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Cover of The Great Debates: Ten Controversies in Economic Policy
The Great Debates: Ten Controversies in Economic Policy
In times of upheaval, who benefits—and who pays the price?
Completed · 72 episodes
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Audio in Chinese
Yang Zhao: Liang Jie's Great Questions Cannot Have a Single Authoritative Answer Why Is It So Hard to Evaluate an Economic Policy? Bonus: This Financial-Regulation Reform Is Far from the Finish Line 01. Why Does Usury Persist despite Every Ban? Interest from Ancient Rome to the Middle Ages 02. Is Usury Evil? Changing Ideas and Institutions around High-Interest Lending 03. Will Our Bank Deposits Keep Shrinking? The Meaning and Methods of Negative Interest Rates 04. Quiet but Powerful: Comparing Chinese and US Monetary Policy Bonus: Mortgage Rates Are Falling—Should You Repay Early? A Basic Framework for Financial Analysis Bonus: Mobile Payments Are So Convenient—Can We Abolish Cash? Digital Currency and Banknotes 05. Should Grain Be Freely Imported and Exported? The Rise and Repeal of Britain's Corn Laws 06. From Control to Freedom: The Flour War and French Free-Trade Thought 07. Can Cutting Wages Benefit Society? The Malthus–Ricardo Debate 08. Why Do People Buy More When Some Goods Cost More? The Irish Famine Q&A: Why Has China Never Issued a 500-Yuan Banknote? Bonus: How Did the Qianlong Emperor Provide Famine Relief? Bonus: How Hard Is It to Put a Relief Plan into Practice? 09. Protective Tariffs or Free Trade? Friedrich List's Economic Thought 10. Did High Tariffs Protect the Developing United States? Early American Economic Policy 11. Does Work Relief Really Work? State Intervention in India Bonus: Economist and Pianist—Where the Two Liszts Meet 12. What Exactly Is Being “Fought” in a Trade War? 13. Why Does a Pancake Stall Raise Prices When Pork Gets Dearer? Foundations of the Free Market 14. Is an Oven Part's Value Determined by How Much People Like Bread? The Austrian Defense of Free Markets 15. Should Government Simply Wait through an Economic Crisis? Mises and Hayek 16. Can a Planned Economy Allocate Resources Optimally? The Mises–Lange Socialist Calculation Debate Bonus: What Is the Ideal System for Choosing University Majors? Bonus: Can Computers Make a Planned Economy Possible in the Age of Big Data? 17. Is Marxism Our Century's Greatest Fantasy? Controversies after Marx 18. Did Marx Make a “Crude Logical Error”? The Transformation Problem and Revisions to Marxism 19. How Do We Explain the Great Depression? Marxism and Keynesianism 20. The Man Who Ended Marxian Economics: Piero Sraffa and His System Bonus: Did Marxism Reach China before the October Revolution's Guns Were Fired? Q&A: Exploiting a Coffee Machine? Living Labor and Dead Labor Revisited 21. Why Did Sima Qian Write Biographies of Great Merchants? The Western Han Economy 22. A “Brilliant Plan” to Stop Tax Evasion: Sang Hongyang and the Property-Tax Reporting System 23. How Did Emperor Wu Prevent Private Salt Production? The Background to the Discourses on Salt and Iron 24. A Debate Lasting a Thousand Years? The Salt and Iron Conference and Its Legacy Bonus: How Should We View the Suspension of China's Youth Unemployment Statistics? Bonus: Tax Tea Rather Than Land or People? Southeast Asia and the Tea Trade 25. Is Economic Development Linked to Political Stability? The Background to Wang Anshi's Reforms 26. From Refusing a Capital Post to Twice Becoming Chancellor: Wang Anshi's Life and Reforms 27. With So Much Resistance, Why Reform at All? The Real Effects of Wang Anshi's Program Bonus: Did a Chan Master's Teaching Lead Wang Anshi into Public Service and Temple Patronage? 28. Does Wang Anshi Belong in the Confucian Temple? Evaluating the Man and His Reforms Q&A: Why Did Wang Anshi's Reforms Backfire and Fail? Sun Rui × Liang Jie: Was the Northern Song Fiscal System an “Heresy” in Traditional China? Sun Rui × Liang Jie: Were Wang Anshi's Opponents Really Conservative and Incompetent? Bonus: Rich Students Overcompete while Poor Students Give Up? Unintended Effects of the Double-Reduction Policy 29. Governing People and Land: Ming Yellow Registers and Fish-Scale Maps 30. The Amazing Disappearing-Land Trick: How Ming Commoners Evaded Taxes and Labor 31. Greatest Chancellor Ever—or a Petty Man? Zhang Juzheng and His Political Age Bonus: Understanding the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics 32. Combining Every Tax and Service “into One”: The Single-Whip Reform and Its Controversies Bonus: Did Ming Statistical Yearbooks Lie Too? The Huizhou Silk Case Bonus: A Form of Labor Service No Commoner Could Escape? The Art of Being Governed 33. River Shifts and Silt: Pan Jixun's Method of Constricting Water to Flush Sediment 34. How Can a Swollen River under Heaven Be Tamed? Jin Fu's River Control and Corruption 35. Mobilizing at Any Cost: The Ming–Qing Grain-Transport System 36. If River Transport Was So Inconvenient, Why Not Go by Sea? Economics and Politics of Maritime Grain Shipping Cheng Qing × Liang Jie: Everyone Reads Byung-Chul Han, but Few Dare to Become Him Bonus: Is a Census Actually a “Work of Fiction”? Lies in Statistics 37. Ration Coupons, Black Markets, and Letters of Introduction: Rethinking the Planned Economy 38. How Could Irrational Planned Prices Be Changed? The Dual-Track Solution at the Moganshan Conference 39. Could People Endure Rapid Short-Term Inflation? | The Bashan Conference and Price Reform 40. How Did China's Capital Markets Open? Financial Reconstruction and Stock-Market Fever since the 1980s Afterword: Better to Ask Great Questions Than Give Answers Blossoms Shanghai Is a Hit—but Can It Really Be Called “Blossoms”? Tie Mei × Liang Jie (Part 1): Modern Entrepreneur Mu Xiangyue's Economic and Political Influence Tie Mei × Liang Jie (Part 2): Why Does Mainstream Research Study Growth Rather Than Decline? Shen Yuan × Liang Jie: How Does Economics Shape Music? | The Music of Blossoms Shanghai The New Delayed-Retirement Policy: Benefits, Costs, Gains, and Losses Liang Jie: Technology Changes, and We Can Only Adapt | World Book Day Bonus