The Governance Podcast

How did F.A. Hayek influence the course of economic history? What is the fate of his liberal project in the 21st century? Are we on the road to serfdom? Tune in to the latest episode of the Governance Podcast featuring Professors Mark Pennington and Peter Boettke. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). The Guest Peter Boettke is a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism, and the Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. As a teacher, Boettke is dedicated to cultivating enthusiasm for the economic way of thinking and the importance of economic ideas in future generations of scholars and citizens.  He is also now the co-author, along with David Prychitko, of the classic principles of economics texts of Paul Heyne's The Economic Way of Thinking (12th Edition, Prentice Hall, 2009).  His efforts in the classroom have earned him a number of distinctions including the Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University and the George Mason University Alumni Association's 2009 Faculty Member of the Year award. In 2005, Boettke received the Charles Koch Distinguished Alumnus award from the Institute for Humane Studies and the Jack Kennedy Award for Alumni Achievement from Grove City College.  Boettke was the 2010 recipient of the Association of Private Enterprise Education’s Adam Smith Award as well as George Mason University's College of Humanities and Social Sciences Distinguished Alumnus of the Year Award. In 2012, Boettke received a doctorate honoris causa in Social Sciences from Universidad Francisco Marroquin.  In 2013, Dr. Boettke received his second honorary doctorate from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Romania. Dr. Boettke served as President of the Southern Economics Association from 2015 - 2017 and President of the Mont Pelerin Society from 2016 - 2018. He also is the Editor of the Review of Austrian Economics and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Skip Ahead 0:50: Why did you decide to write this new book about Hayek? 5:10: It’s interesting that you divide Hayek’s work into four phases: Phase 1 is economics as a coordination problem… Phase 2 is the abuse of reason project… Phase 3 is the liberal principles of justice… and Phase 4, where he is addressing these concerns of cultural evolution. The book focuses on the first three phases—why did you decide to break the book down this way? 13:20: I think the common core of those three phases is the idea of Hayek developing epistemic institutionalism… what do you mean by this term? 17:44: Reading Hayek over the years, the idea of ignorance has always struck me as absolutely essential to his project- the idea that agents are not fully rational, that they stumble around in the world, they are purposeful, and they have limited information processing powers. And what we have to do is think about how institutions enable them to cope and to learn in these very non-ideal circumstances. 18:55: Why do you think there are so many misconceptions about what Hayek actually said? You’ll repeatedly hear people say that Hayek’s case for the market assumes that agents are fully rational or fully informed—or if they’re not fully informed, the price system acts as a surrogate for perfect information. 24:08: To push back on the way economics is taught, I definitely agree that if you look at the dominant textbooks, market failure is a dominant theme. I think that what some people in that movement are suggesting… is the idea that the economist’s model, the 101 model, starts from the assumption of there being some kind of a market, and then you talk about there being market failures which the government might correct. But the idea that the market is the primary mechanism of resource allocation is taken as given. What Knight and Johnson say is that you shouldn’t start with any presumption in favour of anything- a market or anything else… Institutions should be more about negotiating that uncertainty. The Econ 101 model doesn’t really recognize that problem. Is that a fair argument? 27:18: Hayek’s argument is that, in a democratic, pluralistic society, we are not going to be able to agree on ends… so the only thing we can agree on is the means by which we interact with each other. [What if we disagree on the means, too?] 31:04: Let me ask you a little about Elinor Ostrom. One of the characterizations you get of Hayek goes something like this: he made very important arguments based on the limits to human knowledge that a broadly competitive market system helps people overcome those limitations more effectively than some kind of top down or centrally planned economy. There are many people now across the political spectrum who would accept at least part of that argument… but they would then say, for example, that we’ve learned from people like Elinor Ostrom that there’s more to economic allocation than markets and states. 42:36: The Hayekian critique of the central planner is that the planner can’t have access to the information which needs to feed into prices… the Ostrom argument which is analogous is that a central rule-maker can’t frame rules to overcome collective action problems given that the circumstances of time and place which affect those collective action problems on the ground are radically dispersed across many different sorts of agents… so you need to have something like a discovery mechanism. 48:15: In the same way that Hayek sees competition between firms as a kind of discovery procedure where firms can copy the successful models and avoid the failing ones-- likewise in a polycentric order where we’ve got multiple decision centres which are public entrepreneurs, if you like, who are trying to cope with collective action problems in different ways, the different localities can observe what other localities are doing to try to learn themselves how to adapt to their own particular condition. 52:38: You mentioned that reconstructing the liberal project is a key part of… Hayek’s work. If we’re thinking about today’s world, many people would argue that that project, in so far as it has been implemented (or attempted), is actually collapsing. We’ve got declining faith in free trade, protectionism is on the rise, we have a much greater scepticism of markets of any time in the last 30-40 years. Is there anything in Hayek’s attempt in that 1960-80 period… that can help us address these problems? 1h:02: One mechanism to deal with our human divisions is democracy. The problem there is that people like myself think that cosmopolitanism is wonderful and we embrace creative destruction… but there are others who see creative destruction as the destruction of their identity.  

