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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
You notice that about economics, this language of hard rules and science?
They talk of market forces, laws, sometimes iron laws, of supply and demand.
The price mechanism.
equilibrium.
It's a mixture of physicist and bloke with his head under the bonnet.
Until the 20th century, government was a small player in the economy, at least by today's standards.
Then we had depression in the 1930s and war in the 40s, and emerged believing that government, not the market, was the answer.
But by the 70s, unemployment and inflation were rising.
The UK was up and down like a fiddler's elbow through hyperactive cycles of boom and bust.
Faith in government tumbled.
Here in Chicago, meanwhile, cheerleaders for a market revival were winning Nobel Prizes, among them Gary Becker and Milton Friedman.
When Soviet communism with its planned economy imploded in 1989 after decades of supposed miracles, the market was triumphant.
30 minutes uptown from Chicago's skyscraper financial district, we meet Charles Whelan, who also teaches at the university.
We popped into his favorite cafe, which the market is treating well.
Forgive me while I rhapsodise for a moment about market economies because you observe these things, these vast, glorious machines, and they allocate and sift and sort and price and they take commodities and raw materials and they mix them with people with all their needs and ambitions and expectations and values and this great titanic mechanism just somehow...
brings it all together so that I can go into a supermarket and find the very particular loaf of bread that I like on the shelf in front of me.
And it can do all this at an infinitely smaller fraction of the cost than I would pay in time and effort and money to do it myself.
And, well...
Here we are in a small village, Cottenham, in Cambridgeshire, in a very tiny, tiny cog in that mechanism, and we've come to Barker's Bakery, and I'm going to ask a very stupid question in a moment, because there is another way of doing this.
We didn't have to leave it to this beautifully calibrated watch, this magnificent computer, to do it all on its own.
Showing 341–360 of 745 · page 18 of 38
← Previous
Next →