EconTalk
Russ Roberts in long talks with scholars, mechanisms and judgments traceable to papers
1:09:03After 11 Years Sober, She Secretly Drank for Another Year: Willpower Simply Can't Cut It
Weil argued that overcoming bad habits depends on attention rather than willpower—which explains why the author, after 11 years sober, secretly drank for another year instead of being saved by willpower.
1:04:52Literacy Once Democratised Europe; Now It Is Retreating
Writing cooled human communication from an emotional, face-to-face oral culture into a textual culture of evidence and logic; rising literacy once drove democratic revolutions, and screens are pulling public discourse back toward a pre-literate age.
1:04:49Obeying Incentives Is Loser Behavior: You Should Decide Right and Wrong for Yourself
Economists say fix the incentives and you fix the world. Mastroianni says that misses half of it: even if you have a reason to do wrong, you still shouldn't do it. Outsourcing your value judgments to an incentive structure is abandoning the core task of being a person.
1:06:17Latin Doesn't Make Surgeons: Exams Should Be Hard at Something Useful
Latin doesn't make surgeons: skills barely transfer. If you assume "the harder the subject, the sharper the mind," a nation's brightest get wasted on the most useless knowledge — that is the lesson of the Qing examination system.
1:22:48Most Gazans Have Already Abandoned Hamas, and a Disarmament Window Is Opening
Gaza-born policy scholar Alkhatib argues from four layers of opposition, two polls and demographic data that most Gazans turned against Hamas long ago and that Hamas may be forced into phased disarmament — but host Russ's pessimism is a sharp counterpoint: for Hamas, disarmament equals political suicide.
1:11:50The UFO boom is not an astronomy question, it is a question of belief
When the evidence stops at testimony, whether the universe is crowded becomes a matter of faith. The further science advances, the rarer extraterrestrial life looks in the observations; when we talk about UFOs, what we are really talking about is ourselves.
1:13:36The Industrial Revolution's Hidden Driver: Parliament Untangled Property Rights, Not Technology
The hidden cause of the Industrial Revolution was the Glorious Revolution of the century before: Parliament used legislation to untangle overly complicated property rights, which let investment in agriculture and infrastructure happen at all, and which created the precondition for a return on technical innovations like the steam engine.
1:21:11Death Is the Last Enemy, Not the Final Word: A Former Senator on Borrowed Time
Ben Sasse, a terminal pancreatic cancer patient and former senator, speaks from borrowed time: his tumor has shrunk by more than 80% but may not be curable; he calls death ‘the last enemy, not the final word’ and traces executive overreach back to legislative retreat.
1:27:41Palestine Is Not a National Cause but a Self-Regenerating Symbol-Extraction Machine
Stop treating Palestine as a single national cause — within the Middle East's power structure it is a symbol machine that converts suffering into assets for every party: no center, no king to kill, and the only way out is clarity at the individual level.