Episode · EconTalk · 2024-08-05
Books mentioned on The Ever-Present Challenge of Escaping Poverty (with Noah Smith)
The universe, points out economist Noah Smith, is always trying to kill us, whether through asteroids hurtling through space or our every-few-hours hunger pains. Why, then, should we expect anything but a gravitational pull toward poverty?
Russ Roberts discussed The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich August Hayek and I, Pencil - My Family Tree As Told to Leonard E. Read by Leonard Edward Read.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Use of Knowledge in Society
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich August Hayek is a seminal economic essay that explores how decentralized mechanisms and price systems coordinate dispersed knowledge within a market economy.
Discussed“join the web of interacting human beings called the modern economy, which is sustained mostly through forces that no one controls, the price system that that Leonard Read writes about in I, Pencil or that Hayek writes about in the use of knowledge in society”
Where to get it
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I, Pencil - My Family Tree As Told to Leonard E. Read
Discussed“join the web of interacting human beings called the modern economy, which is sustained mostly through forces that no one controls, the price system that that Leonard Read writes about in I, Pencil or that Hayek writes about in the use of knowledge in society”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (1) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing A Game of Thrones
“The reason you have Game of Thrones type situations with people trying to kill the king all the time is because you're competing for like the one non-poverty position in society.”