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• Guests: Peter Bent, François Allisson, Herman Daly and Sara Stevano (see below for more information).
• Host and Producer: Maria Bach, Centre Walras Pareto, Unil, Lasuanne (former Assistant Professor of Economics at the American University of Paris)
• Guest hosts: Wilhelm Aminoff, Wyatt DeLong, Farrah Aridou, Jonathan Noulowe II and Paul Harding, students of a history of economics course at the American University of Paris.

Inspired by Radiolab’s episode on the cataclysm sentence, this episode explores whether we could find a cataclysm sentence for economics. Radiolab had found out about the famous and award winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who in the 60s wanted to revamp the physics undergraduate degree to get more researchers into physics. He started his course at Caltech with what he called the cataclysm sentence, which is:

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

We changed it a bit to apply only to economics:

“The one piece of economic knowledge that you would pass on to a future society if ours were to perish in a cataclysm.”

Along with students at the American University of Paris, we interviewed four people, an economic historian, an ecological economist, a feminist political economist and an historian of economics. Here is the list of their cataclysm sentences:

Peter Bent, Department of Economics, Trinity College, Connecticut, USA

Julie Nelson’s (UMass Boston) definition of economics: “The study of the ways societies organize themselves to provide for the survival and flourishing of life.”

Herman Daly, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, USA

“Although not reducible to biophysics, the human economy is nevertheless ecologically constrained, especially in its primary macroeconomic goal of aggregate growth, by the fact that it is a physical subsystem of a finite ecosphere that lives from a non growing  entropic flow of solar energy captured by scarce and depleting terrestrial materials.”

Sara Stevano, Department of Economics, The School of Oriental and African Studies, London

“Power relations are intrinsic to economic phenomena at multiple and interconnected scales.”

François Allisson, Centre Walras Pareto, Unil, Lausanne

“Economics was a temporary science
Necessary in times of perceived scarcity
To understand the ways
In which human needs
Translated
In various ways of organising human activities”
(pictured above)

While everyone had slightly different takes on the task and took us down different avenues of knowledge, there were several common themes. So fasten your seat belts, as we take you on a journey of discovery and at times a rather philosophical, utopic and radical discussion about what really matters.

Featured music (apart from the usual intro and outro music): Sounds by Jordan Powell, Erokia: https://freesound.org/people/Erokia/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:41 — 33.4MB)

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• Guest: Kapil Raj
• Host and Producer: Maria Bach

Join Maria Bach for an interview with Kapil Raj about his approach in the history of science. Dr. Raj is Professor of the History of Science at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris. In particular, they discuss Raj’s book Relocating Modern Science.

Links to works and institutions mentioned:
1. The Go Between by L.P. Hartley
2. The Lund Centre for History of Knowledge (LUCK)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:47 — 42.1MB)

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• Guests: Jaci Eisenberg, Gerardo Serra and Sharmin Khodaiji
• Hosted and produced by Maria Bach

In this episode, Maria interviews three scholars who study underrepresented or what she calls marginalised voices in the history of policy and economics. They discuss why they came to study such lesser known figures and how the research can give us new perspectives. They also share the difficulties and constraints that they face. Jaci Eisenberg studied American women who contributed to the League of Nations. Gerardo Serra studies the history of economics and statistics in 20th century Ghana. Sharmin Khodaiji researches the institutionalisation of political economy in India. Listen to find out more about their research!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:43 — 47.1MB)

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Hosts: Maria Bach and Reinhard Schumacher
Production: Maria Bach

In this episode, we interview Beatrice Cherrier to talk about what it is like being a parent in academia – the ups, the downs and all the things we can do to make life and work easier.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:49 — 37.9MB)

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• Guest: Andrew Sartori
• Hosted and produced by Maria Bach

In this episode, Maria shares a recent interview with Andrew Sartori, an intellectual historian at NYU. Andrew discusses his work in South Asian Intellectual History and how he ended up in this relatively small field when he started. He also talks about how he deals with the international diffusion of ideas. Finally, they debate the need to find a distinct Indian way of thinking and how this perceived need makes it hard to research in this area of study. Check out his publications here.

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In this episode, Maria Bach explores how poverty has been defined and measured over time inspired by her work with Mary Morgan recently published in the History of Political Economy Journal (https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/issue/50/S1)

The episode features notably Amartya Sen, Frances Stewart, Stephen Marglin and Mary Morgan.

Here is a list of the books, websites and articles mentioned in the episode:

1. GSDRC‘s definition of poverty
2. UNESCO‘s definition of poverty
3. The Economist’s article on defining poverty
4. Poverty and Social Exclusion Project based in the UK
5. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen’s An Uncertain Glory, 2013
6. Howard Glennerster, John Hills, David Pichaud and Jo Webb’s One Hundred Years of Poverty and Policy, 2004
7. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1908
8. The New York Times article on How to define poverty? by Louis Uchitelle, 2001
9. The UN Intellectual History Project
10. The IMF and World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs)
11. Frances Stewart and Michael Wang’s working paper on Do PRSPs empower poor countries and disempower the World Bank, or is it the other way round?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:38 — 84.2MB)

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• Presenters: Christina Laskaridis of SOAS University and Tiago Mata of UCL
• Produced and edited by Maria Bach, Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris

In this episode, Christina and Tiago discuss Eric Roll’s book on the History of Economic Thought. A popular history that circulates in many editions and languages, Christina and Tiago explore the book’s making and the reasons for its success. The episode focuses on biographical aspects of Eric Roll, on the book’s critical reception and evolving structure.

Tiago Mata is a Lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Tiago has dedicated himself to the study of “Economics in the Public Sphere”, leading a team of scholars in researching the communication of economic knowledge since 1945. He has worked on political movements in economics, in particular the resurgence of the Left in 1960s and 1970s North America and how it enacted new ways to think the economy, expertise and social justice. He has also worked on the communication of economic knowledge and statistics and the development of business magazines and how they straddle the worlds of print and management, accommodating transformations in American corporate capitalism. Besides these topics, he also works on social science methodology and the funding regimes of the social sciences.

Christina Laskaridis co-hosts the Ceteris Never Paribus podcast, is a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies and a former research fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy.

We would like to thank to Laura Comicini for the clip in Italian, Roger Backhouse and Keith Tribe for sharing his interview with Eric Roll with us.

This episode makes use of the British Library’s Sounds Collection, and the Oral History recording with Eric Roll.