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PODCAST

Capitalisn"t

University of Chicago Podcast Network

Is capitalism the engine of destruction or the engine of prosperity? On this podcast we talk about the ways capitalism is—or more often isn’t—working in our world today. Hosted by author and journalist Bethany McLean and world renowned economist Luigi Zingales, we explain how capitalism can go wrong, and what we can do to fix it. Cover photo attributions: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/about/capitalisnt. If you would like to send us feedback, suggestions for guests we should bring

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All Episodes

00:49:31

Can AI Even Be Regulated?, with Sendhil Mullainathan

Capitalisn"t ·

2025/02/13

This week, Elon Musk—amidst his other duties of gutting United States federal government agencies as head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—announced a hostile bid alongside a consortium of buyers to purchase control of OpenAI for $97.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vehemently replied that his company is not for sale.The artificial intelligence landscape is shifting rapidly. The week prior, American tech stocks plummeted in response to claims from Chinese company DeepSeek AI that

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00:45:08

Why This Nobel Economist Thinks Bitcoin Is Going to...

Capitalisn"t ·

2025/01/30

In December 2024, Bitcoin, one of the earliest cryptocurrencies and undoubtedly the most famous, hit $2 trillion in market capitalization, bigger than Tesla, Meta, and Saudi Aramco. In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist and Chicago Booth finance professor Eugene Fama—widely considered the “Father of Modern Finance”—predicts it will go to zero within ten years.Legendary investor Ray Dalio called crypto a bubble a decade ago; now, he calls it “one hell of an invention.” Larry Fink of

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00:47:05

Should Companies Have A Social Responsibility To Be...

Capitalisn"t ·

2025/01/16

The public often imagines corporations as self-contained actors that provide a set of goods and services to consumers. Underpinning this image have been ideas of ownership, rights to capital and intellectual property, and corporate responsibility to stakeholders including consumers, workers, and shareholders. But what if almost everything we are told about the essence of the firm is wrong? So writes Sir John Kay, a British economist, corporate director, and longstanding fellow of St John’s College

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00:49:56

How Big Money Changed The Democratic Game, with...

Capitalisn"t ·

2025/01/02

Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and the co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of several bestselling books, including How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Ziblatt writes from the position that what defines strong democracies is free and fair competition for power, inclusive participation, and a package of civil liberties that make those first two conditions possible.2024 saw voters in more than 60 countries

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00:49:08

America’s Addiction to Easy Money, with Ruchir Sharma

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/12/19

Are bailouts the new “trickle-down” economics? Have government debt and deficits caused capitalism’s collapse—thus ending the American Dream?Ruchir Sharma is a well-known columnist for the Financial Times, the author of bestselling books Breakout Nations and The Rise and Fall of Nations, and an investment banker who worked as Morgan Stanley’s head of emerging markets for 25 years. His new book, What Went Wrong With Capitalism, traces the roots of current disaffection with our capitalist economy to

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00:47:57

The Argentinian DOGE

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/12/05

A new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Its goals include administrative reductions, cost savings, regulatory cutbacks, and reducing federal spending by nearly $2 trillion. President-elect Donald Trump has called DOGE the "Manhattan Project of our time," and has indicated that DOGE will reduce regulatory burdens to firms and individuals. But is the act of cutting rules and regulations the same as cutting spending? Does it unleash the economy

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00:45:59

The Fertility Crisis: Capitalism's Next Challenge,...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/11/21

For years, the world worried about overpopulation and our capacity to sustain ever-increasing numbers of people. Now, the worry is underpopulation—and recent numbers are stunning. Fertility rate is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime. According to the United Nations, this number is currently 1.64 in the U.S.: If it stays this way, in three generations there will only be half as many young Americans as there are today, holding immigration constant. In China, this

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00:47:01

Visa's Hidden Tax on Americans

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/11/07

While Americans rely on debit transactions for the necessities of life, most are unaware of the networks that drive those transactions, nor are they aware that one company, Visa, has monopolized debit transactions, penalized industry participants that seek to use alternative debit networks, and co-opted innovators, technology companies, and financial institutions to forestall or snuff out threats to Visa's debit network dominance.” So begins the monopolization lawsuit filed on September 24 by the

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00:43:07

How Lobbying Led to Crony Capitalism, with Brody Mullins

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/10/24

As the United States elections draw near, everyone is wondering who will take control of Washington next. In this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Brody Mullins reveals how the real winner will be neither Democrats nor Republicans. Rather, it will be the lobbyists.Mullins is the co-author (along with his brother Luke, also an investigative reporter) of The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. Brody joins Bethany and Luigi to

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00:37:54

Mailbag: UBI, AI, and Does Luigi Believe in "Free Time"?

