the new Maternity Benefit Act Amendment? — Devika Kher. 43. Here's What's Wrong With the Maternity Benefits Act — Suman Joshi. 44. Who is the Identifiable Victim?: Caste Interacts with Sympathy in India -- Ashwini Deshpande and Dean Spears. 45. Identifiable victim effect. 46. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study -- Thomas Sowell. 47. Dominant or Backward? Political Economy of the Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels and Marathas -- Ashwini Deshpande and Rajesh Ramachandran. 48. (In)Visibility, Care and Cultural Barriers: The Size and Shape of Women's Work in India -- Ashwini Deshpande and Naila Kabeer. 49. Norms that matter -- Ashwini Deshpande and Naila Kabeer. 50. The gendered effects of droughts -- Farzana Afridi, Kanika Mahajan and Nikita Sangwan. 51. The COVID-19 Pandemic and Gendered Division of Paid and Unpaid Work -- Ashwini Deshpande. 52. Women's Work in India: Evidence from changes in time use between 1998 and 2019 -- Nicholas Li. 53. Dropping Out, Being Pushed Out or Can't Get in? Decoding Declining Labour Force Participation of Indian Women -- Ashwini Deshpande and Jitendra Singh. 54. Women at Work -- Episode 132 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Namita Bhandare). 55. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman -- Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 56. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal -- Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 57. Metrics of Empowerment — Episode 88 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta & Hamsini Hariharan). 58. We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates (2008) — Amit Varma. 59. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 60. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 61. Understanding Indian Healthcare — Episode 225 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 62. Karthik Muralidharan Examines the Indian State -- Episode 290 of The Seen and the Unseen. 63. Ret Samadhi -- Geetanjali Shree. 64. Main Zindagi Ka Saath Nibhata Chala Gaya -- Mohammed Rafi song from Hum Dono. 65. Court — Chaitanya Tamhane. 66. The Disciple — Chaitanya Tamhane. 67. Line of Duty, Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, Shetland, The Good Wife, The Good Fight and Giri/Haji. 68. The Good Doctor -- Damon Galgut. 69. Gangubai Kathiawadi -- Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: 'Patriarchy' by Simahina.

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He joins the podcast to talk about his involvement in Operation Warp Speed, a uniquely successful federal government project. Richard asks how broadly applicable its lessons are, whether or not we could do something similar for cancer, and why economists and public health officials had such divergent opinions on the need to speed up the process of approving and distributing a vaccine. Alex also discusses the Baumol effect, which he argues can explain much about rising costs in healthcare and education. Richard pushes back on the theory as a sufficient explanation, and asks whether a simple libertarian story better fits the facts, arguing that government support for these industries also plays a major role.They then go on to talk about the rise of crypto, why America is severely under-policed, and how recent years have seen the collapse of challenges to liberal democracy. This podcast was originally released by the Salem Center.Listen in podcast form or watch on YouTube.Links:* Paul Mango, Warp Speed: Inside the Operation That Beat COVID, the Critics, and the Odds.* Eric Helland and Alex Tabarrok, “Why Are the Prices So Damn High?”* “Under policed” tag at Marginal Revolution.* Richard Hanania, “The Year of Fukuyama.” Get full access to Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology at www.cspicenter.com/subscribe

When most people hear “crypto,” the first thing they think of is “currencies.” Cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. And they've given rise to an entire ecosystem of financial speculation, get rich quick schemes, and in some cases outright fraud.But there's another side of crypto that gets less attention: the segment of the community that is interested in the way the technology that powers crypto can decentralize decision making, make institutions more transparent and transform the way organizations are governed. That's the side I find far more interesting.There are few individuals as central to that latter segment of crypto as Vitalik Buterin. When he was still just a teenager, Buterin co-founded Ethereum, a decentralized platform whose token Ether is the second most valuable cryptocurrency today, surpassed only by Bitcoin. But the vision behind Ethereum was that the blockchain technology could be used for more than digital money; it could create a sort of digital infrastructure on top of which organizations and companies and applications could be built — ostensibly free of centralizing structures like banks and governments.Over the last decade, Buterin has become arguably the core public intellectual on the nonfinancial side of crypto. His new book, “Proof of Stake,” is a collection of long, thoughtful essays that taken together lay out a vision of crypto as a truly transformative technology — one with the potential to revolutionize everything from city governance to voting systems to online identity.I myself have dueling impulses about Buterin's vision. On the one hand, I believe many of our governing systems and institutions are badly in need of the kind of reimagining he is engaged in. On the other hand, I'm deeply skeptical of whether the issues Buterin and his ilk are focused on are actually technological problems that blockchains can solve. So this is a conversation that sits squarely within that tension.Mentioned:Seeing Like a State by James C. ScottBook recommendations:The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. ShirerHarry Potter and The Methods of Rationality by Eliezer YudkowskyAlgorithmic Game Theory by Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos and Vijay V. VaziraniThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski, Will Wilkinson, Alex Tabarrok, Glen Weyl and Nathan Schneider.

