The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth

One concept that comes up a lot on the Rhodes Center Podcast: the idea of the 'free market’.

The idea, as you might know it, begins with John Locke, is fashioned fully by Adam Smith, and is delivered to us gift-wrapped (after some delays) by the likes of Hayek and Friedman in the mid 20th century.

But as our guest on this episode explains, the idea of the free market is hardly so straightforward...

On the last episode of the podcast, Mark talked with two experts regarding the Inflation Reduction Act, and the political and logistical challenges of accelerating a ‘Green Transition’ in the US. 

Which makes for an interesting comparison to our topic today...

Over the last two years, if you had asked Mark Blyth if the Biden administration would ever do anything meaningful to fight climate change, he’d have said “no.” These feelings only got stronger in 2021, after the Democrats failed to pass their first big attempt at climate legislation, known as ‘Build Back Better.’

But then, something changed. The Inflation Reduction Act became law...

In the last few years, globalization has gotten an increasingly a bad rap. Whether because of increasing geopolitical tensions over high end computers chips, or the realization that when you outsource your manufacturing base it’s quite hard to make things in a hurry (see: the pandemic), people across the political spectrum are calling time on ‘make it there, ship it here...

This episode is a little different than the type of conversation you normally have on the show. 

Last year, Mark spoke with Oded Galor about his book The Journey of Humanity, a long-run take on why humanity changed so little for so long, and then all of sudden changed tremendously, mostly for the better. 

It’s a fascinating idea, but of course nobody actually experiences that long-run journey, or compares their daily life to distant ancestors...

On this episode Mark talks with Oded Galor, Professor of Economics at Brown University, and author of the new book The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality. 

In this book Oded survey’s 200,000 years of human history to create a theory for why societies and economies grew so slowly for so long – and why, starting about 200 years ago, that began to change very rapidly...

There’s a standard story economists and historians use to explain the global economy over the last 100 years: there was the gold standard, which gave way to the Bretton Woods system, which gave way to “neoliberal globalization”. 

But on this episode of the Rhodes Center Podcast, Mark talks with someone whose work challenges this story by attacking its foundational myth with deep archival work...

From 2019 to 2021, Frances Haugen worked as a Product Manager in Facebook’s Civic Integrity Department. During that time she got an inside view into how Facebook’s algorithms are deliberately designed to influence its users. She also saw something deeply worrying: that this influence was often used to grow Facebook’s profits at the expense of users' safety and wellbeing. 

In 2021 she anonymously leaked tens of thousands of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal...

In the last few years we’ve seen critiques of free trade from across the political spectrum. Trump focused on the US-China trade imbalance, while the left focuses its ire on free trade agreements themselves. 

It’s, of course, not the first time that protectionist ideas have found currency in a globalizing economy.  

In the late 18th century a theory known as ‘neomercantilism’ began to thrive in a number of western countries...

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