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/10/10

You asked and we answered: Over the last year, we have solicited listeners’ questions via voicemail, email, and social media. In this episode, our producer, Matt, turns the tables on Bethany and Luigi and puts them in the hot seat to answer your burning questions in an Ask Me Anything “AMA” format.How do Bethany and Luigi actually define capitalism? Does universal basic income disincentivize work? Does the adoption of artificial intelligence mean we need to rethink economics? What would Bethany and

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00:40:49

Harris vs. Trump: Economics Beyond The "Vibes"

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/10/03

Last week, United States presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump delivered hour-long speeches outlining their economic policies for the country if they win in November. This week on a special episode of Capitalisn’t, Bethany and Luigi weigh in on the candidates’ economic proposals. What makes this discussion particularly urgent is that neither candidate is espousing a traditional Republican or Democratic platform. Further, despite the length of their respective speeches, there were

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00:45:24

Can Democracy Coexist With Big Tech? with Marietje...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/09/26

International technology policy expert, Stanford University academic, and former European parliamentarian Marietje Schaake writes in her new book that a “Tech Coup” is happening in democratic societies and fast approaching the point of no return. Both Big Tech and smaller companies are participating in it, through the provision of spyware, microchips, facial recognition, and other technologies that erode privacy, speech, and other human rights. These technologies shift power to the tech companies at

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00:46:58

Universities and Politics: Should They Mix? with...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/09/12

America’s universities have powered its economy by developing an educated workforce and producing transformative technology, including the internet and vaccines. They were seen as vehicles for social mobility; when veterans returned home from World War II, the newly enacted G.I. Bill compensated millions with paid college and vocational school tuition. However, universities today are bloated and expensive, losing the public's trust, and have become a battleground for controversial culture wars

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00:51:17

Raj Chetty's Surprising New Insights On How Children...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/08/29

Is race a more consequential determinant of social mobility than class? How and under what circumstances do Americans move up the economic ladder?For years, Harvard economist Raj Chetty has leveraged big data to answer these questions. In his recent paper, Chetty and his team show that Black millennials born to low-income parents have more quickly risen up the economic ladder than previous Black generations, whereas their white counterparts have fared worse than previous low-income white

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00:51:12

The End of Google As We Know It?

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/08/15

This week we're taking a quick summer break, but in the meantime, we wanted to re-share a special episode that is relevant in the news again. With the recent federal court ruling that Google engaged in illegal monopolization of internet searches, we thought it would be a great opportunity to share our episode with lawyer Dina Srinivasan. She's an expert in the field of competition policy and a fellow with the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University. Google is no stranger to lawsuits and has

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00:45:04

Dani Rodrik on the New Economics of Industrial Policy

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/08/01

Harvard professor of international political economy Dani Rodrik has long been skeptical of what he calls "hyperglobalization," or an advanced level of interconnectedness between countries and their economies. He first introduced his theory of the "globalization trilemma" in the late 1990s, which states that no country can simultaneously support democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration.At the time when he proposed his trilemma, Rodrik was considered an outcast. However,

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00:48:47

The Economic Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood, with...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/07/18

In one of this year's bestselling books, "The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness," New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that today's childhoods spent under the influence of smartphones and overprotective parenting has led to the reported explosion in cases of teenage anxiety and depression. He calls this process a "three-act play": the diminishment of trust in our communities, the loss of a play-based childhood,

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00:36:06

Immigration in America: Data and Myths, Revisited...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/07/04

If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration?In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and

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00:49:28

Joseph Stiglitz's Vision of a New Progressive Capitalism

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/06/20

In the last 60 years, few economists have contributed more to exposing the failures of capitalism than Joseph Stiglitz. Formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, Stiglitz won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work showing that the possibility of having different information can lead to inefficient market outcomes.On this episode of Capitalisn't, Stiglitz joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his latest

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00:48:21

Capitalism-Was: What Happened to the American Dream?...

Capitalisn"t ·

2024/06/06

Is the famed American Dream still attainable for the immigrants and working class of today? What made America the land of opportunity — and if it isn't the same anymore, what happened to it?Joining co-hosts Bethany and Luigi to discuss these questions is David Leonhardt, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "Ours Was the Shining Future." In his book, Leonhardt describes what he calls today's "rough-and-tumble" capitalism and distinguishes its laissez-faire characteristics from a more

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223 results

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