“Smith’s answer is that human beings have a basic capacity to observe, to be aware of, and in due course to be moved by the feeling of others. He calls that sympathy.” How did Adam Smith's insights into morality and sociology transform the modern world? Do they offer answers to the deepest political challenges of the twenty-first century? Jesse Norman MP discusses his new book on Smith with Mark Pennington on the Governance Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). The Guest Jesse Norman MP was appointed Minister of State for the Department for Transport on 12 November 2018. He was previously Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for Transport from June 2017 to 9 November 2018. He was elected as the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire in May 2010. Before entering politics Jesse was a Director at Barclays, researched and taught philosophy at University College London, and ran a charitable project in Communist Eastern Europe. His books and pamphlets include ‘The achievement of Michael Oakeshott’, ‘After Euclid’, ‘Compassionate conservatism’ and ‘The big society’. His book ‘Edmund Burke: politician, philosopher, prophet’ was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Political Book Awards and the George Orwell Prize. He has also written regularly for the national press.   Skip Ahead 00:38: Why write a book about Adam Smith, and why now? 3:05: What is Smith’s view of human nature, and the role of empathy within it? 9:17: If you look at the Theory of Moral Sentiments, there’s the idea that moral order doesn’t need to come from a legislator [or from God] – it is a bottom-up account of how rules are developed. 12:15: One thing critics say about Smith is that he has a purely descriptive account of morality—it’s describing how people act in ways to seek others’ praise, but that doesn’t address whether the action itself is actually worthy of praise. 15:17: In the Smithian account of morals, how do morals change? If what others perceive I should do is not what I think I should do, how do I challenge that public view? 18:40: I think The Theory of Moral Sentiments can help us understand things like celebrity culture, or what goes on in social media. People looking for ‘likes’ on Facebook is very much praise and blame. But there’s a tension here: this is how moral norms are enforced, but Smith also talks about the “man within the breast,” the person who knows what is really praiseworthy. 21:35: In my view, what the invisible hand is referring to is a kind of social process, it’s an understanding that there are emergent properties in society, when people interact and then something emerges which is more than the sum of its parts and which wasn’t anticipated by its participants… it’s the unintended consequences of spontaneous order. 24:45: If you have a theory of the invisible hand, you might also have theories of how the invisible hand can break down. Economists have theories of market failure, but does Smith have a theory of moral failure? 27:45: When we’re talking about morality, yes we can point to celebrity culture as being a moral market failure, but what’s the alternative? Would the Smithian account favour a legislative response? 31:10: You’re very good at explaining that Smith is, in some ways, an egalitarian… the challenge is, and I think this is a problem that no one’s cracked—what do we do when people who acquire economic power then try to use the state to limit competition? 37:00: We know that financial markets have important information asymmetries… that’s a standard argument some people use to argue for regulation…. But equally, we know that regulation can be captured by big players. To solve a market failure, you end up with a governance failure. 40:28: One of the things I take from Smith is a scepticism about politicians… how do we constrain politicians?  

