Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, if somebody else is sitting at the table... You can't sit at a table if someone else is sitting at it, unless you ask them.
But it's not their table.
It's not their table, right.
But somehow it's as though they rented the table for the evening, even if they hadn't.
Clearly this is a pretty absurd way to talk about going to the pub for a drink.
Of course it is, because we both lived in Britain for most of our lives, and we know what the rules are.
But if we came here, if we were doing an anthropological study and came here from New Guinea, in the way British anthropologists go out to New Guinea, we'd have to ascertain what these rules are.
And why is that relevant to economics?
It's relevant to economics because...
It's the rules like these that determine the structure and the quality of the institutions in which we operate.
I think of this as the fish question.
How aware is a fish that it swims in water?
Not very.
Am I too a prisoner of my time and place whose choices aren't calculated but absorbed from culture?
Oh dear, the simplest economic transactions in institutions from pubs to banks, in firms and stock markets, all mixed into a cultural soup of things we do because these are things we do, rather than the result of rational independent calculation.
I'd like to know more about Homo economicus.
Let's hear from the historians who've accompanied us in this series.
Roger Backhouse and first, Mary Morgan.
I suspect some people feel there's just a bit of a ghost in the whole machine.
Economics, which is very often characterised as a sort of mechanistic discipline, is never going to get at whatever it is.
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