ePODstemology: Recent Episodes
Mark Fabian
Medicine for intellectual boredom. Host Dr Mark Fabian of Cambridge University brings together an eclectic mix of creative young folk to discuss the most stimulating ideas at the knowledge frontier, from data governance to the metamodern cultural mode, and everything in between. The world's most thoughtful people, having a chat - and you're invited! So turn off your socials, throw away your popular science books, and get ready for some legit galaxy brain takes. Thanks to Keith Spangle for the spaceship cat avatar https://www.deviantart.com/keithspangle
Dr Jaclyn Siegel from NORC at the University of Chicago joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the psychological science of eating disorders and body image, especially her own qualitative research on eating disorders in the workplace and romantic relationships. The conversation also covers the relationship between social media and eating disorders, gluttonous eating, the pros and cons of the Kardashian physique and other pseudo-body positivity trends, the value of grounded theory as a method, and how you can approach someone you care about whom you suspect has an eating disorder.
Jaclyn’s website:
https://www.jaclynasiegel.com/
Follow Jaclyn on twitter:
https://x.com/jacasiegel
How romantic partners can offer support to their partners with eating disorders:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1740144524000317
Eating disorders in the workplace:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0361684318812475?journalCode=pwqa
Helped, heard, or hugged?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/well/emotions-support-relationships.html
Grounded theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory
Braun and Clark thematic analysis:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Becker’s study of the impact of western media on Fijian women’s body image:
https://www.brown.uk.com/eatingdisorders/becker.pdf
ePODstemology brings you cutting edge insights and analysis from early career researchers to help you cut through 21st century complexity. A major driver of that complexity is Algorithms - an increasingly ubiquitous yet remarkably opaque aspect of modern life, directing what you watch on television, who drives your taxi, what products you see when online shopping, and, increasingly who purchases your labour. This episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Hatim Rahman, Assistant Professor of management and organisations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Hatim has a new book out studying the nature and effects of algorithmic management of high skilled workers trading via online platforms like Taskrabbit and Upwork. The Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, available from University of California Press, traces how Algorithmic management perpetuates earlier trends in personal management like Taylorism and Weber’s Iron Cage of bureaucracy, while also significantly departing from these traditional modes. Hatim’s book also explores the regulatory, cultural, and institutional loopholes that algorithmic labour market platforms use to skirt existing labour protections and extract more value for capital, and considers how policymakers and citizens might respond to contemporary trends.
Hatim’s website:
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rahman_hatim.aspx
Buy the book!
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520395541/inside-the-invisible-cage
Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_cage
Taylorism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
Fair Work Consumer Reports:
https://fair.work/en/fw/publications/fairwork-uk-ratings-2023-a-call-for-transparency/
Some of you may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean roughly 1.6 million square kilometres in size that contains between 45 000 to 129 000 metrics tonnes of plastic waste, mostly in the form of microplastics – fingernail sized or smaller bits of the material. The patch has increased 10-fold in size each decade since 1945, and has a twin in the North Atlantic Garbage patch. Growing awareness of the patch and other environmental consequences of plastic waste, like seagull bellies full of plastic lids or turtles trapped in beer nets from six packs, has led to an increasing eco-consciousness around plastic packaging and a desire to use less of it. But as with many policy challenges, the situation can be more complex than a simple slogan like reduce, reuse, recycle. To explain these nuances, my guest this episode is Dr Jack Pickering, a freelance researcher who recently completed a postdoc on waste in the UK food system at City University London. Jack is a qualitative researcher with a PhD from the University of Cardiff in Wales in human geography. He has been working in interdisciplinary teams using mixed methods to understand the causes of waste, people’s beliefs about it, industry attitudes, and how to improve the situation.
Jack’s Linkedin Profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-pickering-6170a4209/?
Jack’s paper on consumer attitudes to plastic packaging:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2023.2281398
Mark Miodownik lab’s work on composting in the UK using citizen science:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsus.2022.942724/full
Sarah Greenwood, packaging expert:
https://scgreenwood.co.uk/
Mike Munger on recycling, especially of glass:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/06/03/michael-c-munger/recycling-can-it-be-wrong-when-it-feels-so-right/
Lesley Henderson and team’s plastic mythbusters toolkit:
https://www.coastalpollutiontoolbox.org/
Max Liboiron’s website (Jack wanted to note that Max is an indigenous/first nations person and avoids using the word ‘Canada’ – an oversight on our part in the episode):
https://maxliboiron.com/
This podcast strives to bring forward new insights and innovative frameworks for understanding the world of the 21st century. Few things underscore just how radically different things are today from the 20th century than recent advances in artificial intelligence, where an AI ‘copilot’ on your smartphone can now perform myriad tasks for you in a few seconds. This episode’s guest is one of the people best placed globally to help us understand the implications of this new technology. He’s Ash Fontana, author with Penguin Random House of The AI First Company: How to Compete and Win With Artificial Intelligence. Ash has been working in the venture capital space with firms utilising machine learning applications for over a decade. He launched Angel List’s fundraising platform, which manages over $15 billion dollars, and was the first or largest investor in category defining companies like Canva, Kaggle, and Tractable. He remains at the forefront of thinking about how artificial intelligence can reshape economies and economies and societies for the better, and how regulators, investors, and other influential actors should approach the possibilities in the space.
Ash's website:
https://ashfontana.com/
The AI-First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence:
https://www.theaifirstcompany.com/
David Watson's episode on ePODstemology about machine learning and the acceleration of discovery:
https://epodstemology.buzzsprout.com/1763534/10465344-machine-learning-and-the-acceleration-of-discovery
James Steele is Associate Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at Solent University. He has extensive research and consultancy experience working with elite athletes across a range of sports, the general population across the lifespan, and both those who are healthy and diseased. He was a member of the Expert Working Group revising the CMO Physical Activity Guidelines for the United Kingdom and is a founding member of both the Strength and Conditioning Society, and the Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology. James joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Warwick, to discuss the new hotness in exercise: low-dose workouts, as well as the challenges and peculiarities of conducting research in the sports space. This is the episode for everyone who thinks that maybe all those sports influencers out there aren't being entirely honest with the 'science'.