In 1947, few people gave us 75 years. Bloody hell, here we are! And it is up to us now to make this country the best version of itself. Karthik Muralidharan joins Amit Varma in episode 290 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss one of our problem areas: the Indian state. Can we fix it? Yes we can! (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Karthik Muralidharan on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Scholar and UCSD. 2. Centre for Effective Governance of Indian States (CEGIS) 3. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 4. Understanding Indian Healthcare -- Episode 225 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 5. General equilibrium effects of (improving) public employment programs: experimental evidence from India -- The paper on NREGA by Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar. 6. Kashmir and Article 370 -- Episode 134 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 7. The Citizenship Battles -- Episode 152 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Srinath Raghavan). 8. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 9. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 10. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah). 11. Pramit Bhattacharya Believes in Just One Ism -- Episode 256 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pramit Bhattacharya). 12. The Paradox of Narendra Modi — Episode 102 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shashi Tharoor). 13. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia -- Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Montek Singh Ahluwalia). 14. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal, Nishant Jain, Deepak Shenoy and Abhijit Bhaduri. 15. The Case Against Sugar — Gary Taubes. 16. The Big Fat Surprise — Nina Teicholz. 17. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao -- Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 18. The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer -- N Gregory Mankiw. 19. The Gated Republic -- Shankkar Aiyar. 20. Despite the State — M Rajshekhar. 21. The Power Broker— Robert Caro. 22. The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs. 23. India's Security State -- Episode 242 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Josy Joseph). 24. We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State -- Amit Varma. 25. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 26. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms -- Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 27. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century — Francis Fukuyama. 28. The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama. 29. Political Order and Political Decay — Francis Fukuyama. 30. Computer Nahi Monitor -- Episode 5 of season 1 of Panchayat. 31. Naushad Forbes Wants to Fix India -- Episode 282 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. Courts Redux: Micro-Evidence from India -- Manaswini Rao. 33.  The Checklist Manifesto -- Atul Gawande. 34. Annie Hall -- Woody Allen. 35. The Politics Limerick -- Amit Varma. 36. The Decline of the Congress -- Episode 248 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 37. The Burden of Democracy -- Pratap Bhanu Mehta. 38. A Theory of Clientelistic Politics versus Programmatic Politics -- Pranab Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee. 39. Power and Prosperity — Mancur Olson. 40. The Business of Winning Elections -- Episode 247 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shivam Shankar Singh). 41. Premature load bearing: Evidence, Analysis, Action -- Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock. 42. A Meditation on Form — Amit Varma. 43. Religion and Ideology in Indian Society -- Episode 124 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Suyash Rai). 44. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 45. India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy -- Ramachandra Guha. 46. Participatory Democracy -- Episode 160 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 47. Cities and Citizens -- Episode 198 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 48. Helping Others in the Fog of Pandemic -- Episode 226 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ashwin Mahesh). 49. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope -- Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen. 50. The Tamilian gentleman who took on the world -- Amit Varma on Viswanathan Anand. 51. Running to Stand Still -- U2. 52. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 53. India's Founding Moment — Madhav Khosla. 54. The Ideas of Our Constitution -- Episode 164 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Madhav Khosla). 55. The Life and Times of Urvashi Butalia -- Episode 287 of The Seen and the Unseen. 56. Pitfalls of Participatory Programs -- Abhijit Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster and Stuti Khemani. 57. Our Parliament and Our Democracy -- Episode 253 of The Seen and the Unseen (w MR Madhavan). 58. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 59. Urban Governance in India -- Episode 31 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 60. The Life and Times of Abhinandan Sekhri -- Episode 254 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Abhinandan Sekhri). 61. The Tiebout Model. 62. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence -- Amit Varma. 63. Taxes Should Be Used for Governance, Not Politics -- Amit Varma. 64. The Effects of Democratization on Public Goods and Redistribution: Evidence from China -- Nancy Qian, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Monica Martinez-Bravo and Yang Yao. 65. Sneaky Artist Sees the World -- Episode 260 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Nishant Jain). 