Is good governance a choice between markets and states, or is there a third way? How can institutional diversity help us fight climate change or enhance social welfare? Tune in to this conversation with Dr Derek Wall of Goldsmiths College on what we stand to learn from the intellectual legacy of Elinor Ostrom, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Dr Derek Wall is an associate lecturer in Political Economy at Goldsmiths College.  His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014) and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals (2017).  He is a former International Coordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales and contested the Maidenhead constituency in the 2017  General Election.  He is currently writing a political biography of Hugo Blanco.  He is a patron of Peace in Kurdistan. For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 0:45: What was Elinor Ostrom’s main contribution to the social sciences? 1:55: Was Ostrom successful in moving beyond markets and states? 4:44: What is the relevance of her work for green politics? 8:00: Is Ostrom’s framework limited to localities? If so, how well does it tackle environmental problems in the global commons? 15:30: What is the connection between Ostrom and John Dewey? 19:26: How did Vincent Ostrom influence Elinor’s work? 22:43: Was there a possibility of confirmation bias in Elinor’s work? Was she interested in demonstrating outcomes in her empirical work that we might view as favourable to building a self-governing citizenry in the way that Vincent envisioned it? 25:46: What happens when localities come up with bad rules, or even oppressive ones? Should the state monitor local policy experimentation? 29:43: What are the social justice implications of Ostrom’s research framework? Should we be comfortable in accepting institutionally diverse approaches to income redistribution? 31:23: If there are macro-level structural inequalities in society that are too big for any one person to overcome, wouldn’t the state be the only entity capable of solving problems at that scale? 36:01: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your political background. How do you translate such complex ideas from the academy into policy? 40:15: What are the 13 rules for policy makers to begin thinking in an Ostromian way? 42:28: Let’s take a more pragmatic challenge to the Ostroms. If we’re dealing with a diverse constellation of rule systems in a given country, it looks like utter chaos for investors. Doesn’t the diversity and localism implied in the framework undermine the Ostroms’ pragmatism? 45:02: What is Elinor Ostrom’s legacy? What research programs has she left open for the future?

Why did state building fail in Afghanistan? What are the root causes of corruption and endemic poor governance? Ilia Murtazashvili from the University of Pittsburgh joins us for a conversation on the lessons Afghanistan teaches us about state predation and potential ways it can be reversed. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Ilia Murtazashvili is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in political economy, institutional design, land governance, public policy, and public administration. Substantively, he is interested in emergence and change in property rights institutions, American political development, challenges of public administration in weakly institutionalized contexts, and the relationship between property rights and security in fragile states. He has written on emergence and change in property rights on the American frontier, self-governance of land relations in a diversity of contexts both in the US and the developing world, the relationship between land and state-building in Afghanistan, and on the governance of hydraulic fracturing. His current research focuses on the relationship between governance and legal titling in the developing world, the implications of economic studies of anarchy for public policy, the link between institutions and the shale boom in the US, and on lessons of the American frontier for current challenges confronting developing countries seeking to improve prospects for economic development and political stability. For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:11: In the literature on political economy, there are two views about how the state behaves. What are these views and which one better describes what we see in the real world? 4:15: What do you think is missing from our political science frameworks? How can we improve the theory of state predation? 7:41: Your latest paper is about Afghanistan, a country that has seen little in the way of political or economic development despite trillions of dollars of investment from the international community. Why do you think state building has failed there? 11:35: How has a history of foreign intervention affected the modern-day Afghan state? 14:45: What does predation actually look like in Afghanistan? 17:30: What role does self governance play in Afghanistan? Has customary law been important in counteracting state predation? 21:11: Where does the Taliban fit into your framework of self governance? Can’t self governing systems be predatory in their own way? 25:04: Does the state actually exist in Afghanistan, or are we actually only observing groups competing for power? Where does a framework of state predation fit here? 27:50: Let’s go back to the four variables that can reduce state predation: a strong monopoly on coercion, robust political institutions, the lack of foreign intervention and the presence of self-governing institutions. Could Afghanistan realistically reverse course by following these ideals as a blueprint? 32:55: To some degree, we know the variables that are correlated with good governance. But in much of the developing world, political actors don’t have incentives to relinquish power and those societies get stuck in transition. Do we have a decent theory of development or is it merely a matter of historical accident? 38:17: What does Afghanistan’s experience teach the developed world about state building and foreign aid? Should the west stop all forms of intervention abroad? 40:54: What’s the role of culture in inhibiting the development of a commercial society in Afghanistan? 44:28: You have a new project on the horizon that compares governance in the US, China and Afghanistan. What do you expect to find in that comparison?

