318 | Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if any of you out there are fans of the web comic Girl Genius. I'm a huge fan of Girl Genius. It's a comic by Phil and Katya Folio, the artists, and it tells a story, it's been going on for years now, so if you want to like take a weekend off and catch up, if you haven't read it, there's plenty of material there.

And it's a very complicated story with a lot of moving parts, but it's a kind of a steampunk. almost medieval setting. So there are dragons and there are swords, but there's also science of a sort, but it's kind of fantasy science. So rather than just ordinary scientists, they have mad scientists called sparks in the comic. And there's a lot of jokes.

It's a it's a mostly humor-filled webcomic. One of the characters, a minor character in Girl Genius, is presented as a mad social scientist. Rather than most of the mad scientists who are, you know, building death rays and flying machines, he's experimenting on people. And even within the comic, they say, like, you don't meet a lot of mad social scientists. But at one point, uh, there's a place where the mad social scientist is explaining what a soft hearted guy he is, and as evidence, he says,

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (81 minutes, 15,464 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 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.