The Great Antidote

Jan 31 2025 211 ep. 49 mins 1.5k
The Great Antidote Podcast artwork

Adam Smith said, "Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." So join us for interviews with the leading experts on today's biggest issues to learn more about economics, policy, and much more.

  Society & Culture  Science  Government
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Douglas Irwin on Talking about Trade and Commerce

Jan 31 2025 51 mins  
Send us a textTrade is all the rage these days. Or, at least, raging about trade is. Today, we unpack what trade and free trade are, and how to talk about it. We also address the abundance of lawyers in trade policy. Douglas Irwin is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and the author of several books including Clashing Over Commerce and Against the Tide: An Intellectual H

Anna Claire Flowers on F. A. Hayek and Social Structures

Jan 24 2025 50 mins  
Send us a text Today, I am excited to host Anna Claire Flowers to discuss F. A. Hayek and the mesocosmos. The mesocosmos is a fancy way to describe all the social groupings on the spectrum between the extremes of individualism and society. Think families, neighborhoods, farmers markets, firms, and universities. We talk about the importance of characterizing this missing middle piec

Eric Leeper on Volcker, Friedman, and the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level

Jan 17 2025 55 mins  
Send us a textWelcome back! Happy New Year! Glad to be back! Come one, come all! Eric Leeper is the Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor in Economics at the University of Virginia. He also is a visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at GMU. Today, we talk about inflation. He explains to us how inflation theory has evolved and how we forgot about the relationship between the fiscal and

David Beito on Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Race, Liberty, and Equality

Nov 22 2024 45 mins  
Send us a textNot often do we find people who make the case for how race, liberty, and equality belong together. Even less often do we find them making arguments in the height of racially and economically troubled times. And EVEN LESS do we find audio clips of them doing so. These people are inspiring. They stand up against the currents of the time to speak their minds, for the ben

Sarah Skwire on Adam Smith and Grief

Nov 15 2024 55 mins  
Send us a textAdam Smith was a man who read the Stoics. He liked them, too, talking them up in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly in the section on grief. Then he lost two of his closest relations (old timey, right?), David Hume and his mother. These world-shaking events caused him to reevaluate what he said about grief in TMS and change our interpretation of his commenta

David Henderson on the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics

Nov 08 2024 46 mins  
Send us a textThis year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics are Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, who wrote on the importance of inclusive institutions to economic growth. But what on earth are ‘inclusive institutions’ and how do they differ from exclusive ones?Inclusive institutions are norms, either written or unwritten, about things like property rights, de

Samuel Gregg on National Security and Industrial Policy

Nov 01 2024 54 mins  
Send us a textPicture a policy conversation, perhaps in Washington, about national security. Who’s sitting around the table? It might be the President, national security advisors, military personnel, or generals, but not economists. And yet, national security is often used as a reason to intervene into the economy. At the mention of national security, it seems economists often sh

Tawni Hunt Ferrarini on Teaching Hayek

Oct 25 2024 44 mins  
Send us a textHow do you teach about a man who does not fit neatly into a box? Hayek is one such man, and today, we tackle the difficult task of putting him in a box. We conclude that we cannot put someone like F. A. Hayek into boxes such as “economist” or “philosopher” or “political theorist”, because he did it all. How and when do you teach the ideas of a man who did

Bruce Caldwell on Hayek: A Life

Oct 18 2024 55 mins  
Send us a textIt’s often said that if you want to get to know someone, you should look through their garbage. Now, I don’t recommend this method of getting to know someone (it’s kind of gross). But biographers often have the luck of getting to know the people they study by looking through their stuff- that stuff not being actual garbage. For example, Bruce Caldwell spent time

Jacob Levy on Smith, Hayek, and Social Justice

Oct 11 2024 64 mins  
Send us a textThe title of this episode might confuse you: what on earth do Adam Smith and F. A. Hayek have to say about social justice? A surprising amount, given how much we talk about it!Smith makes a big point of critiquing men of pride and vanity. What happens when those ultimately negative aspects of humanity go too far, into the territory of what he calls “domineering”?