Wars don't look like what they used to. Using a variety of new data sources from modern war zones, Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University offers transformative insights into the nature of 21st century terrorism, civil wars and development aid. Join us for this conversation between Dr Shapiro and Dr Samuel DeCanio of King's College London on the way we govern warfare. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that compiles and analyzes micro-level conflict data and other information on politically motivated violence in nine countries. He studies conflict, economic and political development, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations, co-author of Foundations of the Islamic State: Management, Money, and Terror in Iraq, and co-author of the forthcoming Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. His research has been published in broad range of academic and policy journals as well as a number of edited volumes. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan. Shapiro received the 2016 Karl Deutsch Award from ISA, given to a scholar younger than 40 or within 10 years of earning a Ph.D. who has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He is an Associate Editor of Journal of Conflict Resolution, World Politics, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, a Faculty Fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS). Ph.D. Political Science, M.A. Economics, Stanford University. B.A. Political Science, University of Michigan. Prior to graduate school Shapiro served in the United States Navy. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 0:48: How did you get interested in this project? 2:05: Why should people be interested in studying asymmetric conflict? 4:20: Why are western militaries investing so heavily in technology when their opponents are often technologically weak? 6:33: What’s the theoretical argument of your book about asymmetric conflict? 9:30: Are there any drawbacks of studying conflict through the lens of non-combatants? 12:25: What is the role of communications and cellular technology in the relationship civilians have with combatants? 17:50: You had a student who had been a special operations task force commander in Iraq, and he had an interesting story about cell phones. Can you tell us that story? 20:52: Did insurgents have any response to civilians using cell towers to send tips to the government? 23:30: Was the telecommunications experience in Iraq different from Afghanistan? 25:10: When we think of the term ‘big data’, we usually think of maybe someone in Silicon Valley analysing large datasets removed from events on the ground. But the book draws on a variety of data sources. How did they help you study conflict? 30:24: What argument do you develop on the relationship between poverty, development aid and violence? 34:51: What’s the different impact of big and small aid projects? 39:00: Does timing matter for development aid? Should you bring in small projects first to reduce violence and follow it up with larger projects to enhance local development? 40:20: How did this research help you create a network between academics and policy makers? 42:17: What is the next stage of your research agenda?