66. Science and Covid-19 -- Episode 221 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Anirban Mahapatra). 66. Centrally Sponsored Government Schemes -- Episode 17 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pranay Kotasthane.). 67. India's states can be laboratories for policy innovation and reform -- Karthik Muralidharan. 68. Clientelism in Indian Villages -- Siwan Anderson, Patrick Francois, and Ashok Kotwal. 69. Patching Development -- Rajesh Veeraraghavan. 70. Opportunity, Choice and the IPL (2008) — Amit Varma. 71. The IPL is Here and Here Are Six Reasons to Celebrate It (2019) — Amit Varma. 72. Climate Change and Our Power Sector -- Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah). 73. The Delhi Smog -- Episode 44 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vivek Kaul). 74. The Life and Times of Nilanjana Roy -- Episode 284 of The Seen and the Unseen. 75. The Life and Times of Nirupama Rao -- Episode 269 of The Seen and the Unseen. 76. The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen. 77. Objects Speak to Annapurna Garimella -- Episode 257 of The Seen and the Unseen. 78. Letters for a Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers 1947-1963 -- Edited by Madhav Khosla. 79. To Raise a Fallen People -- Rahul Sagar. 80. The Progressive Maharaja -- Rahul Sagar. 81. India = Migration -- Episode 128 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Chinmay Tumbe). 82. India: A Sacred Geography -- Diana Eck. 83. Unlikely is Inevitable — Amit Varma. 84. The Law of Truly Large Numbers. 85. Political Ideology in India -- Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his podcast, Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

TODAY´S EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE FLOW RESEARCH COLLECTIVE Are you an entrepreneur, a leader, or a knowledge worker, who wants to harness the power of flow so you can get more done in less time with greater ease and accomplish your boldest professional goals faster? If you´ve answered this question with “hell yes” then our peak-performance training Zero to Dangerous may be a good fit for you. If this sounds of interest to you all you need to do is click here right now, pop in your application and one of our team members will be in touch with you very soon.   ABOUT THE GUEST: Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution   A dedicated writer and communicator of economic ideas, Cowen is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media. His latest book is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World and he is a columnist with Bloomberg View.  Cowen is also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.   Cowen graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.   ABOUT THE EPISODE:  In this episode, you will learn about: Intro (0:00) Impact of Self Motivation In Young People (2:21) Getting Better At Knowing How To Get Better (3:48) Stagnation In Healthcare, Housing, & Education (5:49) Nuclear Energy (15:14) The State of The Economy (17:20) Initiatives That Would Progress The U.S (20:51) The Mental State of America (24:35) What Tyler's Day Looks Like (29:38) Tech Progress (33:52) Smart People Should Build Things (38:52) Worker Mental Health Crisis (40:30) How To Effectively Mobilize Talent (41:59) Old People Getting Younger Mentors (44:26) Research Genie Question (46:15) How To Improve Discovered Talent (47:24)   RESOURCES Website: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylercowen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-cowen-166718/ ‍ STEVEN KOTLER is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and Founder and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance. His books include The Art of Impossible, Stealing Fire, and The Rise of Superman. His work has been translated into over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, The Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

Our real heroes are often backstage. Montek Singh Ahluwalia joins Amit Varma in episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his life, his learnings and the liberalisation of 1991. Also check out: 1. Backstage: The Story behind India's High Growth Years -- Montek Singh Ahluwalia. 2. Breaking Through: A Memoir -- Isher Judge Ahluwalia. 3. The M Document -- Montek Singh Ahluwalia's legendary note from 1990. 4. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 5. The Forgotten Greatness of PV Narasimha Rao -- Episode 283 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vinay Sitapati). 6. Public Choice Theory -- Episode 121 of The Seen and the Unseen. 7. Principles of Economics -- Alfred Marshall. 8. Alexandre Dumas on Amazon. 9. Gurbani and Heer Ranjha. 10. The Life and Times of Abhinandan Sekhri -- Episode 254 of The Seen and the Unseen. 11. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 12. On Inequality — Harry Frankfurt. 13. The Cantillon Effect: Because of Inflation, We're Financing the Financiers -- Jessica Schultz. 14. Population Is Not a Problem, but Our Greatest Strength -- Amit Varma. 15. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century — Francis Fukuyama. 16. The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama. 17. Political Order and Political Decay — Francis Fukuyama. 18. James Buchanan on Amazon. 19. Jawaharlal Nehru's speech about our "tryst with destiny." 20. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 21. Education in India — Episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Amit Chandra). 22. Fund Schooling, Not Schools (2007) — Amit Varma. 