Based on the six topics of rationality, confidence, money, regulation, business and globalisation, these imaginary radio programmes provide a pretext for discovering 18 renowned economists who have greatly influenced the currents of economic thinking.
Choose your programme :
They are quoted in the programme, learn more about them :
© Collection Bettmann/CORBIS John Maynard Keynes
The British economist John M. Keynes was born in Cambridge (United Kingdom) in 1883 and died in Firle, Sussex (United Kingdom) in 1946. He has had a considerable influence over western economic policies through to the present day.
A university professor trained in Cambridge, Keynes was a senior treasury official during the First World War. He became famous in 1936 with the publication of his book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" and was appointed financial adviser to the Crown. He headed the British delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.
Reasoning in terms of macroeconomics, Keynes rejected the notion that a market economy is able to self regulate in order to achieve full employment and recommended intervention by the state in times of economic turmoil so as to shore up demand and stimulate investment.
© The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choise/D.R. Milton Friedman
Considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, the American Milton Friedman was born in New York and 1912 and died in San Francisco in 2006.
After studying economics and statistics at the University of Chicago then Columbia, he worked for the government as an economist before being appointed Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976 for his life's work and served as advisor to President Ronald Reagan through until 1988.
A free market economist, Friedman questioned the effectiveness of state interventions to combat unemployment. As a monetarist, he blamed inflation on excessive growth of the money supply.
© Peter Badge/License Creative Commons John Forbes Nash
Born in 1928 in Bluefield in the State of West Virginia (United States), John F. Nash is an American mathematician.
After studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he took a particular interest in number theory, Nash taught at the University of Princeton and defended a dissertation on non-cooperative games. This work gave rise to what would later be termed "the Nash Equilibrium". His research has found several applications in microeconomic analysis and earned the author the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, alongside Reinhard Selten and John C. Harsanyi.
The Nash Equilibrium is a combination of individual decisions where each person anticipates the choices of others. This situation of interactions is defined as stable if no-one has an interest in modifying their strategy.
© Steve C. Mitchel/EPA/CORBIS Elinor Ostrom
An American economist and political scientist Elinor Ostrom was born in 1933 in Los Angeles and died in 2012 in Bloomington (Indiana).
After gaining a degree in political science from the University of California (UCLA), she became professor at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) where in 1973, with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, she founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. She was the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, jointly with Oliver Williamson, for her work on economic governance.
Her analyses covered the collective management of common goods. In particular, she demonstrated that the collective management of natural resources by user associations can be economically effective and that this type of governance constitutes a third way, between privatisation and state management.