‘You Can’t Fix Systemic Problems at the Unit Level’
In this installment of In Search of Monsters, a limited series collaboration between QI and Radio Open Source, what we’re talking about is money and power, meaning the political economy we all live in, with some anxiety. Mark Blyth is our authority — professor of political economy at Brown University. He’s revered around here for his mastery of (a) markets and (b) the vernacular that makes money and power a plausible story for the rest of us. Mark brings an understudy this time, our sometime colleague Brendan Greeley, who has just stepped away from finance journalism to pursue his Ph.D. in economics at Princeton. The news, so-called, this Fourth of July week is not encouraging: consumer “sentiment,” according to the Wall Street Journal, is as low as it’s been since the recovery from World War II; the world’s biggest economy is slowing down, inflation spiking to a 40 year peak, interest rates on mortgages heading up, sure to slow construction and home sales.
