Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema

Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema

Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found his largest audience through blogging in his 50s and 60s, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet this unconventional journey led him to become one of the most influential monetary thinkers of the past two decades.

Scott joins Tyler to discuss what reading Depression-era newspapers revealed about Hitler's rise, when fiat currency became viable, why Sweden escaped the worst of the 1930s crash, whether bimetallism ever made sense, where he'd time-travel to witness economic history, what 1920s Hollywood movies get wrong about their era, how he developed his famous maxim "never reason from a price change," whether the Fed can ever truly follow policy rules like NGDP targeting, if Congress shapes monetary policy more than we think, the relationship between real and nominal shocks, his favorite Hitchcock movies, why Taiwan's 90s cinema was so special, how Ozu gets better with age, whether we'll ever see another Bach or Beethoven, how he ended up at the University of Chicago, what it means to be a late bloomer in academia, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded December 27th, 2024.

Other ways to connect

Episoder(283)

Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new ...

18 Mar 49min

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's co...

4 Mar 59min

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy e...

18 Feb 53min

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remark...

4 Feb 56min

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christiani...

21 Jan 59min

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets g...

7 Jan 1h 1min

Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and mo...

23 Des 202559min

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of t...

17 Des 20251h 1min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
treningspodden
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
foreldreradet
rss-sunn-okonomi
jakt-og-fiskepodden
takk-og-lov-med-anine-kierulf
sinnsyn
merry-quizmas
rss-kunsten-a-leve
lederskap-nhhs-podkast-om-ledelse
smart-forklart
hverdagspsyken
gravid-uke-for-uke
level-up-med-anniken-binz
hagespiren-podcast
rss-kull
fryktlos