Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: episode 157 was recorded in September of 2022. Full transcript here. In this episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, to discuss prediction markets. Click here to download Episode 157 of Elucidations. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: episode 156 was recorded in June of 2024. Full transcript here. For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise. Click here to download Episode 156 of Elucidations. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: episode 155 was recorded in October of 2025. Full transcript here. Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Click here to download Episode 155 of Elucidations. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this was recorded in November of 2022. Full transcript here. In the latest episode of Elucidations, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas) joins us once again, this time to discuss freedom of speech. Click here to download Episode 154 of Elucidations. Free speech talk has been in the air, on the internet, for the past decade. But what exactly is going on with freedom of speech? Do I have the right to criticize my alderman’s second term on my blog without getting thrown in jail? Do I have the right to publish cartoons that make fun of venerated religious figures without being physically attacked? Do I have the right to tell my work colleagues who I voted for in the last election without getting fired? Do I have the right to express an opinion on whether R2-D2 or BB-8 is the superior Star Wars droid, without getting kicked out a group chat I have going with my friends? Which of these things is a right and which isn’t? What even is a right? ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2025. Full transcript here. In the latest episode of Elucidations, Sam Enright (Progress Ireland, The Fitzwilliam) instructs us in the delicate art of learning forever. Click here to download Episode 153 of Elucidations. If you’re one of those people who responds well to formal education, chances are you’ve spent 10-20 years of your life as a student. When you finally graduate, it can feel jarring, like you’re kissing all this efficient infrastructure for mastering difficult skills goodbye. How are you going to keep learning, without a teacher you can pester with questions in the classroom, without regular feedback on homework assignments, and without exams? Sam Enright is here to tell you that just because you’re moving into the next phase of your life, that doesn’t mean you need to turn your back on the learning experience. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in March of 2024. Full transcript here. This time around, Matt talks to Luca Gattoni-Celli about why it’s so expensive to buy a house. Click here to download episode 152 of Elucidations. In the 80s, people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds were able to afford apartments and houses in places like New York City, San Francisco, or London. Now, on the other hand, even many wealthy people are getting priced out of the city. And indeed, the issue is no longer specific to urban areas: the problem of seemingly infinitely increasing real estate prices would appear to be creeping into the rest of the US, and into many other areas that were typically regarded as affordable in the recent past. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in August of 2022. Full transcript here. In the latest Elucidation, Matt talks to Witold Więcek about the difficulties that come up for researchers who would like to draw upon statistics. Click here to download episode 151 of Elucidations. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Note: this episode was recorded in April of 2023. Full transcript here. In this episode, Matt sits down with Shruti Rajagopalan (Mercatus Center) to talk about what the future holds for India. Click here to download episode 150 of Elucidations. We often have a tendency to think of the current economic and geopolitical situation as simply the way things are. Especially for people who grew up in the United States over the past 50 years, the fact that it is an economic and military superpower sorta feels set in stone. But in this episode, Shruti Rajagopalan encourages us to take the long view, regarding the current state of the US as just one phase in a decades or possibly centuries-long economic development life cycle. First, the country logs a certain number of decades as a manufacturing hub, under conditions of minimal top-down interference from regulatory bodies. This enables it to build wealth, which eventually pushes it away from being a manufacturing economy, but it’s a race against the clock. With economic growth comes a rise in average life expectancy, plus a lower birth rate, which together can lead to large aging population. Once the aging population increases, the country’s economy needs to be strong in order to accommodate all the caregiving that an aging population makes necessary. ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Full transcript here. In this episode, we are joined by Lainie Ross (University of Rochester Medical Center) and (once again!) Christos Lazaridis (UChicago Medicine), this time to talk about the different ways of defining death. Click here to download episode 149 of Elucidations. In our previous episode with Christos, we talked about death and the vexed history of attempts to define it. Prior to the advent of modern life support technology in the 1960s, it was usually enough to check whether a person had a heartbeat and could breathe to determine whether they were dead. But once machines were invented that could breathe and circulate blood in patients whose lungs or hearts were failing, a new moral conundrum was born: how do you decide whether a medical patient is dead when it is now possible to keep their lungs breathing and their heart beating indefinitely? ...
Subscribe to Elucidations: Full transcript here. In this episode, Matt sits down with Christos Lazaridis (University of Chicago Medicine) to chat about what brain death is and whether brain death should count as death, period. Click here to donwload episode 148 of Elucidations. Modern life support technology really hit its stride in the 1960s, allowing doctors to buy themselves more time to save their patients by connecting them to machines that could assist with breathing, blood oxygenation and/or heart pumping. But the flipside to that incredible technological breakthrough was that the medical community now needed to get more precise about the moment at which a person goes from being alive to being dead. After all, what had previously been a quick window between the two was now, due to life support technology, happening in extreme slow motion. In addition, organ transplanation was becoming more and more commonplace, meaning that determining whether someone was dead was no longer as simple as e.g. checking that their heart had stopped. ...