ePODstemology

This podcast strives to bring forward new insights and innovative frameworks for understanding the world of the 21st century. Few things underscore just how radically different things are today from the 20th century than recent advances in artificial intelligence, where an AI ‘copilot’ on your smartphone can now perform myriad tasks for you in a few seconds. This episode’s guest is one of the people best placed globally to help us understand the implications of this new technology. He’s Ash Fontana, author with Penguin Random House of The AI First Company: How to Compete and Win With Artificial Intelligence. Ash has been working in the venture capital space with firms utilising machine learning applications for over a decade. He launched Angel List’s fundraising platform, which manages over $15 billion dollars, and was the first or largest investor in category defining companies like Canva, Kaggle, and Tractable. He remains at the forefront of thinking about how artificial intelligence can reshape economies and economies and societies for the better, and how regulators, investors, and other influential actors should approach the possibilities in the space. Ash's website:https://ashfontana.com/The AI-First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence:https://www.theaifirstcompany.com/David Watson's episode on ePODstemology about machine learning and the acceleration of discovery:https://epodstemology.buzzsprout.com/1763534/10465344-machine-learning-and-the-acceleration-of-discovery

James Steele is Associate Professor of Sport and Exercise Science at Solent University. He has extensive research and consultancy experience working with elite athletes across a range of sports, the general population across the lifespan, and both those who are healthy and diseased. He was a member of the Expert Working Group revising the CMO Physical Activity Guidelines for the United Kingdom and is a founding member of both the Strength and Conditioning Society, and the Society for Transparency, Openness, and Replication in Kinesiology. James joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Warwick, to discuss the new hotness in exercise: low-dose workouts, as well as the challenges and peculiarities of conducting research in the sports space. This is the episode for everyone who thinks that maybe all those sports influencers out there aren't being entirely honest with the 'science'. 

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by episode guest Dr Stefania Fiorentino, senior teaching associate in planning, growth, and urban regeneration at Cambridge university’s department of land economy. Dr Fiorentino’s research is at the intersection of urban planning and local economic development, specifically how to innovate with respect to the inclusivity and effectiveness of urban regeneration strategies. Her research is extremely impact-oriented and is typically conducted in partnership with communities, developers, and local government. She has worked especially on coastal towns in the UK, and also has papers on densification strategies, industrial clusters, the geography of innovation, and regional inequalities. The conversation ranges from left behind places to gentrification and strategies for participatory governance. Stefania’s webpage and papers:https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-stefania-fiorentinoFiorentino, S., Glasmeier, A. K., Lobao, L., Martin, R., and Tyler, P. (2023) ‘Left behind places’: what are they and why do they matter?, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad044 Fiorentino, S., Sielker, F., and Tomaney, J. (2023) Coastal towns as ‘left-behind places’: economy, environment and planning, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsad045 Fiorentino, S. (2023) Public-led shared workspaces and the intangible factors of urban regeneration in UK coastal towns, Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 11(1), DOI: 10.1080/21650020.2023.2260853 Fiorentino et al. (2022) The future of the corporate office? Emerging trends in the post-Covid city, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 15(3), 597–614, https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsac027

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Jacqui Lau, senior lecturer and discovery early career fellow (DECRA) at James Cook University in Australia. Jacqui is an environmental scientist employing interdisciplinary perspectives and mixed methods to understand how coastal communities in the pacific islands and Australia respond to climate change and environmental transformations. She has worked collaboratively in the Pacific, East and West Africa to examine ecosystem services, the impact of shocks like COVID-19 on coastal communities, perceptions of fairness about the customary management of coral reefs, and issues of equity (including gender) in conservation and climate change policy. Her work has been published in Nature Climate Change, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and World Development, among other top outlets. Jacqui’s website: https://research.jcu.edu.au/portfolio/jacqueline.lau/ Ostrom, E. (2009). A general framework for analysing the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Nature, 325(5939): 419–422. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1172133 Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press. Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values, and ethical life. Cambridge University Press. Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. & Ditto, P. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Applied Experimental Philosophy, 47(1): 55–130. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124072367000024? See also Haidt, J. The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided on politics and religion. Penguin.Shark’s Pacific and Dr Jess Cramp: https://sharkspacific.org/about/   