Has economic theory changed in the last 50 years? How can we incorporate notions of social justice and culture into economic thinking? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Herbert Gintis joins Professor Shaun Hargreaves Heap in a conversation about his contributions to key debates in economics since the 1970s. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Herbert Gintis is an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism,  cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture coevolution, efficiency wages, strong reciprocity, and human capital theory. Throughout his career, he has worked extensively with economist Samuel Bowles. Their landmark book, Schooling in Capitalist America, has had multiple editions in five languages since it was first published in 1976. Their most recent book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution was published by Princeton University Press in 2011. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:30: How did you get into academia? 4:40: You mentioned your political engagement with the SDS and the civil rights movement. Have you maintained that engagement throughout your life? 8:00: One way we can think about Marx and Mill is perhaps that Marx was the materialist, and Mill was the idealist. Has Marx’s materialism stuck with you? 10:53: My understanding of Schooling in Capitalist America is that the book has enjoyed a kind of revival because of the work of people like Heckman, who have discovered that education isn’t important in the traditional ‘human capital’ sense. Is your argument consistent with that? 13:50: How is it that your argument about schooling has become a version of received wisdom today? 15:21: Is the diffusion of ideas so slow in the social sciences because it’s a closed shop—it’s not very competitive? 16:27: What’s the difference between the social sciences and natural sciences in the way that ideas get diffused? 19:24: The maintenance of theory without evidence in economics: how did that tradition survive? 22:30: I’m going to take you to the QJE article on ‘Contested Exchange' and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. A group of economists in the 70s was discussing these ideas a decade before they went mainstream... 33:30: How is it that you weren’t interested in the Keynesian point about uncertainty in your critique of general equilibrium theory? 36:42: There is the problem of calculation when you have complexity and then there's the fact that we don’t know the future. Aren’t these separate issues? 39:05: I suppose there is an a-theoretical space that Keynes opened up—to license ‘animal spirits.’ 40:20: In your view, our cultural values owe much to the evolutionary selection advantage they give to groups. What’s interesting about the ‘co-evolutionary’ part of this is that once we have co-evolution taking place, culture itself… can contribute to the evaluation of fitness. 44:40: If you think about our contemporary cultural values in the US and UK, you might say that two very important cultural values are a belief in liberal freedoms and a belief in democracy. Could you sketch how each of those cultural values gave this evolutionary selection advantage? 47:40: Hayek has a very similar evolutionary view of cultural values to yours… For Hayek, the great virtue of liberal freedoms is that they are an appropriate response to the problem of knowledge. Would you buy that? 55:15: If the ideas of democracy flourished for the reasons you mentioned, historically and evolutionarily, and if we actually buy into democracy for an entirely different set of reasons, which may have to do with egalitarian foundations, how does that tension get played out? 57:45: How did a generation of the best minds in economics spend so much of their time on Walrasian general equilibrium theory?

What are the paradoxes of economic development? How can we preserve liberal democracy in an era of populism and polarisation? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Barry Weingast of Stanford University joins Professor Mark Pennington of King’s College London for a conversation on the key lessons we’ve learned from the study of political economy. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:00 In response to the age old question, ‘why are some countries rich and others poor?’ you argue that some countries fail to develop because they are stuck in a ‘violence trap.’ What do you mean by that? 3:46: How does your explanation for the persistence of poverty differ from others? 6:08: How can developing countries escape from the violence trap? 7:50: Economists have often assumed that markets existed in societies before states began to interfere with them. You argue that markets don’t necessarily exist in many developing societies, but violence does. Why do so many economists have a different starting point? 9:43: In many ways, you’re arguing against the idea that markets are natural phenomena. You argue instead that markets have to be sustained within certain institutional conditions- but whether you actually get to those institutional conditions is the big question. 13:22: It’s not only markets that aren’t natural phenomena—democracy is also not a natural phenomenon. How can we build democracy where it doesn’t exist? 15:12: Is there anything that external bodies or national policies can recommend to help governments reduce the stakes of power? 17:35: How do you respond to Easterly’s arguments about foreign intervention? 18:52: Looking at your insights into early economic development in Europe, much of the good outcomes are unintended. Could we conclude that development isn’t something one can plan or design policy for? 21:48: What is an example of a democracy-promoting policy that isn’t just focused on creating elections? 23:23: What is the role of beliefs or moral attitudes in your framework? 25:55: Is there a role for political entrepreneurs to help societies out of their violence traps? 27:28: Do you see any implications of your research for contemporary events? Today we’re seeing a lot of ‘us versus them’ zero sum thinking. Can people find ways to discover mutual gains from cooperation in this environment? 30:25: What is the contemporary importance of your work on market-preserving federalism? 35:35: How can we explain the current shift in public opinion against market-preserving federalism across the west? 39:02: What are your future projects?

