Pop-Up Economics – new radio series
I’m delighted to announce the arrival of “Pop Up Economics”, my new radio series for the BBC. I’m proud of it and I think my producers have made it sound exciting and very different.
The show is all about storytelling – and the stories are of remarkable lives or surprising ideas in economics. We’ll learn about the impromptu engineering genius Bill Phillips, the cold war guru Thomas Schelling, and life-saving market designer Al Roth. We’ll discover how the geeks took over poker, and what happened to them.
And the series begins with the innovation lessons from the London Olympics – or as we’ve called it, “Hot Pants vs. the Knockout Mouse”.
Here’s the free podcast page (or search on iTunes) and here is the series homepage. Please spread the word. First broadcast is tonight, 8.45pm GMT, BBC Radio 4.
3 Comments
Mark Burrough says:
Well done Tim, a really inspiring story well told.
16th of January, 2013Alice says:
Just listened to your show and thought it was brilliant. As a young economist myself I would be interested to know where you think marginal gains would particularly help the government?
16th of January, 2013Jeremy Green says:
I loved your talk on Pop-Up Economics this evening.Except for one thing: the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is not the risk-taking institution that you suggest – by a long chalk. They usually fund very well-established scientists (e.g. Capecchi) who have often got there through the incremental improvements that you described – i.e. via the NIH. (And by the way, high citation is often a mark of important incremental advancement while revolutionary papers often don’t get cited because very quickly they are copied and emulated and become general knowledge not requiring citation.)
16th of January, 2013Unlike most scientists in the U.S. and U.K. I have run labs on both sides of the Atlantic and I can say confidently that the U.K. funding system is much less conservative that the U.S. system. Our science is probably the most productive in the world. Interestingly, we’re not so good at commercialisation because that needs guess what: incremental improvements…
P.S. “Productivity” is a much-abused word in science: the denominator is not money but name. Odd and wrong.