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University of Chicago Podcast Network

Is capitalism the engine of destruction or the engine of prosperity? On this podcast we talk about the ways capitalism is—or more often isn’t—working in our world today. Hosted by author and journalist Bethany McLean and world renowned economist Luigi Zingales, we explain how capitalism can go wrong, and what we can do to fix it.

Cover photo attributions: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/research/stigler/about/capitalisnt. 

If you would like to send us feedback, suggestions for guests we should bring on, or connect with Bethany and Luigi, please email: contact at capitalisnt dot com. If you like our show, we'd greatly appreciate you giving us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners find us too.

Capitalisn't

Did you know Amazon makes $37 billion a year—more than double the revenue of all the newspapers in the world combined—from its sponsored results alone? Yes, the same, spammy, sponsored results at the top of a search that bilk shoppers with fake or low-quality items and can starve legitimate businesses of traffic and revenue.

This is one of the many insights shared by our guest this week, Tim Wu, in his new book, “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.” He argues that the defining story of the modern internet isn’t openness or democratization, but rather wealth extraction: the ability of gatekeeping Big Tech platforms, such as Amazon, Facebook, or X, to take money from everyone else without actually providing net value in return. Platforms weaponize convenience, he writes, so switching to competitors or smaller platforms is designed to be exhausting. Add in AI technologies that foster emotional relationships with users, and our dependence on them may deepen even more.

An author and professor at Columbia Law School, Wu served in the Biden administration as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy. He discusses with Bethany and Luigi why we should care about Big Tech value extraction and posits how Big Tech power arose in the first place: from centralized power to shareholder pressure, from poorly aligned corporate structures to nefarious intentions. Together, they also chart how we can make our way out of this era of extraction. They discuss the feasibility of treating Big Tech platforms like utilities, applying frameworks for structural separation between the platforms’ various services, decentralizing digital network infrastructures through interoperability to allow users to switch more easily between different platforms, and how economic populism influences the political messaging around these issues. Ultimately, Wu makes the case for embracing a philosophy of decentralized capitalism to achieve a fairer and beneficial balance between public and private power.
 

Read more from Tim Wu in ProMarket:
The Consumer Welfare Standard is Too Tainted
Over recent years, the antitrust law appears to be returning to its historical standard, the “competition and competitive process” standard, often referred to in the Supreme Court as the goal of “protecting competition.” In this post, Tim defends this trend for rule-of-law reasons and presents a realistic assessment of the legal system’s capabilities and its limits.

A Conversation with Tim Wu
A transcript of Tim Wu’s keynote in conversation with Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times from the Stigler Center’s annual Antitrust and Competition Conference archives.

 

 
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Are Big Tech’s Regulators “Cowards”? ft. Tim Wu

Recently, Bethany and Luigi joined economist and wealth inequality expert Branko Milanovic in front of a live audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival to explore how capitalism, democracy, and income inequality interact. Together, the three discussed the pervasiveness of income inequality around the world, its connections with democracy and political stability, if the inequality that really matters is that between countries, and if capitalism and democracy aren't as intricately connected as we thought. 

As a scholar of China’s economic system, Milanovic discussed how much of the country’s success can even be attributed to capitalism. In the process, the three unpacked if capitalist societies, particularly in the West, are able to address the very inequality they have produced. Are there free-market mechanisms to correct for inequality or does there need to be government intervention? If income inequality poses a dire threat to democracy, what should capitalists do to preserve the institutions that enabled their wealth in the first place?

Read a book review of Branko Milanovic's Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War and how his analysis of class and inequality applies to contemporary America, written by former ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda

Also mentioned: Revisit our episode with Thomas Piketty on creating a more equal society and with Martin Wolf: Is Capitalism Killing Democracy?
Also revisit our episodes with Sen. Phil Gramm and Matthew Desmond on Poverty in America: Terrible Scourge or a Measurement Error?

 
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Why Economists Should Care About Inequality, with Branko Milanovic

Standard economic theory informs how we think about business strategy and the economy and presumes that people are selfish, have well-defined preferences, and consistently make welfare-maximizing choices. In other words, we are rational. But what if that is not the case?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler is out with an updated edition of his bestselling 1991 book, "The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life." In the new edition, he and his co-author Alex Imas (both professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business) reflect on the last thirty years of behavioral economics and how it makes sense of tensions between our psychological biases and impulses that make us less than fully rational in practice. Using a wealth of empirical evidence, the authors explore the behavioral anomalies that contradict the expectations of standard economic theory and explain a wide range of real-world examples from banking crises to social media addiction.