23. Our Unlucky Children (2008) — Amit Varma. 24. The Beautiful Tree — James Tooley. 25. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 26. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 27. The Business of Winning Elections -- Episode 247 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shivam Shankar Singh). 28. Most of Amit Varma's writing on DeMon, collected in one Twitter thread. 29. Narendra Modi Takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma 30. Minoo Masani, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Isaiah Berlin, John Hicks and Ian Little. 31. Spontaneous Order. 32. The Evolution of Everything -- Episode 96 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Matt Ridley). 33. Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai on Amazon. 34. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 35. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman — Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 36.  The Life and Times of Mrinal Pande -- Episode 263 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Mrinal Pande). 37. Beware of the Useful Idiots -- Amit Varma. 38. The Lost Decade — Puja Mehra. 39. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 40. Managing Climate Change: A Strategy for India -- Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Utkarsh Patel. 41. Mahabharata. 42. Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini and Roman Polanski. 43. Amit Varma's tweet on velociraptors and turkeys. 44. The James Bond films. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his work on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

He's been an academic who's studied the country, and a businessman who's created wealth and jobs. Now he wants to help India achieve its potential. Naushad Forbes joins Amit Varma in episode 282 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his life and learnings -- and the roadmap that can help India lift its citizens. Also check out: 1. The Struggle And The Promise: Restoring India's Potential -- Naushad Forbes. 2. Ram Guha Reflects on His Life -- Episode 266 of The Seen and the Unseen. 3. Aakar Patel Is Full of Hope -- Episode 270 of The Seen and the Unseen. 4. PG Wodehouse on Amazon. 5. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms -- Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 6. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 7. The Great Redistribution -- Amit Varma. 8. Early Indians — Tony Joseph. 9. Tony Joseph's episode of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. Who We Are and How We Got Here — David Reich. 11. Two-and-a-Half Bengalis Have an Economics Adda -- Episode 274 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswaro Sengupta and Shrayana Bhattacharya). 12. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 13. On Inequality — Harry Frankfurt. 14. Our Unlucky Children (2008) — Amit Varma. 15. Fund Schooling, Not Schools (2007) — Amit Varma. 16. The Beautiful Tree -- James Tooley. 17. Fixing Indian Education -- Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 18. The Loneliness of the Indian Woman -- Episode 259 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shrayana Bhattacharya). 19. Black Beauty -- Anne Sewell. 20. Enid Blyton and Gerald Durrell on Amazon. 21. Leave it to Psmith -- PG Wodehouse. 22. Survival In Auschwitz -- Primo Levi. 23. Homage to Catalonia -- George Orwell. 24. Steven Van Zandt: Springsteen, the death of rock and Van Morrison on Covid — Richard Purden. 25. Marginal Revolution. 26. Econ Talk — Russ Roberts's podcast. 27. Conversations With Tyler — Tyler Cowen's podcast. 28. Deirdre McCloskey on Amazon. 29. Manmohan Singh's budget speech on July 24, 1991. 30. Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working -- Jonathan Rauch. 31. The oddest entry in Business Week's 2009 list of the 50 Most Powerful People in India. 32. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 33. The Lost Decade — Puja Mehra. 34. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century -- Francis Fukuyama. 35. The Origins of Political Order -- Francis Fukuyama. 36. Political Order and Political Decay -- Francis Fukuyama. 37. James Buchanan on Amazon. 38. Public Choice Theory -- Episode 121 of The Seen and the Unseen. 39. Public Choice: A Primer — Eomonn Butler. 40. Wonder Woman, the God of War and Public Choice Economics -- Amit Varma and Kumar Anand. 41. Narendra Shenoy and Mr Narendra Shenoy -- Episode 250 of The Seen and the Unseen. 42. The Tragedy of Our Farm Bills -- Episode 211 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ajay Shah). 43. Why Children Labour (2007) -- Amit Varma. 44. Becoming Modern -- Alex Inkeles and David H Smith. 45. The Overton Window. 46. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — Albert O Hirschman. 47. India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy -- Ramachandra Guha. 48. Wealth And Poverty Of Nations -- David S Landes. 49. The Uncommon Reader -- Alan Bennett. 50. On Liberty -- John Stuart Mill. 51. Patriots and Partisans -- Ramachandra Guha. 52. Democrats and Dissenters -- Ramachandra Guha. 53. 1984 -- George Orwell. 54. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph -- Albert O Hirschman. 55. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin on Spotify. 56. Brahms: Second Piano Concerto in B Flat. 57. Beethoven: The Piano Concertos. 58. Beethoven: Symphonies 1 to 9. 59. Schubert: Impromptus. 60. The Philadelphia Story -- George Cukor. 61. Casablanca -- Michael Curtiz. Check out Amit's online courses, The Art of Clear Writing and The Art of Podcasting. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his work on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.

