Economics

Ending the New Cold War w/ Jake Werner

04 Oct 2024
Featuring Jake Werner on how the US and China entered into a New Cold War and why the whole world urgently needs an alternative international order that fosters great power cooperation.

Macrodose! The Future of Global Capitalism

02 Aug 2024
Dan just did a live Dig in London with Jeremy Corbyn and Laleh Khalili. It was part of a podcast doubleheader that included this recording of the economics podcast Macrodose featuring Asad Rehman, James Meadway,...

Bidenomics w/ Daniela Gabor, Ted Fertik, & Tim Sahay

21 Jul 2023
Featuring Daniela Gabor, Ted Fertik, and Tim Sahay on Bidenomics. We define and debate the new American industrial policy, the energy transition, the New Cold War with China—and more.

Transcript: Inflation Is About Class Struggle (with Tim Barker)

11 Jan 2023
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/inflation-class-struggle-economic-policy-federal-reserve-the-dig

The Capitalist Conjuncture w/ Tim Barker

31 Dec 2022
Featuring historian Tim Barker on monetary politics, inflation, and the general capitalist conjuncture. The second of a two-part interview.

Monetary Politics w/ Tim Barker

22 Dec 2022
Featuring historian Tim Barker on the state of monetary politics amid the current fight over inflation.

Transcript: The Impossible Escape From the European Union (with Anton Jäger and Dominik Leusder)

14 Dec 2022
Read the transcript of our interview with Anton Jäger and Dominik Leusder of Eurotrash podcast: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/european-union-history-eurozone-politics

Founding Finance with William Hogeland

02 Dec 2022
Astra Taylor interviews William Hogeland on his book Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation. Hogeland recovers a fascinating crop of mostly-forgotten rebels, the movements they led, and their...

Europe w/ Anton Jäger & Dominik Leusder

10 Oct 2022
Featuring Anton Jäger and Dominik Leusder on Europe and the European Union from the crises of social democratic welfare states in the 1970s and 80s, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, through the eurozone crisis, to...

Transcript: Clash of Empires w/ Ho-fung Hung

17 Aug 2022
Transcript of the second part of Dan’s two part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political and economic history: the 2008 financial crisis, how China’s response deepened global and domestic economic imbalances and (alongside...

Center and Periphery w/ Margarita Fajardo

21 May 2022
Historian Margarita Fajardo on her book The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era. Fajardo discusses the Latin American economists at the Economic Commission for...

Bonds of Inequality w/ Destin Jenkins

21 Apr 2022
Destin Jenkins on his book The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City, which makes a powerful argument about how the ubiquitous and in many ways invisible dependence of American cities...

Clash of Empires w/ Ho-fung Hung

23 Mar 2022
The second of our two-part interview with sociologist Ho-fung Hung on Chinese political and economic history. This episode covers the 2008 financial crisis, how China’s response deepened global and domestic economic imbalances and (alongside the...

War w/ Sophie Pinkham and Nick Mulder

10 Mar 2022
Sophie Pinkham and Nick Mulder on the war, its origins, how it’s being experienced by Ukrainians, Russians, Europeans, and Americans—and also its geopolitical and global economic ramifications, particularly sanctions.

Financial Empire w/ Daniela Gabor & Ndongo Samba Sylla

04 Feb 2022
Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today’s Wall Street...

Inflation Politics with Tim Barker

28 Jul 2021
Inflation is once again at the center of political debate. Dan interviews Tim Barker to put monetary policy in its historical and class war context.

Family Values with Melinda Cooper

27 Dec 2020
From The Dig archives: Dan interviews Melinda Cooper about her book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which makes the case that neoliberalism and social conservatism have been consistent collaborators in creating...

Yanis Varoufakis on the Economic Situation

23 Aug 2020
Dan’s recent live event with Yanis Varoufakis on how 2020 revealed that 2008 had changed capitalism forever.

Coronavirus Economics with Grace Blakeley

27 Mar 2020
Dan interviews Marxist economist Grace Blakeley on coronavirus economics.

Family Values with Melinda Cooper

04 Jan 2019
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Crashed with Adam Tooze

18 Dec 2018
Historian Adam Tooze, the author of Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, explains how crisis in an unprecedentedly powerful and interconnected global banking system coursed through American homes and European sovereign...

Haddad and Varoufakis Fighting Right-Wing Populism

04 Dec 2018
On Saturday, Dan was in New York to interview Fernando Haddad and Yanis Varoufakis. Haddad is the former Workers Party mayor of São Paulo who recently lost Brazil’s presidential election to far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro....

The Color of Economic Anxiety

28 Oct 2018
Recently, Dan spoke to Nikhil Pal Singh about the unfortunate and never-ending debate over whether it was economics or racism that got Trump elected. This is a sequel to that discussion: because what Malaika Jabali...

Economics Discounting Climate Catastrophe. REPOSTED.

24 Oct 2018
CORRECT EPISODE NOW POSTED.Today’s episode is on the alarming new report out from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and how it is that William Nordhaus—an economist whose work is dedicated to arguing...