Earlier this month, Thaler joined Bethany and Luigi for a sold-out Capitalisn’t recording in front of a live audience in Chicago to walk through the anomalies of human behavior that have endured from biblical times to the age of Big Tech. Thaler reflects on how views and the adoption of behavioral economics have changed over the last thirty years, both within academia and beyond (wonder why you can’t put down your phone? Silicon Valley has read Thaler). He also shares how behavioral economics can influence public policy from canceling “junk fees” and dubious subscriptions to deciding which parts of the Affordable Care Act to keep and which are unlikely to produce their desired outcomes. Over conversation, light banter, and audience Q&A, Thaler shares his views on the state of capitalism and reveals how there is no grand unified theory of human behavior that incorporates all its irrationalities—only departures from the standard model.

 
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Nobel Economist Reveals Why Economic Models Keep Failing Us, ft. Richard Thaler

Every major technological revolution has come with a bubble: railroads, electricity, dot-com. Is it AI’s turn? With investments skyrocketing and market valuations reaching the trillions, the stakes are enormous. But are we witnessing a genuine revolution—or the early stages of a spectacular crash?

Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan joins Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean to explain why he believes AI’s transformative impact is overstated. Drawing on his book AI Snake Oil, co-authored with Sayash Kapoor, Narayanan argues that capitalism’s incentives can distort technological progress, pushing hype faster than reality can deliver. They examine how deregulation, geopolitical competition, and private control over data shape the trajectory of AI’s development.

They also explore what could happen if the bubble bursts: massive market shocks, exposed structural weaknesses in the economy, and a wave of painful restructuring that could echo the dot-com crash—but on a far larger scale. It’s a conversation that cuts through the hype and asks what’s at stake when an entire economy bets on one technology.

 
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What Everyone’s Getting Wrong About AI, with Arvind Narayanan

The Japanese economy was once the envy of the world. By the 1980s, it looked set to surpass the United States in size. Real estate prices were high, the stock market was booming—the entire world was asking if Japan had found a superior model of economic growth and recovery after World War II, one grounded in industrial policy.

However, the bubble burst in the early 1990s, and what followed was not a quick recession and rebound as we have often seen in the U.S., but decades of stagnation. Near-zero deflation became entrenched, and the banking system turned into a drug of cheap borrowing rather than an engine for recovery, with the Bank of Japan pioneering quantitative easing by pushing interest rates to zero long before the U.S. Federal Reserve considered such steps in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. Japan has never since returned to sustainable growth, and this matters for the world at large. A significant creditor to other countries, shifts in Japan’s economic policy and fluctuations in its currency ripple across global interest rates, tightening or loosening financial conditions worldwide. Japan also remains a critical node in global supply chains (including for semiconductor chips and electronics), a major importer of energy, and not for nothing, its cultural exports continue to conquer the world.

What lessons can Japan’s lost decades of economic stagnation and missed opportunities offer the U.S. and other developed economies? Bethany and Luigi are joined by Takeo Hoshi, professor of economics at the University of Tokyo and a leading expert on Japan's financial system and economic stagnation. Together, they discuss Japan’s idiosyncrasies—from demographic decline to economic policy mismanagement—and the interplay of global factors such as populism, nativism, and dissatisfaction with capitalism. If the U.S. is indeed on the cusp of its own economic bubble driven by oversized capital investments in artificial intelligence and technology rather than consumer spending and wage growth, does it have the institutions and flexibility to avoid Japan’s fate?

 
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Why Capitalism Stopped Working In Japan, with Takeo Hoshi

Why does a podcast about capitalism want to talk about science?

Modern capitalism and science have evolved together since the Enlightenment. Advances in ship building and navigation enabled the Age of Discovery, which opened up new trade routes and markets to European merchants. The invention of the spinning jinny and cotton in the 18th century spurred textile production. The United States’ Department of Defense research and development agency helped create the precursor to the internet. The internet now supports software and media industries worth trillions of dollars. On the flip side, some of America’s greatest capitalists and businesses, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Bell Labs, gave us everything from electricity production to the transistor. Neither science nor capitalism can succeed without the other.

