Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAre Transaction Costs Really Just Human Distance
Season 3 Episode 21
Send us Fan Mail
We connect Adam Smith’s moral psychology to the modern idea of transaction costs and argue that the biggest frictions in markets star…
4 hours ago
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Episode 10: Always Contemporary
Send us Fan Mail
We assess Adam Smith’s enduring ideas—moral authorization of commerce, division of labor, emergent order—and confront where his optim…
1 month ago
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Episode 9: Spending, Taxing, and Debt
Season 3 Episode 24
Send us Fan Mail
We walk through Book Five of The Wealth of Nations to map a state that defends, adjudicates, and builds wisely, then pays for it with…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
Adam Smith Episode 8: A Nation of Shopkeepers
Season 3 Episode 19
Send us Fan Mail
Smith closes Book IV by dismantling mercantilism through the lens of colonial policy, monopoly, and rent seeking, then weighs physioc…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Parts is (Not) Parts: The Life Cycle Problem for Heavy Equipment
Send us Fan Mail
We trace how Alex Schuessler, the once and once-again President of SmartEquip--also a scholar of expressive choice!--built a platform…
3 months ago
Money Killed Barter; Can a Platform Bring It Back?
Send us Fan Mail
We explore why money became the default middleman and how a modern platform can make barter practical by slashing the costs of search…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
Adam Smith Episode 7: The Errors of Mercantilism--Bullion, Balances, and Bounties
Send us Fan Mail
Tracing out Adam Smith’s Book IV, chapters 1–6, to show how mercantilism mistakes money for wealth, how protection creates monopolies…
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Episode 6--Division of Land
Send us Fan Mail
We trace how Adam Smith solves a historical puzzle: why Europe’s path to prosperity inverted the “natural order,” and how commerce qu…
5 months ago
Little's Law: The Transaction Costs of (Re)Drawing Lines
Send us Fan Mail
A conversation with Andrew Wagner, production and manufacturing engineer, now in aerospace, but with experience also in the auto indu…
5 months, 1 week ago
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: Episode 5--The Text of Book II
Send us Fan Mail
This episode explores Book 2 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, focusing on his revolutionary concept of the "division of stock" and …
5 months, 3 weeks ago