If you make space for serendipity in your life, good things happen. Abhijit Bhaduri joins Amit Varma in episode 279 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe his journey from the corporate life to the creator economy -- and the lessons he learnt along the way. Also check out: 1. Abhijit Bhaduri on Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and his own website. 2. Dreamers and Unicorns -- Abhijit Bhaduri. 3. The Digital Tsunami -- Abhijit Bhaduri. 4, Selected talks on YouTube by Abhijit Bhaduri: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 5. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen on the creator ecosystem with Roshan Abbas, Varun Duggirala, Neelesh Misra, Snehal Pradhan, Chuck Gopal, Nishant Jain and Deepak Shenoy. 6. A Meditation on Form — Amit Varma. 7. The Prem Panicker Files -- Episode 217 of The Seen and the Unseen. 8. The Curse of Knowledge. 9. Amitava Kumar Finds the Breath of Life -- Episode 265 of The Seen and the Unseen. 10. The Invisible Gorilla. 11. When Daddy Was a Little Boy -- Alexander Raskin and Lev Tokamakov. (Original cover.) 12. Tuntunir Galpa/The tale of The Tailer-Bird -- Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. 13. The Complete Adventures of Feluda -- Satyajit Ray. 14. Mukh Chai Mukh -- Milan Mukhopadhyay. 15. Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Ashapurna Devi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Banaphul, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Shivani and Munshi Premchand. 16. Ravi Shankar, Bhimsen Joshi and Kishori Amonkar on Spotify. 17. Haré Rama Haré Krishna -- Dev Anand. 18. The Charm of Raga Des - Abhijit Bhaduri. 19. SD Burman and Nikhil Banerjee on Spotify. 20. Is Old Music Killing New Music? -- Ted Gioia. 21. The Universe of Chuck Gopal -- Episode 258 of The Seen and the Unseen. 22. Brave New World -- Episode 203 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vasant Dhar). 23. Wanting -- Luke Burgis. 24. Khushwant Singh and Mulkraj Anand on Amazon. 25. RK Laxman, Mario Miranda and Ajit Ninan. 26. In Search of Excellence -- Tom Peters. 27. Mirch Masala -- Ketan Mehta. 28. Ek Ruka Hua Faisla -- Basu Chatterjee. 29. 12 Angry Men -- Sidney Lumet. 30. Housefull Economics. 31. Manu Pillai and Ramachandra Guha on Amazon. 32. Episodes of the Seen and the Unseen w Manu Pillai: 1, 2, 3, 4. 33. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Ramachandra Guha: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 34. The Hedgehog And The Fox — Isaiah Berlin. 35. Are you a career3.0 person stuck in a career1.0 Job? -- Abhijit Bhaduri. 36. Miss Excel on Instagram and TikTok. 37. How an Excel Tiktoker Manifested Her Way to Making Six Figures a Day — Nilay Patel. 38. In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones -- Pradip Krishen. 39. How Social Media Threatens Society — Episode 8 of Brave New World (Jonathan Haidt speaking to host Vasant Dhar). 40. Elite Imitation in Public Policy -- Episode 180 of The Seen and the Unseen (on isomorphic mimicry, with Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok). 41. Skeuomorphic Design. 42. The New World Upon Us -- Amit Varma on Alpha Zero. 43. Google's AlphaZero Destroys Stockfish In 100-Game Match -- Mike Klein. 44. Dicing An Onion -- Gordon Ramsey. 45. Satyajit Ray on Amazon. 46. Feluda @ 50 -- Edited by Boria Mazumdar. 47. Days & Nights In The Forest -- Sunil Gangopadhyay. 48. The Art of Translation -- Episode 168 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Arunava Sinha). 49. Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages — Peggy Mohan. 50. Understanding India Through Its Languages -- Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). This episode is sponsored by Knest Manufacturers, India's largest and the world's fastest-growing formwork company, which has made real estate development in India more efficient, sustainable and scalable. This episode is so-sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! The illustration for this episode is by Nishant Jain aka Sneaky Artist. Check out his work on Twitter, Instagram and Substack.