However, science’s star is now dimming. Part of this is due to political intervention. In the U.S., the federal government has cut funding for scientific research. The Covid-19 pandemic diminished the public’s trust in scientific experts, which social media has exacerbated through misinformation. Restrictions on immigration may further hamper scientific research as some of the world’s brightest minds lose access to funding and state-of-the-art facilities.

But so too has capitalism played a hand in science’s struggles. While corporations sponsor a significant portion of funding for scientific research, this funding too often comes with undisclosed conflicts of interest. Or corporate pressure may influence results in other ways.

Stanford University professor John Ioannidis is a physician, writer, and one of the world's most-cited scientists. He studies the methodology and sociology of science itself: how the process and standards for empirical research influence findings in ways that some may find inaccurate. His 2005 essay "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is one of the most accessed articles in the history of Public Library of Science (PLOS), with more than three million views. Ioannidis joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the future of the relationship between capitalism and science, how both will have to respond to contemporary politics, and how one even conceptualizes robust measurements of scientific success.

Listen:
Science for Sale, with David Michaels: Learn how corporate-funded science uses doubt to its patrons' advantage.
The Money Behind Ultra-Processed Foods, with Marion Nestle: Examine the role of Big Food in public health.
The Capitalisn’t of the U.S. COVID Response: Understand the factors that exacerbated the pandemic’s fallout for the most vulnerable in society.

Read:
Food for Thought: An excerpt from the second edition of Marion Nestle’s book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.
How Conflicts of Interest Shape Trust in Academic Work: What is the impact of various conflicts of interest on readers’ trust in academic research findings? What are the implications for academia and policy?
There’s More Bias Than You Think: To protect the integrity of academia, we must also encourage the injection and consideration of new and contradictory unconflicted ideas.
Academic Bias Under the Microscope: That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. What are the sources of industry bias in economic and business research, and possible avenues of mitigation?
“Doubt is Their Product”: The Difference Between Research and Academic Lobbying:
Reflecting on the intersection of academic economics and policymaking – and advice to young scholars.Watch:
John Ioannidis’ Keynote at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference 2025: Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas
How Conflicts of Interest Impact the Marketplace of Ideas: Webinar
De-Biasing Academic Research: Panel Discussion at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference 2022

 
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How Profit and Politics Hijacked Scientific Inquiry, with John Ioannidis

This week, the Trump administration announced it would sell around 5% of mortgage giants and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The sale would begin to reintroduce the two firms to private markets after 17 years of government conservatorship. The decision to re-privatize two of the largest mortgage firms in the world, and a prominent reason why the United States is one of the only countries where people can get 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, will have enormous implications for the U.S. economy, housing market, and the American dream.

Fannie Mae was founded during the Great Depression with the idea of making mortgages more widely available to Americans by buying mortgage loans from banks. Freddie Mac came along in 1970 to provide competition and increase liquidity for mortgages. In part, Fannie and Freddie increased liquidity by repackaging their mortgages into mortgage-backed securities and reselling them to investors. In the early 2000s, the subprime mortgage crisis began as smaller, unregulated financial actors started offering risky mortgage loans and likewise repackaged them to investors. When the crisis imploded in 2008, it gutted the market for mortgage-backed securities, and the U.S. government seized Fannie and Freddie to prevent them from collapsing. The government feared that without Freddie and Fannie, many Americans would no longer be able to afford home ownership. Today, Fannie and Freddie still back roughly 50% of all mortgage loans, with other government agencies making up another chunk.

The Trump administration’s plans to take these GSEs public again will allow the two firms to raise billions through new stock offerings and shift risk back to the private sector. But the question is, why is the government doing this? Will it help fix the country’s housing crisis—which Trump has reportedly called a national emergency—or will it make matters worse? Bethany and Luigi get together to discuss what it would mean for Fannie and Freddie to go public, who benefits from these developments, and their implications for home loans, the housing market, and the American economy.

Also check out Bethany’s book, published in 2015: Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants

 
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Will Privatizing The Mortgage Giants Solve The Housing Crisis?

For decades, private equity has been the darling of pension funds, university endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, promising high returns and low volatility. Now, President Donald Trump has made it possible for everyday investors to get in on the magic with his executive order, "Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors.” The order relieves regulatory burdens that limit the access of defined contribution plans, like 401(k)s, to alternative assets such as private equity (but also cryptocurrency and real estate). The hope is to give American workers access to greater choice, diversification, and potential growth towards a comfortable retirement.