Which governance arrangements best help us manage and preserve natural resources? Markets, states, or something in between? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Dominic Parker of the University of Wisconsin, Madison discusses his latest research on comparative institutions and the commons.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Dominic Parker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics at UW-Madison. His research fields include environmental and resource economics, law and economics, development, and institutional economics. Specifically, he is interested in the  role that property rights and governance play in affecting the extent to which societies and individuals benefit from their natural resource endowments. Topics include conflict minerals, oil boomtowns, private land conservation, commercial fishery reform, and the economies of indigenous communities. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:15: Which governance arrangements have you found to be most effective in managing natural resources? The government, the market or something in between? 2:49: Which governance arrangements best promote wildlife conservation? How do the US and UK differ it this regard? 9:20: Is the government always the preferred source of governance over large territories where it’s too costly for social actors to contract together? 18:45: How do you compare the performance of the government and private sector in the management of oil resources? 25:25: What is the tragedy of the anti-commons? 26:05: How do you determine the benefits versus the costs of government ownership of natural resources? 33:36: Let’s take the example of a dictatorship where there is no institutional diversity in resource ownership and elites don’t share oil rents back with the population. Does government ownership still make sense despite its efficiency benefits, or is there value to having institutional diversity in principle? 38:12: What implications does your work have for addressing climate change? The language of action in the scientific and policy communities tends to be very anti-market. Does this conversation require more nuance or can we safely say that the market won’t be an option? 44:54: Can people privately contract among themselves to reduce emissions when government policies fall short? 45:58: What is the legacy of the Ostroms? Did Elinor Ostrom’s work successfully move us beyond markets and states?

What are the dangers of theory building about property rights in development economics? Are we becoming more ethical in the way we conceptualize property over time? In the latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Bart Wilson of Chapman University discusses his book project on the origins and meaning of property.  Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Bart J. Wilson is the Donald P. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Economics and Law at Chapman University. He is a founding member of the Economic Science Institute and founding member and Director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy. His research uses experimental economics to explore the foundations of exchange and specialization and the origins of property. Another of his research programs compares decision making in humans, apes, and monkeys. Bart has published papers in the American Economic Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Nature Human Behaviour. His research has been supported with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Federal Trade Commission. Bart has co-authored with Vernon Smith a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book entitled, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 01:05: What is property? 07:10: How using tools gave primates a sense of ownership 08:30: Tools as extensions of ourselves 11:50: What's the difference between property 'in,' 'on' and 'of'? 15:54: An original experiment exploring what property means 26:40: Does this experiment tell us something new about the way we treat the concept of property in economics? 30:07: Where do property 'rights' come from? 36:20: Is the language of 'rights' morally and conceptually meaningful in domains other than property? 40:30: Are human beings becoming more ethical in the way they conceptualize property over time? 42:30:  How can the humanities and social sciences find a common language to theorize property? 43:07: Does interdisciplinarity make our work better or noisier? 

On our latest episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Mark Pennington interviews Professor Frans Berkhout of King's College London on his latest book about climate governance. Tune in for a rich discussion on the limits of international coordination and how local experimentation can solve global commons dilemmas. Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Frans Berkhout is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London. He joined the Department of Geography at King’s in 2013. From 2013-2015 he was Director of the Future Earth programme, based at the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris. Before that, Prof Berkhout directed the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the VU University Amsterdam in The Netherlands and led the Amsterdam Global Change Institute. He has also held posts at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex, and was Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Environmental Change and Sustainable Technologies programmes. Among other advisory roles, Professor Berkhout was a lead author in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (2014) and a member of the Social Science Panel of the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014) of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He sits on the editorial boards of Research Policy, Global Environmental Change, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions and The Anthropocene Review. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead  00:45: What was the motivation for your latest book? 5:15: What is experimentation in your framework? Is climate governance experimentation different from scientific experimentation? 10:15: Can you combine top down and bottom up approaches to climate governance? 15:25: Why do people at the local level take action on climate change? 19:35: How do local networks of experimentation get off the ground and get connected globally? 21:30: Some say that focusing on an experimental approach can serve as an excuse for a lack of coordination on climate change policy at the global scale. Others say global coordination is too slow and cumbersome. Can we reconcile this tension? 27:25: Do we always want local experiments to ripple out to a broader scale? Would they stop having contextual relevance? 31:45: What evidence do we have that local experiments are having a broader, more global effect? 35:00: Are we abandoning global coordination? Is there still a role for international policy? 39:17: What role does interdisciplinarity play in the study of climate change governance? 42:18: Do we have examples of networks of academic actors that experiment in social science approaches to climate governance? 45:03: What are the next research avenues for climate governance? 45:45: Are social scientists equipped to oversee the experiments? Are academics themselves complex enough to understand governance?