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by episode guest Dr Stefania Fiorentino, senior teaching associate in planning, growth, and urban regeneration at Cambridge university’s department of land economy. Dr Fiorentino’s research is at the intersection of urban planning and local economic development, specifically how to innovate with respect to the inclusivity and effectiveness of urban regeneration strategies. Her research is extremely impact-oriented and is typically conducted in partnership with communities, developers, and local government. She has worked especially on coastal towns in the UK, and also has papers on densification strategies, industrial clusters, the geography of innovation, and regional inequalities. The conversation ranges from left behind places to gentrification and strategies for participatory governance. Stefania’s webpage and papers:
https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-stefania-fiorentino
Fiorentino, S., Glasmeier, A. K., Lobao, L., Martin, R., and Tyler, P. (2023) ‘Left behind places’: what are they and why do they matter?, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad044
Fiorentino, S., Sielker, F., and Tomaney, J. (2023) Coastal towns as ‘left-behind places’: economy, environment and planning, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad045
Fiorentino, S. (2023) Public-led shared workspaces and the intangible factors of urban regeneration in UK coastal towns, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 11(1), DOI: 10.1080/21650020.2023.2260853
Fiorentino et al. (2022) The future of the corporate office? Emerging trends in the post-Covid city, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 15(3), 597–614, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsac027
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Jacqui Lau, senior lecturer and discovery early career fellow (DECRA) at James Cook University in Australia. Jacqui is an environmental scientist employing interdisciplinary perspectives and mixed methods to understand how coastal communities in the pacific islands and Australia respond to climate change and environmental transformations. She has worked collaboratively in the Pacific, East and West Africa to examine ecosystem services, the impact of shocks like COVID-19 on coastal communities, perceptions of fairness about the customary management of coral reefs, and issues of equity (including gender) in conservation and climate change policy. Her work has been published in Nature Climate Change, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and World Development, among other top outlets.
Jacqui’s website: https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/jacqueline.lau/
Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analysing the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Nature, 325(5939): 419–422. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1172133
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values, and ethical life. Cambridge University Press.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. & Ditto, P. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Applied Experimental Philosophy, 47(1): 55–130. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124072367000024?
See also Haidt, J. The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided on politics and religion. Penguin.
Shark’s Pacific and Dr Jess Cramp: https://sharkspacific.org/about/
‘Copaganda’ is the name given to media that seeks to portray the police in a favourable, often distorted light. This includes fictional shows like Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and Miami Vice, as well as reality-TV style shows that follow policy officers around as they go about their business. Emma Rackstraw’s research investigates how these shows affect the behaviour of the police, perceptions of the police among viewers, and attitudes towards the police in the communities where these shows take place. She joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the implications of copaganda for criminal justice reform in the United States, the role that researchers play in skewing policy analysis for good or ill, and what changes are most urgently needed in US criminal justice policy.
Emma’s website:
https://www.emmarackstraw.com/home
Emma’s job market paper:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4592803
“The Work” documentary (typically available via Amazon Prime):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5836866/
Public health approaches to policing:
https://www.intensiveengagement.com/uploads/3/2/8/3/3283498/public_health_approaches.pdf
Climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity. So why aren’t we doing more about it? This week’s guest is Dr Antonio Valentim, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Centre. His research seeks to answer two main questions 1) when and why do voters change their opinions and behaviours with respect to climate change? and 2) how do political incentives influence political elites’ behaviour on climate change? Who better to help us get some answer on how we can get more action on the climate policy front. If you’re interested in what protesters, citizens, political parties, and researchers can do to advance the climate transition, tune into this episode.
Antonio’s website: https://antoniovalentim.github.io/
Antonio’s paper on Fridays for Future protests: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m6dpg/
Antonio’s paper on the Green’s not fielding candidates in flood affected areas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3960045
Bolet, D., Green ,F., & Gonzalez-Eguino, M. (2023). How to get coal country to vote for climate policy: The effect of a ‘just transition agreement’ on Spanish election results. Forthcoming in American Political Science Review. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4394195
While Kim Jong Un might disagreed, democracy is widely regarded as a universal value – it is a system of political organisation that enshrines the right to self-determination. Recent centuries have seen a wave of democratisation relative to historical trends, with democracies replacing dictatorships and other autocratic forms of governance in nations across the globe. Yet many of these democracies have also struggled to put down strong roots. Backsliding is common and consolidation arduous. A few spots of bad luck and a fledging democracy like Bangladesh or even Hungary can start to look fake. How can we promote the maturation of democracies? Samuel Amin from the University of Warwick joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian to share his insights from his PhD research on Ghana, especially the role of the national peace council there. Samuel emphasises the role of institutions in democratic consolidation, and that many of these institutions will be specific to local contexts rather than universally useful models that can be exported to other countries. The national peace council, for example, makes use of cultural narratives of Ghanaians as peaceful people, and norms of respecting religious and ethnic elders, to facilitate conflict resolution and respect for liberal-democratic institutions like courts and the electoral commission. The episode is optimistic and hopeful, with Samuel concluding with some positive thoughts about the future of democracy in West Africa.
Samuel’s student page at Warwick: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/anim/
Follow Sam on twitter: @animksam
Nick Cheeseman’s Democracy in Africa: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-in-africa/3FFB8B40059192D449B77A402ADC82A1
Kate Baldwin’s book on traditional African chiefs in democratic africa: https://politicalscience.yale.edu/publications/paradox-traditional-chiefs-democratic-africa
Dominique Burbidge’s papers on East African democracy: https://law.strathmore.edu/dr-dominic-burbidge/
Lisa Weeden’s book Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5893513.html
One way to think about what makes social science distinct is that it is trying to study subjects, not objects. Subjects have feelings, opinions, and values, which are often hard to observe and even harder to measure. Subjects’ behaviour is also often endogenous to being studied. For example, the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon refers to the observation that people often lie about their right wing and traditionalist beliefs when responding to political polling. Finally, subjects are embedded in social structures that they both create and are created by. And those structures change rapidly! Talk about a hard challenge. One thing holding social science back is the shallow understanding of the philosophy of social science among social scientists. Well ePODstemology strives to be different! This week’s guest is Dr Cristian Larroulet Philippi from the University of Cambridge, who joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the challenges of measuring the human. A key theme of the episode is that ‘physics envy’ is a poor way for social to proceed, but perhaps seismology provides a better template?