But Trump's order comes just as longstanding questions about private equity’s promise of high returns and low risk are coming to the fore. Has the distribution of returns slowed to a trickle? What does data actually say about private equity’s performance, and where is the industry headed? There is also a long standing debate whether private equity is good for society, independent of financial returns.

Is private equity actually a ponzi scheme that now threatens the retirements of millions of American workers? To make sense of it all, Luigi and Bethany are joined by Dan Rasmussen, an experienced investor and author who began his career in private equity but has emerged as one of the most prescient critics of the industry. Together, the three of them distill what the state of the industry means for the future welfare of investors, workers, and the American economy as a whole.

Bonus: Check out ProMarket’s recent series on the impact of private equity in the health care industry.

 
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Trump's Great Private Equity Bailout, with Dan Rasmussen

What is the right way, if there is one at all, to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) technology into our education system? For Sal Khan, CEO of one of the world’s largest nonprofit education technology platforms, the answer is to take a step back and ask: Where can AI best complement current pedagogy? If a problem can be solved by pencil and paper, should we really be using AI instead?

Khan joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss his recent book, “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (And Why That’s a Good Thing),” in which he makes the case for why the education sector will not only survive but thrive in the age of AI. He shares his 17-year journey to build and grow his organization, which now provides over 10,000 videos on everything from integral calculus to art history, reaching more than 170 million registered users in over 20 languages, mostly for free. Together, the three talk about how and where AI can enhance the learning process: how AI has shifted Khan’s philosophy and approach to pedagogy, how it could democratize educational and economic opportunity, and what this all means for traditional modes of learning and instruction in schools and universities. They also discuss concerns about data ownership, Khan’s partnerships with tech companies, and the guardrails he proposes to protect education against the monetization of students’ data and the concentration of benefits to privileged children. Ultimately, he makes the case for why teachers aren’t going anywhere—and leaves aspiring nonprofit and civic leaders with advice on how to build a successful, mission-driven organization.

Read a review of Sal Khan’s book on ProMarket, written by Capitalisn’t team member Matt Lucky.

 
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Should Chatbots Teach Our Children? With Khan Academy CEO Sal Khan

Americans are often told that they benefit from the privilege of the dollar serving as the world's currency. A strong dollar makes imports cheaper, facilitates demand for American companies, and is tied to cheap government borrowing. But what happens when this powerful privilege weakens? What does it even mean for the dollar to be “strong” or “weak” as a medium of exchange and investment? Why should Americans care that the dollar serves as the reserve currency for the world’s central banks?

In his new book “Our Dollar, Your Problem,” Ken Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, argues that the dollar is past “middle age” and that its global dominance will erode in the coming years. He predicts the dollar will eventually share power with the European Union’s euro and Chinese renminbi in a “tripolar” world.

Rogoff joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss why the dollar's shifting dominance matters so much to the United States and what implications this has for the rest of the world’s payment network. He describes how the dollar has come under pressure from multiple directions, both now and in the past. Outside the U.S., these include past and current international challengers, such as the Soviet ruble, the Japanese yen, and the European euro. From within, the current instigators are rising federal debt, increased use of economic sanctions, and growing political dysfunction. The three also discuss if President Donald Trump’s boisterous support for cryptocurrency further undermines the U.S. dollar. Ultimately, they tease out how the dollar has underpinned American economic prowess for the last half century and what the consequences will be for the American economy – and the world at large – if the dollar is dethroned.

Read a review of Rogoff’s book by Capitalisn’t team member Matt Lucky in ProMarket: https://www.promarket.org/2025/07/24/what-happens-after-the-dollars-hegemony-ends/

 
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Can The Dollar Be Dethroned?, with Ken Rogoff

If democracy is a social contract, why don’t we allow everybody who is willing to sign it? Why don’t we have open borders for immigration?

In their book "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success," Princeton University’s Leah Boustan and Stanford University’s Ran Abramitzky provide insights from big data to explore how immigration shaped the United States by looking at the economic legacies of immigrants and their children. On this week’s encore episode, hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean talk with Boustan to unpack how immigrants and their progeny have impacted jobs, wages, and housing prices for native-born Americans. Conversely, how do immigrants’ countries of origin overcome obstacles to socioeconomic change when many of their most-motivated citizens leave? Can data move the U.S. immigration debate beyond the current border crisis?

 
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Immigration in America: Data and Myths, Revisited With Leah Boustan

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