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
The herd-like pressures.
And that takes us into our next programme.
The question that whether economics is fundamentally undermined by human and cultural and institutional pressures and everyday behaviour.
It's a bright February morning in Athens and we're standing... This makes my heart beat a little faster.
We're standing where Aristotle once taught, near the library of the Lyceum, recently rediscovered and soon to be excavated.
Greece is arguably where economics as a discipline began, and it was an economics that was, in many ways, deeply moral, with the gods much in mind.
And if morals no longer seem relevant to the dry economic calculus, well, that's not how it seems here, where people have died protesting about their economic fortunes.
That's a Greek activist, Nikki Roubani.
In good times, money felt no need of an excuse.
Well, not now.
Greed is evil again.
Who thinks that not just bankers and regulators, but economists have some explaining to do?
Me too.
So when Radio 4 asked me to tell the story of economics and why it goes wrong, I said, ask an economist.
Then relented.
Because it seemed to me that one way of thinking about economics and the crash was Nikki Rabbani's, that we're living through a morality tale.
So in these three programmes we'll explore that and two other perspectives.
That economics is not really about morality, but science, describing a vast economic machine.
And third, that it wrestles less with morality or mechanics than with a spirited animal, made up from billions of capricious wills and impulses, including yours and mine.
We've called these three gods, cogs and monsters.
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