Cristian’s webpage: https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/larrouletphilippi
Some background on Kitcher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Kitcher
More information on life satisfaction scales: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00460-8
Depression scales: https://www.apa.org/depression-guideline/assessment
Inventing temperature (the history of thermometers) by Ha-Sook Chang: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/inventing-temperature-9780195337389
Eran Tal on measurement: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement-science/
Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy – little tweaks to the choice environment citizens face as they navigate the world that can help them towards the decisions they would ideally like to make. Piano key stairs that play music to encourage you to walk rather than take the escalator. Being defaulted into a high savings-rate retirement plan by your employer. Or Timely and easy to action reminders from the tax office encouraging you to pay your bills. All nudges. If you think these are all bullshit, try navigating a budget airline’s website without paying for any additional extras. Here behavioural insights from psychology are used against to wear you down and encourage you to hand over cash for things you don’t need. Behavioural welfare economics is the philosophical side of these interventions. When we use nudges and other similar interventions to help people, how do we understand what is good for them? Economics would traditional use people’s own preferences as a measure of their welfare. But one of the main contributions of behavioural economics research has been to demonstrate that people’s preferences are often unstable, unclear, context sensitive, constructed on the spot, and otherwise a poor guide to their welfare. So how should economists, psychologists, and policymakers proceed? Tune in to find out.
Malte's website:
https://www.maltedold.com/
Nudge by Thaler & Sunstein:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0141040017
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour isan anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious landscape that has shifted ever since, and how they devise new forms of spiritual practice. As we discuss in this episode, the experiences of young Zimbabweans in this regard are instructive for people in the global North, especially with respect to how we relate to our ancestors, meaning in life, and cultural power. As the systems of value that made sense of life after World War II come unstuck, a rift is growing between older, more traditional generations, and younger generations who yearn for a different world. There is much that we can learn from Anthropology with respect to navigating this mileau, and Raffaella distils some of this wisdom in conversation with regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick.
Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that income is derived from labour or capital. The implications of compositional inequality for political economy are significant. What else is new is trends in global capitalism, especially the rise of China's middle class, the advent of artificial intelligence, superannuation funds and real estate assets making middle class boomers the new owners of the means of production, and the reluctance of states to tax inefficiently.
Marco's personal website with all his publications:
https://www.mranaldi.com/
A brief explainer of compositional inequality:
https://www.mranaldi.com/ici
Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done, Harvard University Press: https://www.tony-atkinson.com/new-book-inequality-what-can-be-done/
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W. W. Norton: https://wwnorton.com/books/the-price-of-inequality/
Heather Boushey's Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Harvard University Press: https://equitablegrowth.org/unbound-how-inequality-constricts-our-economy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/
Francois Bourguignon's The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160528/the-globalization-of-inequality
A taste of the content in The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything, by Christopher Snowden:
https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/
Political economists from Goldsmith's London on the domestic regime (i.e. the low interest rate coalition between home owners and hedge funds): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-covid-19-revealed-the-politics-of-our-economy/
Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can squeeze more productivity out of you. Deeper issues like autonomy, culture, and relationships seem missing from the rhetoric. But not from the scholarship! In th bumper 90-minute episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Nina Jordan from Cambridge University and Cherise Regier and Will Fleming from Oxford University to discuss the latest research on workplace wellbeing, from the 4-day work week to worker voice and industrial relations policy. We even discuss the prospects for workplace wellbeing under capitalism.
Cherise's personal webpage: https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/cherise-regier
Will's personal webpage: https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/people/will-fleming
Nina's personal webpage: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/person/nina-jorden/
Nikolova, M. and Cnossen, F. (2020). What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it. Labour Economics. https://docs.iza.org/dp13112.pdf
Sharif, M. A., Mogliner, C., and Herschfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdf
OECD (2013). Guidelines on measuring subjective wellbeing. https://www.oecd.org/wise/oecd-guidelines-on-measuring-subjective-well-being-9789264191655-en.htm
Fabian, M. (2022). A theory of subjective wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-theory-of-subjective-wellbeing-9780197635261?cc=gb⟨=en&
Alexandrova, A. (2017). A philosophy for the science of wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780199300518?cc=gb⟨=en&
Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125169/on-justification
Argument that capitalism is about shifting returns to production towards capital: https://markfabian.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-is-capitalism.html
Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one of the most innovative scholars working on elicit finance and how to combat it. The conversation begins with development economics and the tendency for corrupt officials to move their ill gotten gains offshore. It moves from there to London, notorious site of money laundering through real estate investment, to explore recent efforts to combat elicit finance by creating a public ownership registry. Where does the conversation end? With solutions, but you'll have to listen to learn more about them.
Matt's website: https://sites.google.com/view/mattcollin/home
The Panama papers: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/
The end of Londongrad? The impact of beneficial ownership transparency on offshore investment in UK property.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zzoh2ye2aem47cr/uk_bo_main.pdf?dl=0
Jason Sharman's publications (natural experiments of willingness to engage with dodgy clients by banks):
https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-jason-sharman
Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has passed through the culture in the past decade, exploding especially on some university campuses and nowadays reaching into workplaces as gen Z graduates into employment. It's extremes were characterised by cancel culture - an authoritarian tendency to shut down people with opposing views. Freedom loving liberals everywhere were aghast, but not all of them are now similarly aghast at outright authoritarian efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures in the United States to ban elements of the Woke agenda. These are heady times. Here to chill things out a bit is Rod Graham, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Rod argues that the woke movement is really just generational change. Where 20th century generations prioritised survival, materialism, efficiency, and equal treatment of competitors in the labour market, today's youth place a greater emphasis on self-actualisation, identity, and equality. The implications are far ranging.
Rod's professional page:
https://www.odu.edu/directory/roderick-graham
Rod's twitter thread that inspired this conversation:
https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1625237234483089408
Inglehart and Welzel on survival vs self-actualisation values:
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings
One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as western psychologists have realised how distorted their view is by their tendency to only sample 'WEIRD' subjects - western, education, industrialised, rich, and democratic. Joseph Heinrich has attempted to chart the history of WEIRD societal psychology in his opus 'The WEIRDEST People in the World', but enormous amounts of research remains to be done.
Season 4 of ePODstemology kicks of Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington of the London School of Economics, one of the early career researchers operating at the forefront of this area of research. She was recently tenured as Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Jennifer is an expert in social dominance theory in particular and her research has appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Social Sciences, and Evolution and Human Behaviour, among other leading journals. Tune in to learn more!
Jennifer's website:
http://www.jennifersheehyskeffington.com/
Taking context seriously in The Psychologist:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/taking-context-seriously
Josef Roundtree Foundation article on how poverty affects decision making:
https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/how-poverty-affects-peoples-decision-making-processes
Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoked a flurry of activity concerned with how to revive left behind places and dampen their rage. A large part of this agenda is localism: a combination of place-based policy, participatory governance, and community initiatives aimed at fostering not just economic, cultural, and political revival, but also social capital and ’pride in place’. How effective is this agenda likely to be, and how should we even conceptualise its effectiveness? Is economic growth the goal, or something more complex? To think through these issues, ePODstemology welcomes Jack Shaw, senior account manager for the London Progression Collaboration, affiliate researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, and local government member for Barking and Dagenham in London. Jack is in the thick of the localism debate in the UK, where the government has recently released a whitepaper on ‘levelling up’ that aims to redress left behind places, in large part through localism initiatives and the devolution of decision making powers from the centre to local governments. Will it work or is it all bluster? Tune in to find out.
