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
He only runs the place.
And I'm serious.
An economist friend of mine likes to say that no one person on earth knows how to make a pencil.
Her point is how well the machine organises itself.
Excuse me for a moment while I take in a quick game of pool at my local American pool hall.
The great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously used billiard balls to show how we learn about causality, that is, the way that one thing leads to another, all those angles and forces, and... You could tell the entire story of economics as a quest to find deterministic laws about how one thing leads to another...
or not.
Of all the social sciences, economics has been perhaps most influenced by natural science as an ideal, of laws originating in nature.
But science can mean many things.
Let's hear from our two historians, Mary Morgan and Roger Backhouse.
it's time to take a look at the other side of this argument.
Many who dislike the market's forces, laws and mechanisms think that it repeatedly overheats, then blows an almighty gasket with wretched human consequences.
And when it does go wrong, crunching bank lending for example, it emphatically does not sort itself out.
Often these critics are Keynesians of one sort or another, after John Maynard Keynes.
But what's ironic about the original Keynesian opposition is that it also became a machine.
And we're going to see it.
About the size of a large wardrobe, it sits proudly in Cambridge University, full of pumps, vessels and water to mimic the flow of money around the economy.
Invented in 1949 by Bill Phillips, its unofficial curator is Alan MacRobie.
He was an engineer.
He was an electrical engineer.
Showing 381–400 of 745 · page 20 of 38
← Previous
Next →