The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth

On this episode, Mark talks with two guests to try and understand why, despite growing right populist movements emerging and winning elections in countries around the world, the left seems to be stalling. It’s a simple question with an incredibly complex answer. Hopefully, though, these two guests will help you to see both the question and its possible answers in a new light. 

Guests on this episode:

• Björn Bremer: political ...

On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Małgorzata Mazurek, a historian, associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, and author of the forthcoming book “The Economics of Hereness: The Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism 1918-1968.”

Mazurek explores how, between World Wars I and II, a group of thinkers led by economists Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau began to re-envision Poland’s economy – and future. Their w...

In this episode, Mark Blyth talks with two inequality experts to try and understand something that’s been bugging him for years.

It goes like this: inequality has profound effects on our economy, society, and lives. It has also been growing, and today is at historically high levels. Given all that, why does inequality never seem to be a topic around which we organize our politics? 

Too complicated? Too boring? Too unsolvable?&nb...

To state the obvious, there are many hurdles to addressing the climate crisis in a meaningful way. However, there’s been one relatively bright spot on this front in the last decade: the price of renewable energy — particularly solar and wind power — has dropped dramatically. By many measures, they’re now cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. 

So does that mean when it comes to a “green transition” can we just sit back and let t...

This is a new experiment we’re trying at the Rhodes Center Podcast. 

From time to time, going forward, instead of focusing on one expert and their latest research, Mark will take a deeper dive into one issue (or one question) that’s been bothering him. 

Future episodes will examine the politics of immigration and the persistence of inequality. But the first episode in this new series will explore a topic especially near and...

Remember the supply chain problems of 2020 and 2021? The story we were told was that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy's ability to make and transport goods of every type imaginable: Surgical masks. Car parts. Infant formula. 

But as New York Times' global economic correspondent Peter Goodman explains in his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain,” the story is more compl...

When it comes to governing our economy, estimates rule the day. We want to know what effect a policy might have on the government’s budget, on economic growth, on employment…in the next 1 year, 5 years, 10 years…you get the idea. If you want to make (or critique) public policy, you better have numbers to back it up. 

To get those types of estimates, economists and politicians often rely on institutions like the Office for Budge...

When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship. 

With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this trend has garnered lots of attention in the last few yea...

Listeners of the Rhodes Center Podcast have probably heard of companies like Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard. You’ve also probably heard how, through ETFs and other investment products, these types of investment firms own a staggering share of the world’s biggest companies (20-25% of the S&P 500 by some estimates). 

But in this episode, you’ll hear about a whole other side of asset management; one that’s more opaque, ...

On this podcast, you’ve heard from a range of experts about the policies and politics of decarbonization. But what does the fight against climate change look like from the business side?

Sophie Purdom is the Founder and Managing Partner of Planeteer Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in early-stage climate technology companies. She also writes Climate Tech VC, an industry newsletter that goes deep into the business side of...

In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates in the United States among white middle-aged men and women between the years of 1999 and 2013. 

They published a book in 2020 that aimed to explain the trend, which they attributed to — among other factors — economic stagnation, social isolation, and the opioid crisis. The book, titled “Deaths of De...

This is part three in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson). 

On this episode, Mark talks with four contributors for the book: Alex Reisenbichler, Aidan Regan, Oddný Helgadóttir, and Jonas Nahm. They look at case studies in a handful of countries, as well as some of the cross-cutting trends affecting all grow...

This is part two in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson). 

In part one (which, if you haven’t listened to, we’d recommend you go back and do), Mark and his guests discussed how growth models are almost like the business model for a country. But of course, countries don’t exist in isolation. They can rise and...

This is the first in a three-part series on Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, a book co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro, and Jonas Pontusson. 

Using examples from around the world, the book offers a new understanding of what happens to our politics when growth slows down. In this episode, Mark grills his co-authors about how the book came to be, and the big questions that guided its creation.&n...

In 1849, the historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle referred to economics as the “dismal science.” The pejorative stuck, and is still slung by critics of the field today. 

But what if economics is worse than “dismal”? What it’s…harmful? 

George DeMartino’s recent book, “The Tragic Science: How Economists Cause Harm (Even as They Aspire to Do Good)”, makes exactly that claim: that economists aren’t just ineffective at solv...

On this episode Mark Blyth talks with this year’s invited speaker at the Rhodes Center’s annual 'Ethics of Capitalism’ lecture series, journalist D​​avid de Jong. 

David’s groundbreaking book “Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties”, looks at the individuals and companies that accumulated unimaginable wealth under the Third Reich. Through his incredible investigative work, he exposes how thes...

The history of international politics since 1945. The role of values in the global economy. The future of America’s relationship with China. All three of these would be ambitious topics for a work of political economy. But combining them? That’s not for the faint of heart.  

However, that’s exactly what Sir Paul Tucker has done in his new book, “Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order”. 

Tucker is a...

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. Jacob Soll is a professor of philosop...

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.

Because these days, when people want to critique how slow and ineffective the US government can be, they often compare it to another country – one that we tell ourselves is ...