Follow Jack on twitter! @JackShawLPC
https://www.ippr.org/about/people/staff/jack-shaw
Levelling up whitepaper: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9463/#:~:text=of%20his%20Government.-,Levelling%20up%20white%20paper,social%20disparities%20across%20the%20UK.
Bennett Institute materials on localism, place, levelling up, community infrastructure, etc.
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/place/
Rodriguez Pose on the revenge of places that don’t matter: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85888/1/Rodriguez-Pose_Revenge%20of%20Places.pdf
Torsten Bell on low growth and productivity in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/why-be-a-poor-version-of-germany-instead-of-doing-what-we-do-best
Bennett Institute outputs on productivity in the UK: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/productivity/
The Economist on the cultural transition from Billy Elliot to Everyone is talking about Jamie: https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/04/28/in-britain-internal-migration-is-out-of-favour
Ron Martin and Peter Tyler on how the levelling up agenda is underfunded (and other gems): https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/levelling-up-left-behind-places/
Eric Kleinenberg on urban farms and other initiatives in Palaces for the People: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557044/palaces-for-the-people-by-eric-klinenberg/
Diane Bolet on the link between community pub closures an
What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nations that rose in the second half of the 20th century. In place of industrialisation and associated expansions in manufacturing capacity, we see a relatively larger role played by the services sector, both in terms of relatively high-end services like software development, copy editing, and call centres, and smaller, often informal operations like kiosks, airtasker, and tourism. What are the implications of this for development policy and the potential of economic growth to reduce poverty? Service-sector tasks are typically more capital and less labour-intensive than manufacturing, which limits their ability to provide jobs and wages. But they are also higher value-added tasks, which allows them to contribute substantially to wealth generation. Some nations, notably India, are betting that they can largely skip industrialisation and jump straight to services. How might that play out? Tune in to find out.
https://www.josteinhauge.com/about
Hauge, J. (2020). Industrial policy in an era of global value chains: Towards a developmentalist framework drawing on the industrialisation experiences of South Korea and Taiwan. The World Economy, vol. 43, pp. 2070–2092. DOI: 10.1111/twec.12922
Rodrik, D. (2014). Are services the new manufactures? Project Syndicate: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-services-the-new-manufactures-by-dani-rodrik-2014-10
On reciprocal control mechanisms—Alice Amsden (2001). The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies. Oxford University Press.
Benjamin Selwyn (2018). Poverty chain and global capitalism. Competition and Change, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 71–97. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1024529418809067
Jason Hickel in The Guardian on the feasibility of a global minimum wage: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/13/global-minimum-wage-ask-an-expert
Norwegian show where fashion bloggers are sent to work in sweatshops: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/norwegian-reality-show-sends-fashion-bloggers-to-work-in-cambodian-sweatshop-20150123-12whuz.html
Kevin Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright (2021). The Case for a New Bretton-Woods. Polity Press. https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Case+for+a+New+Bretton+Woods-p-9781509546541
Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degree of sentience? If it's the later, then cephalopods seem curious, honeybees are capable of solving complex optimisation problems, and fish have split brains similar to those of conscious humans whose left and right hemispheres have been split by accident. Should we then conclude that are animals are conscious, albeit not in the same way as humans? What are the implications of this for ethical practice with animals in research, pets, and zoos? Heather was a zookeeper before she was a philosopher and bring a practical perspective to these issues. Heather, Walter, and Mark share a wide-ranging conversation taking in bioethics, cognitive science, and what the philosophy of mind can learn from biology. Enjoy!
Heather’s website: https://www.heatherbrowning.net/
Walter’s website: https://walterveit.com/
Heather’s PhD thesis: 41. Browning, H. (2020). If I Could Talk to the Animals: Measuring Subjective Animal Welfare. PhD Thesis (Australian National University).
https://doi.org/10.25911/5f1572fb1b5be [Download]
Walter’s forthcoming book: Veit, W. (Manuscript). A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Manuscript in preparation.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. William Collins.
The hard and soft problem of consciousness: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness,with%20phenomenal%20qualities%20or%20qualia).
Philosophical zombies: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 435–450. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf
Dan Dennett against the hard problem as special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaEjLZIDqc
Patricia Churchland against the hard problem as special: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/ChurchlandTheHornswoggleProblem1996.pdf
de Haan, E. et al. (2020). Split brain: What we know now and why this is important for understanding consciousness. Neuropsychology Review, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 224–233. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-020-09439-3
Hofstadter, D. and Dennett, D. (2001). The mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul. Basic Books.
Robot wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psY_3k0uiRI
Edelman, D. and Seth, A. (2009). Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach. Trends in Neuroscience, vol
The advancement of health care is one of the hallmarks of development and a central objective of not for profit, public, and private organisations, especially in the developing countries of Africa. Wiktoria Tafesse is an early career researcher working on a range of topics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics. She joins ePODstemology’s regular host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the role health plays in development, the idiosyncratic features of developing countries with respect to health care provision, how we can improve outcomes in the space, and what to expect from the 10 years of activity and research.
Show notes
Wiktoria’s academic website: https://www.york.ac.uk/che/staff/research/wiktoria-tafesse/
De Silva-Sanigorski, A. et al. (2010). Reducing obesity in early childhood: Results from Romp and Chomp, an Australia community-wide intervention program. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 831–840
Kasman, M. et al. (2019). Activating a community: An agent-based model of Romp and Chomp, a whole-of-community childhood obesity intervention. Obesity, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 1494-1502.
Miguel, E. and Kremer, M. (2003). Networks, social learning, and technology adoption: The case of deworming drugs in Kenya. Working paper: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/e271_f03/miguel.pdf
Tafesse, W. (2022). The effect of universal salt iodization on cognitive test scores in rural India. World Development, vol. 152, e105796
Tafesse, W. et al. (2019) The effect of government contracting with faith-based health care providers in Malawi. CHE Research Paper; No. 167.
