#1166 Alexander Rosenberg: Why Economic Theory Can't Get Any Better...Why We Need It Anyway

Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm here with a returned guest, Dr. Alexander Rosenberg, and we're talking about his latest book, Blunt Instrument, Why Economic Theory Can't Get Any Better. why we need it anyway and that is the nice book cover so uh drosenberg instrument you can see it on the cover yes it certainly is so dr Rosenberg thank you so much for coming again on the show it's always a pleasure to talk with you and with you Ricardo so i mean let me first ask you why do you think we need to know about economic theory So it's not that we need to know about economic theory in general, it's that the people who consume economic theory professionally, policy planners, legislators, those who are involved with the public institutions of our society need to understand the

the way in which these institutions interact with individual rational egoists, those among us who are always looking out for number one, ready to cut corners, take shortcuts, take risks, and otherwise game the system. There are a few people in society that do this continually and at um uh uh considerable cost to the rest of society. There are some people in our society who never do this, and most of us do it some of the time. So um uh it's at least one portion of economic theory that is absolutely indispensable to designing social institutions in such a way as to save our civilization and that's the part of economic theory called game theory the most badly named um

uh discipline in the social sciences because it's not about games, it's about strategic interaction. And everybody always is engaged in strategic interaction with other people. So we're going to talk about game theory later, but I mean I've heard people discussing this many times, but is economics a science? Well, insofar as it aims to explain and predict human behavior, it at least endorses the demands made on sciences with regard to their methods and their approach. But

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (51 minutes, 6,563 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.