‘Copaganda’ is the name given to media that seeks to portray the police in a favourable, often distorted light. This includes fictional shows like Law and Order, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, and Miami Vice, as well as reality-TV style shows that follow policy officers around as they go about their business. Emma Rackstraw’s research investigates how these shows affect the behaviour of the police, perceptions of the police among viewers, and attitudes towards the police in the communities where these shows take place. She joins regular ePODstemology host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the implications of copaganda for criminal justice reform in the United States, the role that researchers play in skewing policy analysis for good or ill, and what changes are most urgently needed in US criminal justice policy.   Emma’s website:https://www.emmarackstraw.com/homeEmma’s job market paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4592803 “The Work” documentary (typically available via Amazon Prime):https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5836866/ Public health approaches to policing: https://www.intensiveengagement.com/uploads/3/2/8/3/3283498/public_health_approaches.pdf 

Climate change is the biggest existential threat facing humanity. So why aren’t we doing more about it? This week’s guest is Dr Antonio Valentim, a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Yale’s MacMillan Centre. His research seeks to answer two main questions 1) when and why do voters change their opinions and behaviours with respect to climate change? and 2) how do political incentives influence political elites’ behaviour on climate change? Who better to help us get some answer on how we can get more action on the climate policy front. If you’re interested in what protesters, citizens, political parties, and researchers can do to advance the climate transition, tune into this episode. Antonio’s website: https://antoniovalentim.github.io/Antonio’s paper on Fridays for Future protests: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/m6dpg/ Antonio’s paper on the Green’s not fielding candidates in flood affected areas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3960045 Bolet, D., Green ,F., & Gonzalez-Eguino, M. (2023). How to get coal country to vote for climate policy: The effect of a ‘just transition agreement’ on Spanish election results. Forthcoming in American Political Science Review. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4394195 

While Kim Jong Un might disagreed, democracy is widely regarded as a universal value – it is a system of political organisation that enshrines the right to self-determination. Recent centuries have seen a wave of democratisation relative to historical trends, with democracies replacing dictatorships and other autocratic forms of governance in nations across the globe. Yet many of these democracies have also struggled to put down strong roots. Backsliding is common and consolidation arduous. A few spots of bad luck and a fledging democracy like Bangladesh or even Hungary can start to look fake. How can we promote the maturation of democracies? Samuel Amin from the University of Warwick joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian to share his insights from his PhD research on Ghana, especially the role of the national peace council there. Samuel emphasises the role of institutions in democratic consolidation, and that many of these institutions will be specific to local contexts rather than universally useful models that can be exported to other countries. The national peace council, for example, makes use of cultural narratives of Ghanaians as peaceful people, and norms of respecting religious and ethnic elders, to facilitate conflict resolution and respect for liberal-democratic institutions like courts and the electoral commission. The episode is optimistic and hopeful, with Samuel concluding with some positive thoughts about the future of democracy in West Africa.Samuel’s student page at Warwick: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/anim/ Follow Sam on twitter: @animksamNick Cheeseman’s Democracy in Africa: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-in-africa/3FFB8B40059192D449B77A402ADC82A1 Kate Baldwin’s book on traditional African chiefs in democratic africa: https://politicalscience.yale.edu/publications/paradox-traditional-chiefs-democratic-africa   Dominique Burbidge’s papers on East African democracy: https://law.strathmore.edu/dr-dominic-burbidge/ Lisa Weeden’s book Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5893513.html 

One way to think about what makes *social* science distinct is that it is trying to study subjects, not objects. Subjects have feelings, opinions, and values, which are often hard to observe and even harder to measure. Subjects’ behaviour is also often endogenous to being studied. For example, the ‘shy conservative’ phenomenon refers to the observation that people often lie about their right wing and traditionalist beliefs when responding to political polling. Finally, subjects are embedded in social structures that they both create and are created by. And those structures change rapidly! Talk about a hard challenge.  One thing holding social science back is the shallow understanding of the philosophy of social science among social scientists. Well ePODstemology strives to be different! This week’s guest is Dr Cristian Larroulet Philippi from the University of Cambridge, who joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss the challenges of measuring the human. A key theme of the episode is that ‘physics envy’ is a poor way for social to proceed, but perhaps seismology provides a better template?Cristian’s webpage: https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/directory/larrouletphilippi Some background on Kitcher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_KitcherMore information on life satisfaction scales: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-021-00460-8 Depression scales: https://www.apa.org/depression-guideline/assessment Inventing temperature (the history of thermometers) by Ha-Sook Chang: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/inventing-temperature-9780195337389Eran Tal on measurement: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement-science/ 

Regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Dr Malte Dold, assistant professor of economics at Pomona College. Malte is one of the most prominent scholars in the field of behavioural welfare economics, which sits at the intersection of economics, philosophy, and psychology. You might have heard of behavioural economics, which inspired the idea of nudges in public policy – little tweaks to the choice environment citizens face as they navigate the world that can help them towards the decisions they would ideally like to make. Piano key stairs that play music to encourage you to walk rather than take the escalator. Being defaulted into a high savings-rate retirement plan by your employer. Or Timely and easy to action reminders from the tax office encouraging you to pay your bills. All nudges. If you think these are all bullshit, try navigating a budget airline’s website without paying for any additional extras. Here behavioural insights from psychology are used against to wear you down and encourage you to hand over cash for things you don’t need. Behavioural welfare economics is the philosophical side of these interventions. When we use nudges and other similar interventions to help people, how do we understand what is good for them? Economics would traditional use people’s own preferences as a measure of their welfare. But one of the main contributions of behavioural economics research has been to demonstrate that people’s preferences are often unstable, unclear, context sensitive, constructed on the spot, and otherwise a poor guide to their welfare. So how should economists, psychologists, and policymakers proceed? Tune in to find out.  Malte's website:https://www.maltedold.com/Angner, E. We're all behavioural economists now. Journal of Economic Methodology, 26(3): 195-207. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350178X.2019.1625210 Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica., 47(2): 263 -292. Kuhn on scientific revolutions:https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/Lakatos on scientific revolutions:https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/Chetty, R. (2015). Behavioural economics and public policy: A pragmatic perspective. American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, 105(5): 1-33. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34330194/behavioral_ely.pdfSmith, V. (1962). An experimental study of competitive market behaviour. Journal of Political Economy, 70(2): 111-137. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=economics_articles Bernheim, D. (2008). Behavioural welfare economics. NBER Working Paper 14622. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14622Sugden, R. (2018). The Community of Advantage: A behavioural economist's defence of the market. Oxford University Press.https://academic.oup.com/book/10329Sugden, R. (2021). Normative economics without preferences. International Review of Economics, 68(1): 5-19.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12232-020-00356-8 Chater, N. & Loewenstein, G. (2022). The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioural public policy astray. Online first in Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 1-60.Francis, D. V., Hardy, B. L., Jones, D. (2022). Black economists on race and policy: Contributions to education, poverty, and mobility, and public finance. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 60(2): 454-493.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20211686Gneezy, U. (2020). A fine is a price. The Journal of Legal Studies, 29(1): 1-17.   https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061Nudge by Thaler & Sunstein:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improvin

Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. Her work examines religious transformations in the context of struggles over gender, sexuality, and the environment in contemporary Zimbabwe. This is a context in which colonization violently upended ideas about personhood, spirituality, and ties between people and place. Raffaella’s work explores how young people navigate a religious landscape that has shifted ever since, and how they devise new forms of spiritual practice. As we discuss in this episode, the experiences of young Zimbabweans in this regard are instructive for people in the global North, especially with respect to how we relate to our ancestors, meaning in life, and cultural power. As the systems of value that made sense of life after World War II come unstuck, a rift is growing between older, more traditional generations, and younger generations who yearn for a different world. There is much that we can learn from Anthropology with respect to navigating this mileau, and Raffaella distils some of this wisdom in conversation with regular host Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick.   

Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that income is derived from labour or capital. The implications of compositional inequality for political economy are significant. What else is new is trends in global capitalism, especially the rise of China's middle class, the advent of artificial intelligence, superannuation funds and real estate assets making middle class boomers the new owners of the means of production, and the reluctance of states to tax inefficiently.  Marco's personal website with all his publications: https://www.mranaldi.com/A brief explainer of compositional inequality: https://www.mranaldi.com/iciTony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done, Harvard University Press: https://www.tony-atkinson.com/new-book-inequality-what-can-be-done/Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W. W. Norton: https://wwnorton.com/books/the-price-of-inequality/Heather Boushey's Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Harvard University Press: https://equitablegrowth.org/unbound-how-inequality-constricts-our-economy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/ Francois Bourguignon's The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160528/the-globalization-of-inequality A taste of the content in The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything, by Christopher Snowden:https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/Political economists from Goldsmith's London on the domestic regime (i.e. the low interest rate coalition between home owners and hedge funds): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-covid-19-revealed-the-politics-of-our-economy/ 

Workplace wellbeing kicked off in Silicon valley with ping pong tables, bean bags, and on 'campus' Michellin star restaurants. With Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. raking in the dollars, it wasn't long before other companies were exploring the theme themselves. Some of the outcomes seem sinister: employers encouraging you to see the firm as your family, your work as making a difference to the world, and you mental health as something to make resilient, but mostly so that they can squeeze more productivity out of you. Deeper issues like autonomy, culture, and relationships seem missing from the rhetoric. But not from the scholarship! In th bumper 90-minute episode, regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick is joined by Nina Jordan from Cambridge University and Cherise Regier and Will Fleming from Oxford University to discuss the latest research on workplace wellbeing, from the 4-day work week to worker voice and industrial relations policy. We even discuss the prospects for workplace wellbeing under capitalism. Cherise's personal webpage: https://www.spi.ox.ac.uk/people/cherise-regierWill's personal webpage: https://wellbeing.hmc.ox.ac.uk/people/will-flemingNina's personal webpage: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/person/nina-jorden/Nikolova, M. and Cnossen, F. (2020). What makes work meaningful and why economists should care about it. Labour Economics. https://docs.iza.org/dp13112.pdfBudd, John, W. (2011). The Thought of Work. Cornell University Press: https://www.amazon.com/Thought-Work-Cornell-Paperbacks/dp/0801477611Sharif, M. A., Mogliner, C., and Herschfield, H. E. (2021). Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspp0000391.pdfOECD (2013). Guidelines on measuring subjective wellbeing. https://www.oecd.org/wise/oecd-guidelines-on-measuring-subjective-well-being-9789264191655-en.htmFabian, M. (2022). A theory of subjective wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-theory-of-subjective-wellbeing-9780197635261?cc=gb&lang=en&Alexandrova, A. (2017). A philosophy for the science of wellbeing. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-philosophy-for-the-science-of-well-being-9780199300518?cc=gb&lang=en&Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thevenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125169/on-justificationArgument that capitalism is about shifting returns to production towards capital: https://markfabian.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-is-capitalism.html

Have you heard of the Panama papers? A giant leak of 11.5 million legal and financial documents exposing a vast system of secretive offshore companies enabling corruption, tax avoidance, and other forms of wrongdoing? Well that system and how to clean it up is what this episode is about. Regular host Dr Mark Fabian is joined by Dr Matthew Colin, Senior Researcher at the EU tax observatory and one of the most innovative scholars working on elicit finance and how to combat it. The conversation begins with development economics and the tendency for corrupt officials to move their ill gotten gains offshore. It moves from there to London, notorious site of money laundering through real estate investment, to explore recent efforts to combat elicit finance by creating a public ownership registry. Where does the conversation end? With solutions, but you'll have to listen to learn more about them. Matt's website: https://sites.google.com/view/mattcollin/homeThe Panama papers: https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/The end of Londongrad? The impact of beneficial ownership transparency on offshore investment in UK property. https://www.dropbox.com/s/zzoh2ye2aem47cr/uk_bo_main.pdf?dl=0 Jason Sharman's publications (natural experiments of willingness to engage with dodgy clients by banks): https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-jason-sharman 

