🚋EconTalk

A weekly hour-long conversation between an economist and one guest, running since 2006. Economics in the widest sense: prices, institutions, statistics, and what a good life is.

The tram podcast. One host, one guest, an hour, almost every week since 2006. Line 4 from Fennick to Greywater Docks is 24 minutes, so an episode is exactly one office day: half on the way in, half on the way home, and the last twelve minutes on the stairs.

It is not for the morning loop. 🔹 Walk before screens means before the phone, and that includes anything coming out of it. Filed on 2025-01-08-Wednesday, the first office day of the year on which I noticed I had a routine.

What I like is the host. He is an economist who has become steadily less sure of things in public, and he says I don't know on air more often than anyone I work with says it in a meeting. He interrupts to restate the guest's point in plain words, and if he cannot, the guest has to try again.

• Plays: statistics, how knowledge is spread across people, anything about trade or shipping.
• Skips: monetary policy. I have tried.
• About one episode in three. That is still fifteen hours of someone thinking slowly, which nobody else is offering.