Tafesse, W. and Chalkley, M. (2021). Faith-based provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Malawi. Social Science and Medicine, vol. 282, e113997
Kwan et al. (2019). Use of standardised patients for health care quality research in low and middle income countries. BMJ Global Health, vol. 4:e001669. https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/5/e001669.abstract
Fitzpatrick, A. (2022). The impact of public health sector stockouts on private sector prices and access to health care: Evidence from the anti-malarial drug market. Health Economics, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 102544
Banerjee, A. et al. (2020) The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries. Harvard Business School Working Paper, December 2020.
Fleming et al. (2016). Health-care availability, preference, and distance for women in urban Bo, Sierra Leone. International Journal of Public Health, vol. 61, pp. 1079–1088
Through most of human history, we needed more food, cheaper food, and easier to access food, so we built economic systems that could deliver mountains of the stuff. Now that was a noble effort at the time, but we didn’t think much about waste, and so huge quantities of food today ends up in landfill where it turns to greenhouse gases, or rots on the vine, squandering the resources we used to produce it. Much of our food is also of dubious nutritional quality but can meet our demands for supposedly ‘fresh’ produce in all seasons by surviving long supply chains of freezer ships, freezer trucks, and freezer supermarkets. All that is carbon intensive. What if we could more efficiently utilise the food system we already have to produce higher quality food less wastefully? A win for our waistlines, a win for our wallets, and a win for the planet. To guide us through the latest research on food waste, ePODstemology’s guest this episode is Dr Christian Reynolds, Senior Lecturer in Food Policy at City University London. Dr Reynolds is an economist by training, but like many early career researchers is thoroughly interdisciplinary in his work, operating out of the school of health and psychological sciences. Christian’s work has appeared in numerous top journals including Food Policy, The Lancet, Ecological Economics, and Waste Management. He talks us through the research issues in food waste management, what food waste is, what drives it, and what we can do about it. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Christian’s Academic page: https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/christian-reynolds
Gavin Stewart at University of Newcastle doing evidence synthesis: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/nes/people/profile/gavinstewart.html
University of Aberdeen Rowitt Institute for Nutrition Science: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowett/
Wansink, B., & van Ittersum, K. (2013). Portion size me: Plate-size induced consumption norms and win-win solutions for reducing food intake and waste. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19(4), 320–332. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035053
World Resources Institute on food loss and climate change: https://www.wri.org/insights/whats-food-loss-and-waste-got-do-climate-change-lot-actually
EAT Lancet report on a scientifically-informed healthy and sustainable diet: https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/
Dr Megan Blake at University of Sheffield who works on food security and food justice: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/people/academic-staff/megan-blake
FareShare: https://fareshare.org.uk/
HelloFresh meal boxes: https://www.hellofresh.com.au/
Riverford organic, sustainable, smallholder produce boxes: https://www.riverford.co.uk/
Oddbox wonky fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/
Blue Apron ready meals: https://www.blueapron.com/
Chill the fridge out: https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/article/chill-fridge-out
Plastics Pact: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/the-plastics-pact-network
Regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by philosopher of science Dr Riana Betzler from Washington University in St Louis to discuss the nature and study of empathy. In popular culture, empathy is one of these haloed qualities that we generally perceive as good and desirable. Yet in recent years some psychologists, notably Paul Bloom at Yale, have argued that empathy is overrated, indeed, harmful, because it biases our moral judgements towards our in groups. Riana’s research is principally concerned with the scientific practices upon which these debates turn. Are scholars in favour of or against empathy using the same definition of the term? Are meta-analyses of empirical results reliably distilling the true effects of empathy, or are they in fact horribly undermined by differences in the way empathy is operationalised across studies? How do these questions play into broader trends in psychological science like the supposed theory crisis and recent critiques of factor analysis? Tune in to find out.
https://rianabetzler.com/
Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338
Jessie Prinz Against Empathy: https://philpapers.org/rec/PRIAE-5
Anna Alexandrova on theory avoidance in psychology: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780199300518.001.0001/oso-9780199300518-chapter-6
Discretionary time and wellbeing: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdf
Chancellor and Lyubomirsky on humility: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/spc3.12069
Dan Batson’s view of empathy: http://people.uncw.edu/hakanr/documents/batsononempathy.pdf
fMRI study of compassion: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763419306918
The psychologically-rich life questionnaire: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656619300649
Settler mortality instrumental variables paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369
interpersonal reactivity index: https://fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/stories/pdf/selfmeasures/EMPATHY-InterpersonalReactivityIndex.pdf
Anna Alexandrova and Daniel Haybron (2016). Is Construct Validation Valid? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303753840_Is_Construct_Validation_Valid
ePODstemology is about popularising the genuinely new ways of thinking emerging from the pathbreaking research of young scholars. There are few fields that represent this agenda more than machine learning, a branch of computer science and statistics that promises to dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, crack open hard questions that have bedeviled humanity for decades, and even crack open our minds with whole new ways of understanding our world. In this episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the universities of Tasmania and Cambridge is joined by Dr David Watson, a postdoc at University College London making voluminous contributions to the machine learning literature. Their discussion ranges over what machine learning, why deep neural networks are so hot right now, how they are being applied in areas as diverse as protein folding and x-ray imaging, and their potential to transform society, for both good and ill.
https://dswatson.github.io/
The rhetoric and reality of anthropomorphism in artificial intelligence. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-019-09506-6
Local explanations via necessity and sufficiency: Unifying theory and practice. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-022-09598-7
Mass Effect Full Game Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5dSRaeUcFc
Joy, Bladerunner 2049: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL0gX1_NWTk
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the SunIan McEwan, Machines Like Me
Athey and Imbens – Machine learning methods economists should know about. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080217-053433
The biggest change in electoral politics in the last decade is without a doubt the advent of social media. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in Brexit, Russian bots in the EU, the zone that Steve Bannon suggests political parties flood with shit, it’s all happening on our favourite doom-scrolling apps. How is political science getting to grips with this new and influential phenomenon? Dr Kevin Munger from Pennsylvania State University joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss. The conversation covers Munger’s seminal model of fake news, the differences between online and offline politics, the technological and psychological mechanisms by which social media influences political behaviour, and the importance of low digital literacy, especially among the elderly, for understanding why toxic forces on social media are so effective. In the 2nd half of the episode we get the inside line on Munger’s forthcoming book, Generation Gap, which analyses the impact of the boomer generation’s outsize demographic heft on politics, policy, culture, economics, and even niche industries like academia.