Before there was the COVID-19 virus there was the 'Woke' mind virus, or at least that's how some reactionary commentators in the US refer to a cluster of strongly progressive cultural tropes, including emphasising racial and gender identity, prioritising equality of outcomes over equality of treatment, and being mindful of language that can be potentially harmful. A woke wave has passed through the culture in the past decade, exploding especially on some university campuses and nowadays reaching into workplaces as gen Z graduates into employment. It's extremes were characterised by cancel culture - an authoritarian tendency to shut down people with opposing views. Freedom loving liberals everywhere were aghast, but not all of them are now similarly aghast at outright authoritarian efforts by Republican-controlled  legislatures in the United States to ban elements of the Woke agenda. These are heady times. Here to chill things out a bit is Rod Graham, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Rod argues that the woke movement is really just generational change. Where 20th century generations prioritised survival, materialism, efficiency, and equal treatment of competitors in the labour market, today's youth place a greater emphasis on self-actualisation, identity, and equality. The implications are far ranging. Rod's professional page: https://www.odu.edu/directory/roderick-grahamRod's twitter thread that inspired this conversation: https://twitter.com/roderickgraham/status/1625237234483089408Inglehart and Welzel on survival vs self-actualisation values:https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings

One of the oldest and most famous questions in the social sciences is the debate over nature vs nurture in determining characteristics of the individual. Transcending this focus on the micro is a new field within social-psychology sometimes called social-ecological psychology, which explores how psychology brings about societal conditions and vice versa. Research in this vein has become popular as western psychologists have realised how distorted their view is by their tendency to only sample 'WEIRD' subjects - western, education, industrialised, rich, and democratic. Joseph Heinrich has attempted to chart the history of WEIRD societal psychology in his opus 'The WEIRDEST People in the World', but enormous amounts of research remains to be done.  Season 4 of ePODstemology kicks of Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington of the London School of Economics, one of the early career researchers operating at the forefront of this area of research. She was recently tenured as Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Jennifer is an expert in social dominance theory in particular and her research has appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Social Sciences,  and Evolution and Human Behaviour, among other leading journals. Tune in to learn more!Jennifer's website:http://www.jennifersheehyskeffington.com/Taking context seriously in The Psychologist:https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/taking-context-seriouslyJosef Roundtree Foundation article on how poverty affects decision making:https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/how-poverty-affects-peoples-decision-making-processes

Recent political cycles across the OECD have seen the ‘revenge of places that don’t matter’. These ‘left behind places’, where economic prosperity has withered and culture decayed, have made their misery known electorally. The economic consequences, notably assaults on trade and globalism, and the human misery obvious in things like deaths of despair from suicide and opioid overdoses, have provoked a flurry of activity concerned with how to revive left behind places and dampen their rage. A large part of this agenda is localism: a combination of place-based policy, participatory governance, and community initiatives aimed at fostering not just economic, cultural, and political revival, but also social capital and ’pride in place’. How effective is this agenda likely to be, and how should we even conceptualise its effectiveness? Is economic growth the goal, or something more complex? To think through these issues, ePODstemology welcomes Jack Shaw, senior account manager for the London Progression Collaboration, affiliate researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge University, and local government member for Barking and Dagenham in London. Jack is in the thick of the localism debate in the UK, where the government has recently released a whitepaper on ‘levelling up’ that aims to redress left behind places, in large part through localism initiatives and the devolution of decision making powers from the centre to local governments. Will it work or is it all bluster? Tune in to find out.   Follow Jack on twitter! @JackShawLPChttps://www.ippr.org/about/people/staff/jack-shaw Levelling up whitepaper: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9463/#:~:text=of%20his%20Government.-,Levelling%20up%20white%20paper,social%20disparities%20across%20the%20UK. Bennett Institute materials on localism, place, levelling up, community infrastructure, etc.https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/place/ Rodriguez Pose on the revenge of places that don’t matter: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/85888/1/Rodriguez-Pose_Revenge%20of%20Places.pdf Torsten Bell on low growth and productivity in the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/10/why-be-a-poor-version-of-germany-instead-of-doing-what-we-do-best Bennett Institute outputs on productivity in the UK: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/productivity/ The Economist on the cultural transition from Billy Elliot to Everyone is talking about Jamie: https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/04/28/in-britain-internal-migration-is-out-of-favour Ron Martin and Peter Tyler on how the levelling up agenda is underfunded (and other gems): https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/levelling-up-left-behind-places/  Eric Kleinenberg on urban farms and other initiatives in Palaces for the People: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557044/palaces-for-the-people-by-eric-klinenberg/ Diane Bolet on the link between community pub closures an

