From China's Lost Generation to American Private Equity Professor
Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary sch...
19 Mar 20231h 18min
Hernán Flom, "The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Instead of tracking the path that illegal drugs take or...
16 Mar 202350min
Mareike Schomerus, "Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Violent conflict and its aftermath are pressing problems, particularly for international development initiatives. However, the results of development in conflict contexts have generally been disappoin...
15 Mar 20231h 10min
Russ Roberts, "Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us" (Portfolio, 2022)
Algorithms and apps analyze data and tell you how to beat the traffic, what books to buy, what music to listen to, and even who to date—often with great results. But what do you do when you face the b...
15 Mar 202338min
Sango Mahanty, "Unsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Like other global frontiers, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands are a hotspot for migration, land claims, and markets for newly introduced commodities. These topics and more are the focus of Sango Mahan...
15 Mar 202344min
Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, "The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left" (Hurst, 2023)
During the first months of the pandemic, governments worldwide agreed that ‘following the science’ with hard lockdowns and vaccine mandates was the best way to preserve life. But evidence is mounting ...
12 Mar 20231h 12min
Arve Hansen, "Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life" (Springer, 2022)
In this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic ...
10 Mar 202328min
The Future of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Tim Winters
The term "Silk Road" evokes images of trade and exotic luxurious goods and Orientalist images. Today, however, it also is associated with the projection of Chinese power abroad. And as that pairing su...
7 Mar 202335min
