Royce Kurmelovs, "Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil" (U Queensland Press, 2024)
A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian government to undermine worldwide efforts to add...
23 Mar 202533min
Paul Seabright, "The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements ...
20 Mar 20251h 10min
Yingyao Wang, "Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics: How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State" (Columbia UP, 2024)
China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a str...
19 Mar 202547min
Bryan Caplan, "Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing" (Cato Institute, 2024)
Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel’ can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Bui...
18 Mar 202541min
Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman, "Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices" (Yale UP, 2022)
The word Leader often brings to mind the heroic image of a charismatic, confident, and persuasive person who seems to "know" what to do in an instinctual, gut-driven way. In Decision Leadership: Emp...
17 Mar 202552min
Gregor Craigie, "Our Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis" (Random House Canada, 2024)
Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appeared to have topped out, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Higher interest rates ha...
16 Mar 202532min
Carolyn Whitzman, "Home Truths: Fixing Canada's Housing Crisis" (On Point Press, 2024)
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians exist on the edge. Renters fear eviction, homeowners feel trapped, and both are vulnerable to becoming homeless with a single stroke of misfortune. Unaffordable hous...
15 Mar 202525min
Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game
On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the So...
10 Mar 202544min