Tune in to a special conversation on the governance podcast between Professor Jeremy Jennings of King’s College London and Professor Quentin Skinner of Queen Mary University. Professor Skinner discusses the meaning of intellectual history, key insights about republicanism and political representation, and the perennial lessons we stand to learn from the humanities about our political present. Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Professor Quentin Skinner is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London. Previously the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, he is known as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. His most recent book is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:05: What do intellectual historians do, and what are the defining features of the Cambridge school? 6:34: Is there a reason intellectual historians are so drawn to the early modern period? 8:08: What is Hobbes’ legacy? Why is he important? 10:38: What was so original about the Hobbesian conception of the state? 16:00: Why did Britain fail to adopt the Hobbesian view of the state? 19:41: What is republicanism, and why is it important? 25:00: What does the Irish case teach us about republicanism? 28:00: Your new book is about teaching the humanities. Why is that so important? 33:10: What is the meaning of laughter? 37:15: What is Hobbes’ theory of political representation? 40:45: How do classical debates about representation bear upon the present? 43:50: How much can we learn from the past? 49:02: How do you see yourself entering public debate as a moralist?

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Professor Peter John of King’s College London, who discusses the history of behavioral economics, the limits of “nudge,” and how citizens can be empowered to “nudge” their political authorities back.  Learn more about how to enhance democratic accountability in the policy-making process from a key voice in the field. The Guest Peter John is Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He was previously Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University College London. He is known for his work on agenda-setting, local politics, behavioral interventions, and randomized controlled trials. He is author of Analyzing Public Policy (2012), which reviews the main theories of public policy and the policy process. He has carried out empirical work on agenda-setting to find out why governments focus on particular policies, which is represented in the book, Policy Agendas in British Politics (Palgrave, 2013), co-authored with Anthony Bertelli, William Jennings, and Shaun Bevan. With Anthony Bertelli, he developed public policy investment as an approach to understanding decision-making, which was published as Public Policy Investment: Priority-Setting and Conditional Representation in British Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is interested in how best to involve citizens in public policy and management, often deploying behavioural interventions. He tests many of these interventions with randomized controlled trials. Some of these trials appeared in Nudge, Nudge, Think, Think: Experimenting with Ways to Change Civic Behaviour (Bloomsbury, 2011). Practical issues with the design of experiments are covered in Field Experiments in Political Science and Public Policy (Routledge, 2017). Experiments are also used to examine the impact of social media and politics in Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton University Press, 2015), with Helen Margetts, Scott Hale and Taha Yasseri. His current book, to be published in 2018, is a critical review of the use of behavioral public policies, called How Far to Nudge: Assessing Behavioural Public Policy (Edward Elgar). Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 00:50: What is the concept of “nudge” and where did it come from? 5:05: What has your personal journey in public policy been like? Where did it start and where is it now? 10:00: How do you propose including citizens in the policy-making process? 20:00: What’s the cost of nudge plus? 30:18: How do you measure the impact of a behavioral public policy study? 31:12: How do I complain to the NHS about its services? 39:40: Is ‘nudge plus’ the best way to connect citizens with good public policy outcomes? After all, people have very little incentive to complain about government services. 44:50: Are you over-relying on the goodwill of the nudgers to create good public policy? What happens when a corporation or authoritarian government uses behavioral insights for nefarious purposes? 50:17: Can the private sector use ‘nudge plus’ to build trust with customers? 53:03: What is the future of behavioral economics as a field? 57:02: How has being interdisciplinary influenced your work?