What is the future of the factory in economic development? That is the subject of a forthcoming book by this episode’s guest, Dr Jostein Hauge from the University of Cambridge. Numerous scholars, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik arguably most prominent among them, have noted that industrialisation among contemporary developing countries is more muted than it was for the Asian Tiger economies and other nations that rose in the second half of the 20th century. In place of industrialisation and associated expansions in manufacturing capacity, we see a relatively larger role played by the services sector, both in terms of relatively high-end services like software development, copy editing, and call centres, and smaller, often informal operations like kiosks, airtasker, and tourism. What are the implications of this for development policy and the potential of economic growth to reduce poverty? Service-sector tasks are typically more capital and less labour-intensive than manufacturing, which limits their ability to provide jobs and wages. But they are also higher value-added tasks, which allows them to contribute substantially to wealth generation. Some nations, notably India, are betting that they can largely skip industrialisation and jump straight to services. How might that play out? Tune in to find out. https://www.josteinhauge.com/about Hauge, J. (2020). Industrial policy in an era of global value chains: Towards a developmentalist framework drawing on the industrialisation experiences of South Korea and Taiwan. The World Economy, vol. 43, pp. 2070–2092.  DOI: 10.1111/twec.12922 Rodrik, D. (2014). Are services the new manufactures? Project Syndicate: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/are-services-the-new-manufactures-by-dani-rodrik-2014-10 On reciprocal control mechanisms—Alice Amsden (2001). The Rise of “The Rest”: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies. Oxford University Press. Benjamin Selwyn (2018). Poverty chain and global capitalism. Competition and Change, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 71–97. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1024529418809067 Jason Hickel in The Guardian on the feasibility of a global minimum wage: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/13/global-minimum-wage-ask-an-expert Norwegian show where fashion bloggers are sent to work in sweatshops: https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/norwegian-reality-show-sends-fashion-bloggers-to-work-in-cambodian-sweatshop-20150123-12whuz.html Kevin Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright (2021). The Case for a New Bretton-Woods. Polity Press. https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Case+for+a+New+Bretton+Woods-p-9781509546541    

Mark is joined by Heather Browning from the London School of Economics and Walter Veit from the University of Sydney who their ideas regarding the nature of consciousness, what we can learn about consciousness from animal studies, and the implications for animal welfare. Should we think of consciousness as some special property unique to human minds, or is it in fact merely a particular high degree of sentience? If it's the later, then cephalopods seem curious, honeybees are capable of solving complex optimisation problems, and fish have split brains similar to those of conscious humans whose left and right hemispheres have been split by accident. Should we then conclude that are animals are conscious, albeit not in the same way as humans? What are the implications of this for ethical practice with animals in research, pets, and zoos? Heather was a zookeeper before she was a philosopher and bring a practical perspective to these issues. Heather, Walter, and Mark share a wide-ranging conversation taking in bioethics, cognitive science, and what the philosophy of mind can learn from biology. Enjoy!Heather’s website: https://www.heatherbrowning.net/ Walter’s website: https://walterveit.com/ Heather’s PhD thesis: 41. Browning, H. (2020).  If I Could Talk to the Animals: Measuring Subjective Animal Welfare. PhD Thesis (Australian National University). https://doi.org/10.25911/5f1572fb1b5be [Download] Walter’s forthcoming book: Veit, W. (Manuscript). A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Manuscript in preparation.Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Other minds: The octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. William Collins.  The hard and soft problem of consciousness: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness,with%20phenomenal%20qualities%20or%20qualia). Philosophical zombies: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 435–450. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf  Dan Dennett against the hard problem as special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSaEjLZIDqc Patricia Churchland against the hard problem as special:  https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/ChurchlandTheHornswoggleProblem1996.pdf de Haan, E. et al. (2020). Split brain: What we know now and why this is important for understanding consciousness. Neuropsychology Review, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 224–233. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-020-09439-3 Hofstadter, D. and Dennett, D. (2001). The mind’s I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul. Basic Books. Robot wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psY_3k0uiRI Edelman, D. and Seth, A. (2009). Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach. Trends in Neuroscience, vol