Kevin’s website with all his many outputs: http://www.kevinmunger.com/
Follow Kevin on twitter: @kmmunger
Kevin’s substack/blog: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/
Kevin’s forthcoming book on boomer ballast: https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Gap-Dominate-American-Politics/dp/B08ZK7YV47
Kevin is also founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital – Check it out if you’re an academic active in this field. https://journalqd.org/
BJPS article on social media in the 2015 UK election: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/political-knowledge-and-misinformation-in-the-era-of-social-media-evidence-from-the-2015-uk-election/EF26FA6C515D9C697DD72B95F452B2C5
Blog post on social media toxicity as reflective of the misery of American society:
https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/facebook-is-other-people?s=r
Political Communication article on the political economy of fake news: https://kmunger.github.io/pdfs/pc_clickbait.pdf
What are the big questions in macroeconomics right now? Well there’s the unprecedented assault on Russia’s financial architecture, that’s quite topical. We usually study how to avoid financial crises, not how to start them. How do a tank a central bank? Just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the big news was the return of inflation. After a decade or so of ‘secular stagnation’ and fears of deflation, consumer prices across the world are rocketing up. Is this just a hangover from COVID, or is there more to it? How should we plan our lives around inflation expectations? Wind the clock back a little bit further and macroeconomists were very puzzled by productivity. As Nobel Laureate Bob Solow said: “you can see the impact of computers everywhere except the productivity data”. Why’s that? Is it just really hard to measure productivity in the digital and service sector economy, or it productivity really going to flatlining, with implications in turn for the heart rate of our economies? And finally, if we really wind the clock back all the way to 2008 (just yesterday really), then the big question is how has macroeconomics updated itself in the wake of the biggest loss of confident in the discipline in decades?
Here to answer all these questions is Dr Adam Triggs, a man with a very long signature block. He is director at the Canberra office of AlphaBeta, an economic consulting firm within Accenture Strategy, non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, a visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy in the Australian National University, a fellow at Macquarie University’s e61 institute, and a columnist for the Canberra times. All these hot shot agencies want Adam’s insights, and he’s giving them away to you for free on ePODstemology. Do tune in.
Adam’s website: https://adamtriggs.com/resume/
Cambridge’s Diane Coyle provides an overview of the productivity puzzle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRrbjmrqJw
Noah Smith interviews Emi Nakamura:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-emi-nakamura-macroeconomist
How does science, the quintessential secular enterprise, study religion? What can we learn about religion by applying the tools of scientific method, and what can religion teach secularists about how to build thriving societies? In this episode, social psychologist Dr Kitty O'Lone from Cambridge University's Woolf Institute joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss these and other questions pertaining to the secular benefits of religious practices. Dr O'Lone discusses her previous work on interfaith dialogue, her new work on religious forgiveness and its role in healing post-conflict societies, and her ambition of studying the similarities and differences between religious and secular fasting practices. The episode also ranges over mindfulness and the two-way learning that has taken place between academics and traditional communities of practice, the vacuum left by the disappearance of priest's from everyday life, whether science really offers 'explanations' for seemingly supernatural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and want the frontiers are in the social psychology of religion. Please tune in.
SHOW NOTES AND LINKS
https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/people/katherine-olone
Atkinson, Quentin. D and Pierre Bourrat. 2011. “Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation.” Evolution and Human Behavior, 32 (1): 41-49.
Boyd, Robert., Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles and Peter J. Richerson. 2003. “The evolution of altruistic punishment.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA, 100:3531–3535. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0630443100
Carlsmith, Kevin M., John M. Darley and Paul H. Robinson. 2002. “Why do we punish? Deterrence and just desserts as motives for punishment.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83:284–299.
Nikiforakis, Nikos and Dirk Engelmann. 2011. “Altruistic Punishment and the Threat of Feuds.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 78 (3): 319-332.
Johnson, Kathryn A. and Adam B. Cohen. 2016. “Authoritarian and benevolent god representations and the two sides of prosociality.” Behavioral And Brain Sciences 39: 32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000461
Karremans, Johan C and Paul A. M. Van Lange. 2004. “Back to caring after being hurt: The role of forgiveness.” European Journal of Social Psychology 34: 207-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.192
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/category/books-by-dops/study-of-reincarnation/
Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 49, pp. 65-85
Van Elk, M., Karinen, A., Specker, E., Stamkou, E. and Baas, M. (2016). 'Standing in Awe': The effects of awe on body perception and the relation with absorption. Collabra, vol. 2, no. 1.
Artist, feminist economist and activist Cassie Thornton joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian to discuss her recent project The Hologram, a social technology for creating peer to peer care networks and unlearning capitalism. Inspired by the community health clinics of post-GFC Greece, The Hologram seeks to cultivate our capacity for caring about others in a collective, non-reciprocal, and holistic fashion. The project illustrates how the steady professionalisation, individualisation, and commercialisation of care, medical or otherwise, has eroded our sense of belonging in community, our ability to give care generously and ask for it guiltlessly, and our capacity to conceptualise our personal journeys as bound up with others. Through social technologies like The Hologram – free, amateur, and collective – Cassie explores how we can remember and relearn how to be a cooperative species and move together against the financialisation of everything.
https://thehologram.xyz/
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745343327/the-hologram/
http://feministeconomicsdepartment.com
https://linktr.ee/TheFeministEconDept
Trailer for the movie PIG with Nicholas Cage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4nRpdONaAA
Genevieve Vaughan’s work on the gift economy: http://www.genevievevaughan.org/
Long before Donald Trump referred to Mexican migrants as 'bad hombres', migration was a perennially hot topic in economic and social policy. Some of the endlessly debated question in this space include: do migrants hurt the labour market prospects of locals by taking away jobs and depressing wages? Or do they instead create more opportunities by bringing capital and spurring economic activity? Is there a difference in effects between skilled and unskilled migrants? What about refugees? Do temporary visa schemes for seasonal labour solves more problems than they create? What about a points-based migration system like the way they have in Australia? Here to answer all these questions and more, including what we can learn about migration from observing the pacific, is Dr Ryan Edwards from the Australian National University. Ryan is deputy director of the development policy centre, and was formerly a postdoc at Stanford and Dartmouth. This is a million-mile a minute episode that will answer your questions and then some.
Grattan Institute reports on migration policy: https://grattan.edu.au/migration-and-labour-markets/
Clemens, M. A. (2011). Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 83–106. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83
Elinor Ostrom’s (Nobel Prize Winner) Magnum Opus Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. TOC andFirst chapter: https://www.burmalibrary.org/docs20/Ostrom-1990-governing_the_commons.pdf?
(Nobel Prize Winners) Banerjee, A. and Duflo, E. (2019). Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems. Penguin.
