Does the US really make the dollar? Has it ever?
On this episode, Mark talks with Brendan Greeley, a journalist and former U.S. economics editor at the Financial Times, about his new book “...
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The Rhodes Center Podcast
A podcast from the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics at Brown University, hosted by political economist and director of the Rhodes Center, Mark Blyth.
Episodes
20 of 80 episodesHow come corporate justice means never having to admit you're guilty?
On this episode Mark Blyth talks with Cornelia Woll, a professor of international political economy at the Hertie School Berlin and author o...
From competition to monopoly and back again: a political economist's tale
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Erik Peinert, an assistant professor of political science at Boston University, about his new book “M...
The ‘doom loop’ of global disorder
Not so long ago, it appeared to many observers that economic globalization, political liberalization and geopolitical stability were an unst...
How authoritarianism went from defense to offense on the world stage
The global rise of authoritarianism today is a puzzle: democracies were supposed to be immune to such impulses, but the current political la...
A global history of capitalism
In December, the Rhodes Center hosted Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, to discuss his new book “Capi...
The story of capitalism, as told by its critics
For as long as this thing we call “capitalism” has existed, it has had its fair share of critics. (You’ve heard more than a few of them on t...
The extraction industry powering the green transition
Lithium is an essential ingredient of most modern electronics. It helps to power our phones, our laptops, and increasingly EVs and other key...
Independent from who exactly? Central banks and democracy (part two)
This is the second part of a two-part series featuring Leah Downey, a political economist at King’s College London and author of the new boo...
Independent from who exactly? Central banks and democracy (part 1)
This is the first in a two-part series featuring Leah Downey, political theorist at King’s College London and author of the new book “Our Mo...
The role of universities in a democratic society (a collaboration with “Brown 2026”)
What’s the role of a university in a democratic society? What responsibility do universities have to foster the public good, and what respon...
Why the left keeps losing (or does it)?
On this episode, Mark talks with two guests to try and understand why, despite growing right populist movements emerging and winning electio...
Imagining the macroeconomy in interwar Poland
On this episode, Mark Blyth talks with Małgorzata Mazurek, a historian, associate professor of Polish Studies at Columbia University, and au...
The puzzling politics of inequality
In this episode, Mark Blyth talks with two inequality experts to try and understand something that’s been bugging him for years. It goes lik...
Why capitalism can’t solve the climate crisis
To state the obvious, there are many hurdles to addressing the climate crisis in a meaningful way. However, there’s been one relatively brig...
Why we think what we think, when we think about inflation
This is a new experiment we’re trying at the Rhodes Center Podcast. From time to time, going forward, instead of focusing on one expert and...
Why we ran out of everything during the pandemic, and why it had less to do with the pandemic and more to do with the corporations that made us much more vulnerable to it
Remember the supply chain problems of 2020 and 2021? The story we were told was that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy's ab...
The expulsion of politics? What the UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility tells us about the limits of technocracy
When it comes to governing our economy, estimates rule the day. We want to know what effect a policy might have on the government’s budget,...
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy citizenship abroad
When you think of high-end luxury commodities, you might imagine yachts, private jets, or even whole islands. But in the last few years, ano...
How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice
Listeners of the Rhodes Center Podcast have probably heard of companies like Black Rock, State Street and Vanguard. You’ve also probably hea...