ROCKING OUR PRIORS
Dr Alice Evans and leading experts discuss growth, governance, & gender inequalities. Alice is a Senior Lecturer at King's College London, and Faculty Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Episodes
August 2, 2025 • 74 mins
John Burn-Murdoch (the FT's Chief Data Reporter) and I discuss gendered ideological polarisation.
- Does this hold worldwide?
- Which groups are most polarised?
- Is there a rise in hostile sexism?
- Is this due to economic frustrations or online persuasion?
- What are the possible solutions?
Read John's weekly columns at https://www.ft.com/john-burn-murdoch
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March 21, 2025 • 61 mins
The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Professor Malika Zeghal by Dr Alice Evans
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March 19, 2025 • 104 mins
Professor Jared Rubin has authored two superb books, “Rulers, Religion and Riches” and “How the World Became Rich”. He joined my podcast, to discuss:
- Why did the Middle East Fall Behind?
- What caused the shift to Scriptural Literalism?
- What explains the Rise and Decline of Sufism?
- How important was Wahhabism and Saudi Petrodollars?
- Why were Liberalising Reforms Short-Lived?
- Why has Digital Technology been More Disruptiv...
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November 19, 2024 • 76 mins
Professor Agustina Paglayan has a fascinating new book: “Raised to Obey”!
She contends that mass primary education systems were primarily established to consolidate state authority and maintain social order.
But what about industrialisation, democratisation or the Protestant Reformation?
And why should education experts consider Political Economy?
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Raised-Obey-Education-Princeton-Economic/dp/069126...
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October 2, 2024 • 107 mins
How exactly does low fertility affect economic growth, are UN population predictions accurate, what’s driving the decline in fertility, and what can be done?
To answer these questions, I’m joined by the brilliant macro-economist, Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
Read his recent paper: The Wealth of Working Nations https://www.nber.org/papers/w31914
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September 1, 2024 • 67 mins
Professor Daron Acemoglu is famous for his careful empirical research, demonstrating the economic importance of institutions. But actually, he’s done a 180 to embrace culture!
In this podcast we discuss his new theory of culture, what drives liberty and prosperity, the limits of democracy, and the importance of geography!
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August 30, 2024 • 77 mins
Dr Oliver Kim has completed his PhD at Berkeley, recently appointed at Open Philanthropy. He does awesome research, carefully examining the drivers of structural transformation. We discussed:
Why do you think East Asia is the only world region to have converged with the West?
How have big data and computational tools changed our understanding of structural transformation?
Oliver's website: https://oliverwkim.com/
His substack: h...
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July 26, 2024 • 36 mins
“Vikings is no. 1 from all the Saudi men 😂”.
Leila chuckled as we browsed top hits on Netflix. For only 30 Riyals (8 USD) a month, Saudis can tune into stories about uncovered pagans. A global feast of delights are now on offer - from Western films to women’s football.
Rapid cultural change is afoot in Saudi Arabia, a unique experiment in top-down secularisation. But how can we as social scientists study such rapid cultural evol...
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July 22, 2024 • 33 mins
Culture is not a static inheritance, but a dynamic arena of ongoing struggle. From the mosques of Jakarta to the classrooms of Louisiana, from TikTok feeds to university lecture halls, ideological warfare rages. This podcast explores the complex interplay of several crucial factors shaping our cultural landscape:
Contestation: Culture is a battlefield where competing ideologies clash, merge, and evolve. Prestigious actors and inst...
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July 18, 2024 • 28 mins
Imagine: Elon Musk's tweet causes a cryptocurrency frenzy. Kim Kardashian’s outfit becomes an overnight fashion sensation. Daron Acemoglu and colleagues’ paper on settler mortality reshapes economic thinking. The Pope’s words influence millions globally. What links these diverse events? They’re all powerful manifestations of prestige bias.
Psychologically, we seek guidance from those who’ve achieved success, looking to emulate the...
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July 11, 2024 • 22 mins
Senior management remains heavily male, and honestly I’m not entirely sure why.
Economist Ingrid Haegele finds that junior men are more likely to apply for promotions, primarily due to a greater desire for team leadership.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.07750.pdf
Haegele: https://www.ingridhaegele.com/
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July 9, 2024 • 17 mins
During the World War I, the US federal government was short on civil servants and actively recruited women.
Abhay Aneja, Silvia Farina, and Guo Xu find that men with multiple female colleagues were subsequently more likely to marry working women and father careerist daughters! Crucially, the effect is larger when men have many female colleagues and it becomes perfectly conventional.
Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32639
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July 3, 2024 • 90 mins
How can we improve government capacity and public services?
In “Mission-Driven Bureaucrats”, Dan Honig argues that civil servants are often deeply committed, yet hobbled by strict rule books. Trapped by top-down strictures, civil servants may even become disillusioned. Unable to help, they quit.
Government ministries can be so much more effective if motivated civil servants actually have the autonomy to be creative, independent, ...
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June 29, 2024 • 26 mins
Imagine a world where love knows no boundaries, where two people can marry regardless of their gender. Now open your eyes. In some parts of the globe, this is reality. In others, it's a distant dream.
Twenty years ago, a mere 26% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. Today, that figure has skyrocketed to 69%. That is extremely rapid cultural change in favour of love and liberalism. But hold your applause, because here’s the pl...
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June 24, 2024 • 89 mins
Aaron Rock-Singer is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He has published two fantastic books, “Practicing Islam: Egypt’s Islamic Revival” and “In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East”.
Aaron is truly brilliant, connecting both the macro and the micro. By examining structural shifts in education and urbanisation as well as Islamic print media, he shows how modernis...
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June 20, 2024 • 16 mins
The Ten Commandments must now be displayed in all Louisiana’s public school classrooms. The law, signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry, requires poster-sized copies with easily readable text.
Why is this happening? Is it unprecedented?
Actually, it echoes the 1970s global religious revival. Threatened by liberal modernity, conservatives worldwide leveraged new technologies and defensively mobilised to institutionalise piety.
...
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June 10, 2024 • 153 mins
Professor Robert Hefner has a tremendous new book, “Islam and Citizenship in Indonesia: Democracy and the Quest for an Inclusive Public Ethics”. It’s one of my favourite books of the year, drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research. Today, he joins “Rocking Our Priors”. We discuss:
Indonesia’s religious history
Why have Hinduism and Buddhism have largely faded in Indonesia?
Why were madrasas were rare until the 19th centu...
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May 28, 2024 • 91 mins
Michael Cook's "A History of the Muslim World" is my favourite book of 2024. Together, we discussed:
- Did Islamic science weaken due to religious authoritarianism?
- Why, in the Middle East and North Africa, were there so few peasant rebellions?
- Theologically, how important was Ghazali?
- What determined the rate at which people converted to Islam?
- Why was there so much religious syncretism and diversity in the Ottoman Empir...
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May 23, 2024 • 30 mins
Trust is down, worldwide. In India, Iran, Indonesia and Nigeria, less than 15% say that ‘most people can be trusted’. What’s going on? I suggest several likely mechanisms:
1) Generalised distrust is correlated with strong family bonds
2) Poorer countries have rapidly urbanised at a lower level of income
3) Rule of law varies worldwide
4) Political contestation and growing polarisation
5) Online connectivity has boomed, and is incr...
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April 22, 2024 • 7 mins
What led to the demise of foot-binding? by Dr Alice Evans
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