Bahar, D. and Rappaport, H. (2018). Migration, Knowledge Diffusion, and the Comparative Advantage of Nations. The Economic Journal, vol. 128, no. 612, pp. F273–F305
Dustman, C. and Görlach, J. (2016). The Economics of Temporary Migration. Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 98–136
Fifer McIntosh, M. (2008). Measuring the Labor Market Impacts of Hurricane Katrina Migration: Evidence from Houston, Texas. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, vol. 98, no. 2, pp. 54 – 57
D’Amuri, F. and Peri, G. (2014). Immigration, Jobs, and Employment Protection: Evidence from Europe Before and During the Great Recession. Journal of the European Economic Association, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 432–464
Breunig, R., Deutscher, N. and To, H. T. (2017). The Relationship Between Immigration to Australia and the Labour Market Outcomes of Australian-Born Workers. Economic Record, vol. 93, no. 301, pp. 255–276
Dustman, C., Schönberg, U. and Stuhler, J. (2016). The Impact of Immigration: Why Do Studies Reach Such Different Results? Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 31–56. https://www-aeaweb-org.ezp.lib.cam.ac.uk/articles?id=10.1257/jep.30.4.31
Clemens, M. and Hunt, J. (2019). The Labour Market Effects of Refugee Waves: Reconciling Conflicting Results. ILR Review, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 818–857
The ePODstemology Christmas Special! Popular guest, Bayesian Bae, and all round great person Rachel Meager from the LSE returns to ePODstemology to sit in the host's chair and interview regular host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University. The topic is all things wellbeing. The philosophy of it, the psychology of it, the economics and public policy of it. Why does wellbeing scholarship need to be interdisciplinary? How do we even measure it? What even is wellbeing? Fabian delivers hot takes faster than the New York Times pitchbot, from the importance of self-actualisation to the role of expectations, with sidebars into why tennis ain't what it used to be and why economics is the best social science. It's a festive episode but also an enlightening one. So pop on a Santa hat, sit down with some cocoa, and join the conversation.
https://sites.google.com/view/markfabian/home
Fabian, M. Scale Norming Makes Welfare Analysis with Life Satisfaction Data Difficult. Online first in Journal of Happiness Studies. (Download open access)
Fabian, M. (2020) The Coalescence of Being: A Model of the Self-Actualization Process. Journal of Happiness Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 1487 - 1508. doi: 10.1007/s10902-019-00141-7. Download.
Weiss, A., King, J.E., Inoue-Murayama, M., Matsuzawa, T., Oswald, A.J. (2012) Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes consistent with the U-shape in human well-being. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109 (49): 19949-19952. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212592109
Nakamura, J. and Csikszentmihaly, M. (2014). The concept of flow. In M. Csikszentmihaly (ed.), Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, pp. 239 - 263. Springer.
Ryan, R. and Deci, E. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and wellbeing. American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 68 - 78.
Ryan, R. and Deci, E. (2003). On assimilating identities to the self: A self-determination theory perspective on internalisation and integrity within cultures. In M. R. Leary and J. P. Tangney (eds.), Handbook of Self and Identity, pp. 253 - 272. Guildford.
Believed dead and buried after World War 2, the far right has risen like a zombie from the ashes of deindustrialising towns to once again plague the polities of the trans-Atlantic region. The electoral success of Trump and Brexit made the ‘elites’ pay attention, but it’s only recently that we’ve come to understand enough about what happened in 2016 to give a thorough accounting. Here to help us understand the nature, causes, and consequences of the far right is Dr Diane Bolet, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Durham University and Research Fellow in Political Science at the University of Zurich. Drawing on qualitative studies of French and Spanish former coal mining communities and quantitative evidence from studies of community pub closures in the UK, Diane mounts a compelling thesis about the roots of the far right lying in the disintegration of social and cultural cohesion more so than economic decay or prejudicial racism. It's a fresh take straight from the knowledge frontier to your ear drums.
Papers and other links from this episode:
https://www.dianebolet.com/
Local Labour Market Competition and Radical Right Voting: Evidence from France. European Journal of Political Research, 2020.
Drinking Alone: Local Socio-Cultural Degradation and Radical Right Voting - The Case of British Pub Closures. Comparative Political Studies, 2021.
Fabian, M., Breunig, R., and De Neve, J. (2020). Bowling With Trump: Racial Identification, Economic Anxiety, and Well-Being in the 2016 Presidential Election. Brookings Institution Working Paper.
Tim Carney (2019). Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Harper Collins.
Infrastructure is the skeleton upon which the economy is built. Energy, water, sewerage and other utilities provide the fuel and take away the waste; roads, bridges, railways, ports, and broadband cables facilitate the movement of goods that is the essence of commerce; and town halls, leisure centres, parks are the sites on which the public sphere is manifested. So why don't we talk more about this critical aspect of our world? Even more pertinently, why don't we talk about how it is governed? Infrastructure touches of everyone's lives in some way, so perhaps we should have people more heavily involved in its design, implementation, and management. Or is that too unwieldy? Too idealistic? Perhaps it would be better to leave the infrastructure domain to technical analysts able to manage all its complexities for the common good. In this episode, ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian from Cambridge University is joined by Dr Rehema Msulwa, also from Cambridge, who helps us navigate the dynamic terrain of infrastructure policy, with an especial focus on how we can involve local voices to improve outcomes.
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/team/rehema-msulwa/
https://stateup.co/sit-down-with-stateup-dr-rehema-msulwa/
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.17726abstract
https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/ambpp.2017.10284abstract
What is the difference between merely 'statistical' discrimination and prejudice? How can we disentangle these things in social sciences research, and should we? How can researchers get away from a focus on the individual in discrimination research to better understand how institutions, culture, and macro-history cause both statistical and prejudicial discrimination? What can economists learn from sociology and cultural psychology about discrimination, and vice versa? Ben Harrell from the LGBT policy lab at Vanderbilt University joins ePODstemology host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University to Enlighten us.
