The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth

Mar 07 2025 67 ep. 33 mins 552

The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth artwork

A podcast from the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics at the Watson Institute at Brown University. Hosted by political economist and director of the Rhodes Center, Mark Blyth.

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The puzzling politics of inequality

Mar 07 2025 44 mins

In this episode, Mark Blyth talks with two inequality experts to try and understand something that’s been bugging him for years.It goes like this: inequality has profound effects on our economy, society, and lives. It has also been growing, and today is at historically high levels. Given all that, why does inequality never seem to be a topic around which we organize our politics?

Why capitalism can’t solve the climate crisis

Dec 20 2024 42 mins

To state the obvious, there are many hurdles to addressing the climate crisis in a meaningful way. However, there’s been one relatively bright spot on this front in the last decade: the price of renewable energy — particularly solar and wind power — has dropped dramatically. By many measures, they’re now cheaper to produce than fossil fuels. So does that mean when it c

Why we think what we think, when we think about inflation

Nov 22 2024 39 mins

This is a new experiment we’re trying at the Rhodes Center Podcast. From time to time, going forward, instead of focusing on one expert and their latest research, Mark will take a deeper dive into one issue (or one question) that’s been bothering him. Future episodes will examine the politics of immigration and the persistence of inequality. But the first episode in t

Why we ran out of everything during the pandemic, and why it had less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the corporations that made us much more vulnerable to it

Oct 04 2024 41 mins

Remember the supply chain problems of 2020 and 2021? The story we were told was that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy's ability to make and transport goods of every type imaginable: Surgical masks. Car parts. Infant formula. But as New York Times' global economic correspondent Peter Goodman explains in his new book, “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Ins

The expulsion of politics? What the UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility tells us about the limits of technocracy

Jun 07 2024 43 mins

When it comes to governing our economy, estimates rule the day. We want to know what effect a policy might have on the government’s budget, on economic growth, on employment…in the next 1 year, 5 years, 10 years…you get the idea. If you want to make (or critique) public policy, you better have numbers to back it up. To get those types of estimates, economists and politic

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy citizenship abroad

Apr 30 2024 34 mins

When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, another commodity has started to receive a lot of attention from the world’s wealthiest people: citizenship. With enough money, people can buy their way into becoming a citizen of a growing list of countries around the world. While this tre

How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice

Mar 25 2024 53 mins

Listeners of the Rhodes Center Podcast have probably heard of companies like Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard. You’ve also probably heard how, through ETFs and other investment products, these types of investment firms own a staggering share of the world’s biggest companies (20-25% of the S&P 500 by some estimates). But in this episode, you’ll hear about a whole

The business side of fighting climate change

Dec 08 2023 33 mins

On this podcast, you’ve heard from a range of experts about the policies and politics of decarbonization. But what does the fight against climate change look like from the business side?Sophie Purdom is the Founder and Managing Partner of Planeteer Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in early-stage climate technology companies. She also writes Climate Tech VC, an industr

An Immigrant Economist in the Land of Inequality: A Conversation with Sir Angus Deaton

Nov 21 2023 32 mins

In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates in the United States among white middle-aged men and women between the years of 1999 and 2013. They published a book in 2020 that aimed to explain the trend, which they attributed to — among other factors — economic stagnation, social isolation

The new politics of growth and stagnation (part 3): houses, micro states, finance, carbon

Oct 21 2023 35 mins

This is part three in our companion series to the book “Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation” (co-edited by Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson). On this episode, Mark talks with four contributors for the book: Alex Reisenbichler, Aidan Regan, Oddný Helgadóttir, and Jonas Nahm. They look at case studies in a handful of countries, as we