John Stepek
speaker
2,659 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard yesterday
John Stepek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
Um, in New York they're about to open state sponsored grocery stores because prices are too high and you're kinda like, well
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You know, you have to address the underlying issues rather than just you don't do price fixing.
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Um and yeah, so I think that Adam Smith was was spot on about that and it's a persistent issue.
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Yeah, you have to go with the grain of people.
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Um and I do think that's where the theory of moral sentiments is actually really interesting and really worth reading.
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Because I I think the other issue with Smith is that there's this sense that he's in some way the you know the father of free markets or the father of kind of you know capitalism.
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And then you quite often see because obviously this is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the wealthy nations, and I remember reading a few
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Few articles where there's a sort of there's a respect for Smith, but also a sort of like, oh, side face capitalism sort of thing going on, where people feel slightly embarrassed about it.
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And in fact, really, I think trying to get away from this idea that capitalism is something that was imposed is not it kind of reflects what human nature is like.
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And the whole theory of moral sentiments is basically about.
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Empathy.
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It's I mean he calls it sympathy, but I think these days we would probably say that he's describing empathy.
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And really he's just talking about we have a natural desire to see our fellow human beings do well uh with you know within reason.
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Um and you know he talks about how when you see someone in trouble, your your kind of heart goes out to them.
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Um and he also talks about the limits of empathy and explains, for example, why when you see an earthquake in
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in China.
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In fact that's the example he uses.
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You know, you don't feel as upset as if say your next door neighbour, you know, has a horrible tragedy happen to them.
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Um and so he kinda talks about but he talks about human beings and what they were like and basically they were social animals.
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Um and the way that we organise society has to be has to work with that grain rather than being imposed from the top down.
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Showing 401–420 of 2,659 · page 21 of 133
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