Links to content from this episode:
https://www.benharrellecon.com/
twitter @elben
Button, P., Dils, E., Harrell, B., Fumarco, L. and Schwegman, D. (2020). Gender Identity, Race, and Ethnicity Discrimination in Access to Mental Health Care: Preliminary Evidence from a Multi-Wave Audit Field Experiment. NBER Working Paper #28164. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28164
Mario Smalls AEA podcast on racial discrimination: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/economics-racial-discrimination-mario-small
Parable of the polygons game for illustrating neighbourhood diversity preferences and how benign preferences can lead to extreme segregation: https://ncase.me/polygons/
Raj Chetty et al. opportunity atlas: https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-opportunity-atlas/
Edelman, B., Luca, M. and Svirsky, D. (2017). Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Review, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 1–22. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160213
@besttrousers on twitter
Goodman-Bacon, A. (2021). The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes. American Economic Review, vol. 111, no. 8, pp. 2550–2593
Buckles, K. Fixing the Leaky Pipeline: Strategies for Making Economics Work for Women at Every Stage. Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 43–60. https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.33.1.43
The Undergraduate Women in Economic Challenge - https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/UWE
Whether it's build back better, levelling up, or the climate transition, industrial policy is back in the news. Everyone wants to restructure their economies for geopolitical, equality, green, or good old fashion efficiency reasons, but how to do it? Nathan Lane from Oxford University joins host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University to discuss. Industrial policy has a mixed history, having been both the darling and the black sheep of the economics profession in less than 100 years, embroiled in some of the most high profile adventures and misadventures of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and gone from the centre to the periphery of development economics. If you've ever wanted to understand this complex policy domain and understand how economists think about it today, now's your chance - tune in!
What can social scientists learn from biology? A great deal, according to guest Reuben Finigan of the London School of Economics. The burgeoning field of sociobiology provides mind-blowing insights into sociological phenomena like cooperation, common pool resource management, corruption and rent seeking behaviour, how market actors try to deceive regulators, and the efficient provision of public goods. Many of these insights are derived from applying models from the biological sciences, typically using evolutionary game theory, to questions in the social and behavioural sciences. Tune and find out how much we can learn from bees, ants, zebras, wolves, monkeys, flowers, fungus, and genes about how we should design institutions and regulations for the common good.
'Creative destruction' is an inevitable and desirable part of ongoing economic activity, but it does have losers. In particular, the employees of firms that go bust and obsolete industries that disappear. In normal times, these workers will find employment elsewhere or in emerging industries, especially if they are able to retrain easily. But in times of industrial transition, when there are wide ranging structural transformations in the economy, the sheer volume of creative destruction can see many workers fall through the cracks. Such a transition is required if we are to respond meaningfully to the threat of climate change, but how can we deal with the losers of this transition? Fergus Green, Lecturer in Political Theory and Public Policy at University College London (UCL) helps to explain the ethics, political, and economic dimensions of this question. He also gives his thoughts on the green new deal and the kind of transition assistance that could help us to tackle climate change and avoid social misery.
This episode is all about statistics in social science. It's one for all the new armchair epidemiologists out there, especially if COVID has got you thinking about how we can make "evidence-based policy". Statistics cheerleader Rachel Meager, who is Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Politics Science, joins host Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to answer all your questions. Should you be a Bayesianism Bae or a frequentism fan? Should all social science follow economics in its fixation with causal inference, or are there other important question we ought to focus our statistical skills on? What's a randomised-control trial and why do they matter for microfinance in Africa? You want knowledge and ePODstemology is gonna give to ya.
What are the potentials and pitfalls of the new data economy and associated efforts at data governance? Tech entrepreneur, digital marketer, and academic researcher Sam Gilbert joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian of Cambridge University to discuss how we can achieve "Good Data". Sam explains the commercial, scientific, and social value of data, clarifies some common misunderstandings of how data is generated and used, and analyses the many political complexities around data regulation. If you've ever been pessimistic about the data economy, big tech, or "surveillance capitalism", this episode might just change your mind.
The psychological science of happiness, well-being, and meaning in life has progressed rapidly in recent decades but it's insights are only just starting to penetrate the public discourse. Here to help is Frank Martela, a psychologist from Aalto University in Finland, the world's happiest country according to the World Happiness Report. Frank and host Mark Fabian from Cambridge University take you on a tour of the major theories of well-being in psychology, offer practical advice on how to secure meaning and wellbeing in your life, and discuss the prospects of applying insights from psychological science in public policy and organizational design. Straight from the cutting edge of science to your eardrums, only on ePODstemology.
An exceedingly thoughtful mystery guest takes us on a tour of how notions of femininity and motherhood are changing culturally, politically, symbolically, and psychically. We discuss the history of the masculine and feminine archetypes, especially in mythological representations, and recent efforts at their revival by figures like Jordan Peterson. While there is value in salvaging what we can from these, it seems undeniable that contemporary gender politics, much like the broader existential vacuum in which we find ourselves, is a function of these classic maps of meaning being substantially played out. What will replace them? We explore some answers in recent representations of "bad" women and the "heroine's journey", an amalgam of the hero's journey and virgin's journey that are omnipresent in myths and fairy-tales.
Taxes and transfer payments are perhaps the most fundamental element of public policy, yet we rarely hear about these issues outside of banal political point scoring. Robert Breunig joins ePODstemology for a deep dive into the past, present, and future of tax and transfer policymaking. We discuss the basic economic and political logic of taxes and transfers, the lessons of the 20th century, and what to expect from contemporary efforts to combat tax avoidance by multinational firms and individuals, runaway inequality, and iniquitous retirement systems.
In the contemporary culture wars there's a crop of commentators who insist that 'science' is on their side. They're talking about falsification, replication, quantitative methods, and randomised-control trials - the buzzwords of positivism - and they insist that what their opponents say is invalid because it doesn't meet positivism's standards for what counts as 'knowledge'. Sensing an opportunity for ePODstemology to discuss epistemology, we invited Rod Graham of Old Dominion University to the show. Rod is high school biology teacher turned sociology professor who teaches research methods and works on interdisciplinary, multi-method research projects. He is also one of twitter's most thoughtful and genuine commentators on the culture wars. Rod helps us to understand positivism, interpretivism, critical theory, and why we're going to need all three to 'know' much at all in social science.
The 'Asian Miracle' has seen several nations develop from dirt farming to the technological frontier in half a century. Among them is China, whose rise has lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty and reshaped the global economic and political order. Professor Shiro Armstrong of the ANU joins ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian to explain the secret sauce of East Asia's development, especially its clever trade strategies and the political economy of escaping the middle income trap. Will the Chinese Communist Party's reluctant to seed control to democracy and the market hinder its escape velocity? Tune in to find out.
Why do millennials and boomers hate each other so much? Is it about intergenerational fairness, or is it actually an Oedipal thing? And why are they called zillenials? Is it because they're zooming, or because they're zealous? Sonia Arakkal of Think Forward joins ePODstemology to help us figure it all out. We explore the colourful cast of recent generations, discuss their psycho-social, economic, and historical origins, and analyse how to renew the intergenerational contract for a new century.