EconTalk
EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious is an award-winning weekly podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford's Hoover Institution. The eclectic guest list includes authors, doctors, psychologists, historians, philosophers, economists, and more. Learn how the health care system really works, the serenity that comes from humility, the challenge of interpreting data, how potato chips are made, what it's like to run an upscale Manhattan restaurant, what caused the 2008 financial crisis, the nature of consciousness, and more. EconTalk has been taking the Monday out of Mondays since 2006. All 900+ episodes are available in the archive. Go to EconTalk.org for transcripts, related resources, and comments.
- Update frequency
- every 7 days
- Average duration
- 68 minutes
- Episodes
- 1014
- Years Active
- 2006 - 2025
Daniel Okrent on Prohibition and His Book, Last Call
Daniel Okent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, talks about the book with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. They discuss how the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture, sale, and trans…
Louis Menand on Psychiatry
Louis Menand of Harvard University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the state of psychiatry. Drawing on a recent article of his in the New Yorker, Menand talks about the state of knowledge…
Gary Belsky on Journalism, Editing, and Trivia
Gary Belsky, Editor-in-Chief at ESPN The Magazine, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his career path in journalism and the day-to-day life of editing a major American magazine. Belsky discu…
Russ Roberts on the Crisis
Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, discusses his paper, "Gambling with Other People's Money: How Perverted Incentives Created the Financial Crisis." Roberts reflects on the past eighteen months of podca…
Ed Leamer on the State of Econometrics
Ed Leamer of UCLA talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the state of econometrics. He discusses his 1983 article, "Let's Take the 'Con' Out of Econometrics" and the recent interest in natural e…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Black Swans, Fragility, and Mistakes
Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his latest thoughts on robustness, fragility, debt, insurance, uncertainty, exercise, mora…
Paul Romer on Charter Cities
Paul Romer of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about charter cities, Romer's idea for helping the poorest of the poor around the world. Romer envisions a city where the rules…
Michael Munger on Love, Money, Profits, and Non-profits
Mike Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the world of profit, money, love, gifts, and incentives. What motivates people, self-interest or altruism? Both obviously. B…
Diane Ravitch on Education
Diane Ravitch of NYU talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. R…
Yochai Benkler on Net Neutrality, Competition, and the Future of the Internet
Yochai Benkler of Harvard University talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about net neutrality, access to the internet, and innovation. Benkler argues in favor of net neutrality and government support…
Arthur De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness
Arthur De Vany, of the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Evolutionary Fitness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and Evolutionary Fitn…
Steve Meyer on the Music Industry and the Internet
Steve Meyer, music industry veteran and publisher of the Disc and Dat Newsletter, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the evolution of the music industry and the impact of the digital revolut…
Don Boudreaux on Public Choice
Don Boudreaux of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about public choice: the application of economics to the political process. Boudreaux argues that political competition …
Katherine Newman on Low-wage Workers
Katherine Newman, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Newman's case studies of fast-food workers in Harlem. Newman discusses the evolution of t…
Barry Ritholtz on Bailouts, the Fed, and the Crisis
Barry Ritholtz, author of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of bailouts in recent tim…
Garett Jones on Macro and Twitter
Garett Jones of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the art of communicating economics via puzzles and short provocative insights. They discuss Jones's Twitter strateg…
Edmund Phelps on Unemployment and the State of Macroeonomics
Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps of Columbia University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the market for labor, unemployment, and the evolution of macroeconomics over the past century. The conv…
Russ Roberts on Smith, Ricardo, and Trade
Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, does a monologue this week on the economics of trade and specialization. Economists have focused on David Ricardo's idea of comparative advantage as the source of spec…
Larry White on Hayek and Money
Larry White of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Hayek's ideas on the business cycle and money. White lays out Hayek's view of business cycles and the role of moneta…
Michael Spence on Growth
Nobel Laureate Michael Spence of Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Commission on Growth and Development talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the determinants of economic growth.…