The Problem with the Problem with Appalachia

19 Sep 2018
For many, conservatives and liberals alike, Appalachia provides a skeleton key for interpreting changes in American politics that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend. But the way conservatives and liberals talk about Appalachia tells us...

Beyond Economism with Nancy Fraser

12 Sep 2018
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Matt Bruenig Spreads the Wealth Around

09 Sep 2018
What socialism should offer is freedom by way of power and democratic control over our polity and economy—and thus over our future as a society. Matt Bruenig has one  proposal out at his People’s Policy...

Race or Class? Bad Question. With Nikhil Pal Singh.

05 Sep 2018
Nikhil Pal Singh on the unfortunate obsession shared by certain pundits, journalists and social scientists: definitively proving that Trump won because of racism, and racism alone. What drives so many people to dedicate so much...

David Harvey on Capital

20 Jun 2018
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Democracy in Chains with Nancy MacLean

05 Jun 2018
For libertarians, liberty means something different. It’s about liberty for property owners. And in their quest to preserve that absolute freedom for the ownership class—whether their assets be human slaves, factories or extractive industries—democracy must...

Petro-Imperialism with Timothy Mitchell Part II

13 Apr 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the second of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In part 1,...

Petro-Capitalism with Timothy Mitchell Part I

10 Apr 2018
Historian and political theorist Timothy Mitchell joins Dan for the first of a two-part interview on his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, published in 2011 by Verso. In this first episode,...

Student-Debt Capitalism

03 Apr 2018
It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger...

Frances Fox Piven: Movements Still Matter

07 Feb 2018
Four decades ago, Frances Fox Piven and her husband Richard Cloward published Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, a classic, clear-eyed analysis of just what the title suggests. Piven, a legendary scholar...

Baltimore’s Crisis Continues with Lester Spence

03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...

The Militant 70s Labor Movement You Never Heard of with Lane Windham

24 Jan 2018
Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack...

A New Poor People’s Campaign with Nijmie Dzurinko

16 Jan 2018
Martin Luther King Jr. launched the Poor People’s Campaign alongside other organizers shortly before he was assassinated 50 years ago. Today, organizers nationwide are relaunching that movement as The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call...

The Destruction of Black Wealth with Ryan Cooper

08 Dec 2017
Journalist @ryanlcooper talks about the new paper he wrote with @MattBruenig, founder of the @PplPolicyProj, a new left-wing think tank founded by Bruenig and funded by the people. “Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the...

Clintonism's Dreadful Legacy with Robert Reich

01 Dec 2017
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s Labor Secretary, explains one of Clintonism’s most dreadful results: President Trump. The new film available on Netflix, is Reich’s quasi-autobiographical documentary about the origins of contemporary political-economic inequality. The premise that...

A Monstrous Tax Plan That Might Fail with Arthur Delaney

24 Nov 2017
The GOP tax plan is a monstrous giveaway to corporate America but it might not pass thanks to the same contradictions within the Republican coalition that repeatedly sunk efforts to repeal Obamacare, as journalist @ArthurDelaneyHP...

Policing for the Market with Brenden Beck

03 Nov 2017
Why have the size of American police departments grown so dramatically in recent decades, even as crime rates have fallen? One factor may have been the growing centrality of real estate for urban economies, according...

Marisol LeBrón & Brandy Jensen: Puerto Rico, Austerian Disaster; Roy Moore, Perfect Republican

29 Sep 2017
Today’s Diglet is not really diminutive at all. Dan has two interviews with two separate guests because too much has happened over the past few weeks and there are too many smart people to analyze...

David Dayen: Consider the Vampire Squid

06 Jun 2017
Nothing that so exposes Donald Trump as a snake oil salesman as the fact that he ran a campaign pitched at white working-class anger toward so-called globalism and then stacked his administration with representatives from...

Transcript: Sarah Jones: What's the Matter with Appalachia? Capitalism

16 May 2017
What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns,...

Sarah Jones: What's the Matter with Appalachia? Capitalism

16 May 2017
What’s the matter with Appalachia? Many liberal elites think they know the answer. Since Trump’s campaign first took off, the region has become a symbol of all that is wrong with Red State America: guns,...

Dean Baker on Trump's Tax Plan for the Rich

04 May 2017
Why do Republicans only seem to care about deficits and debt when they’re trying to cut social welfare programs? Dan’s guest for this special episode is Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and...

Is Neoliberalism Over? With Nicole Aschoff

11 Apr 2017
Trump’s oligarchic regime is an extreme version of the imperial and economic vision that has guided presidents of both major parties. But the popularity of Trump’s chauvinist, xenophobic appeal points to a major crisis in...

Matt Bruenig on Why Welfare is Great and Why We Need More

04 Apr 2017
Medicaid expansion saved Obamacare from repeal. There’s a lot to hate about Obamacare, but that expansion did something very good on a very large scale — and it made just enough Republicans very nervous about...

Mark Blyth: How Austerity Brought Us Donald Trump​

14 Feb 2017
Mark Blyth wasn’t surprised by the rise of Donald Trump, nor Brexit, nor the crises spreading across Europe. He actually predicted them all.