Can blockchain put an end to election fraud? Can it help us rebuild trust in distant institutions and companies that handle our data? How does blockchain actually work? Join us for this podcast on the inner workings and implications of blockchain for governance and society. The Guests Dr. Grammateia (Matoula) Kotsialou and Dr. Luke Riley are postdoctoral research associates at King’s College London working on the applications of blockchain in voting and collective decision-making domains. As computer scientists with expertise in game theory and artificial intelligence, they are here to answer all of your questions about blockchain and its future in society. For more information about their work, check out the Volt Project. Send us Your Questions for Part II Send us your blockchain questions for our follow-up podcast with Matoula and Luke by May 31, 2018 at info@csgs.kcl.ac.uk, or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 0:40 What is blockchain? 1:07 How does bitcoin work? 7:38 How does blockchain help us secure our transactions with others? 8:49 How vulnerable is blockchain to hacking? 9:54 What’s stopping blockchain from taking over the world right now? 11:50 Why did the stock price of bitcoin drop? 13:52 Is blockchain just an ideology or is it the next great disruptive technology of our time? 15:07 How does blockchain voting work? 18:58 Can blockchain prevent election hacking by third parties? 20:27 What security issues do modern electronic voting systems face? 24:38 How can technology help us improve democracy? 28:14 Can we use blockchain to build trust with companies that use our data? 31:29  Can I sell rights to my data on a blockchain social media account?

Tune in to the Governance Podcast with Dr Adam Tebble on the philosophical case for open borders, the role of experimentation in poverty alleviation, the line between academics and activism, and whether the state can improve governance outcomes. A unique discussion at the intersection of philosophy, policy and development economics. The Guest Dr. Adam Tebble is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at King’s College London. He conducts research broadly within contemporary liberal political theory and specifically in classical liberalism, social justice and the politics of culture and identity. He is the author of Hayek (Bloomsbury) and Epistemic Liberalism, a Defence (Routledge). Prior to joining King’s in 2011, Dr Tebble taught at the School of Public Policy, UCL. In the United States he has taught at Brown University, where he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow (2004-2006) and Lecturer (2006-2007) at the Department of Political Science. Send us Your Questions for Adam Send us your questions for our follow-up blog interview with Adam by June  15, 2018 at info@csgs.kcl.ac.uk, or drop us a line on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 00:50: What’s new about your case for open borders? 2:23: How are people who don’t immigrate benefited by those who do? 6:10: How does the theory of knowledge behind your argument challenge our understanding of evidence and bureaucratic expertise? 10:05: You argue that people can make governance in their home countries better off when they leave. What are the empirics on this? 14:20: How do the benefits of immigration outweigh the costs of brain drain? 17:00: Advocates of open borders will react favorably to your message, but some people in power will not. Who is your audience? 22:18: What do you advise a leader who puts the interests of their electorate first but still claims they have obligations to the global poor? 26:20: Are open borders only theoretically a good idea? In practice, don’t we have good reason to close borders on the basis of national security or economic interests? 30:51: If you have an authoritarian populist who refuses to have obligations to the global poor, how can you convince them to  open borders? 34:45: Is it okay for an academic to toe the line between the academy and activism? 36:22: Are you saying that there are no hard and fast rules about how to craft immigration policy or making a bolder proposal? 38:55: How have liberal thinkers from the 20th century shaped your thinking about migration policy? 49:40: It takes a long time for “experiments of living” to play out. What if we need the state to address more urgent social challenges here and now? What role does the state play in improving governance?

How can we produce effective regulations when governments can no longer cope with the demands of an increasingly complex and digitised world? Professor Gillian Hadfield of the University of Southern California discusses novel institutional mechanisms that can make the law more agile, inclusive and effective. Join us at the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London for the first episode of the Governance Podcast. About the Guest Gillian K. Hadfield is the Richard L. and Antoinette Schamoi Kirtland professor of law and professor of economics at the University of Southern California. She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. She has served as a clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the Future of Technology, Values, and Policy, among other leading organisations in the field of law and economics. Her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in November 2016.