The advancement of health care is one of the hallmarks of development and a central objective of not for profit, public, and private organisations, especially in the developing countries of Africa. Wiktoria Tafesse is an early career researcher working on a range of topics at the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics. She joins ePODstemology’s regular host Dr Mark Fabian to discuss the role health plays in development, the idiosyncratic features of developing countries with respect to health care provision, how we can improve outcomes in the space, and what to expect from the 10 years of activity and research.  Show notesWiktoria’s academic website: https://www.york.ac.uk/che/staff/research/wiktoria-tafesse/De Silva-Sanigorski, A. et al. (2010). Reducing obesity in early childhood: Results from Romp and Chomp, an Australia community-wide intervention program. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 91, no. 4, pp. 831–840 Kasman, M. et al. (2019). Activating a community: An agent-based model of Romp and Chomp, a whole-of-community childhood obesity intervention. Obesity, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 1494-1502. Miguel, E. and Kremer, M. (2003). Networks, social learning, and technology adoption: The case of deworming drugs in Kenya. Working paper: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/e271_f03/miguel.pdf  Tafesse, W. (2022). The effect of universal salt iodization on cognitive test scores in rural India. World Development, vol. 152, e105796Tafesse, W. et al. (2019) The effect of government contracting with faith-based health care providers in Malawi. CHE Research Paper; No. 167.Tafesse, W. and Chalkley, M. (2021). Faith-based provision of sexual and reproductive healthcare in Malawi. Social Science and Medicine, vol. 282, e113997 Kwan et al. (2019). Use of standardised patients for health care quality research in low and middle income countries. BMJ Global Health, vol. 4:e001669. https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/5/e001669.abstract Fitzpatrick, A. (2022). The impact of public health sector stockouts on private sector prices and access to health care: Evidence from the anti-malarial drug market. Health Economics, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 102544Banerjee, A. et al. (2020) The Market for Healthcare in Low Income Countries. Harvard Business School Working Paper, December 2020. Fleming et al. (2016). Health-care availability, preference, and distance for women in urban Bo, Sierra Leone. International Journal of Public Health, vol. 61, pp. 1079–1088   

Through most of human history, we needed more food, cheaper food, and easier to access food, so we built economic systems that could deliver mountains of the stuff. Now that was a noble effort at the time, but we didn’t think much about waste, and so huge quantities of food today ends up in landfill where it turns to greenhouse gases, or rots on the vine, squandering the resources we used to produce it. Much of our food is also of dubious nutritional quality but can meet our demands for supposedly ‘fresh’ produce in all seasons by surviving long supply chains of freezer ships, freezer trucks, and freezer supermarkets. All that is carbon intensive. What if we could more efficiently utilise the food system we already have to produce higher quality food less wastefully? A win for our waistlines, a win for our wallets, and a win for the planet. To guide us through the latest research on food waste, ePODstemology’s guest this episode is Dr Christian Reynolds, Senior Lecturer in Food Policy at City University London. Dr Reynolds is an economist by training, but like many early career researchers is thoroughly interdisciplinary in his work, operating out of the school of health and psychological sciences. Christian’s work has appeared in numerous top journals including Food Policy, The Lancet, Ecological Economics, and Waste Management. He talks us through the research issues in food waste management, what food waste is, what drives it, and what we can do about it. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Christian’s Academic page: https://www.city.ac.uk/about/people/academics/christian-reynolds Gavin Stewart at University of Newcastle doing evidence synthesis: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/nes/people/profile/gavinstewart.html University of Aberdeen Rowitt Institute for Nutrition Science: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/rowett/ Wansink, B., & van Ittersum, K. (2013). Portion size me: Plate-size induced consumption norms and win-win solutions for reducing food intake and waste. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 19(4), 320–332. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035053World Resources Institute on food loss and climate change: https://www.wri.org/insights/whats-food-loss-and-waste-got-do-climate-change-lot-actually EAT Lancet report on a scientifically-informed healthy and sustainable diet: https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/ Dr Megan Blake at University of Sheffield who works on food security and food justice: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/people/academic-staff/megan-blake FareShare: https://fareshare.org.uk/ HelloFresh meal boxes: https://www.hellofresh.com.au/ Riverford organic, sustainable, smallholder produce boxes: https://www.riverford.co.uk/ Oddbox wonky fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/Blue Apron ready meals: https://www.blueapron.com/ Chill the fridge out: https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com/article/chill-fridge-out Plastics Pact: https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/the-plastics-pact-network