Category: Podcast

This episode features Anton Howes of Brown University. He is a historian of innovation, and in this conversation we discuss his work on the explosion of innovation that occurred in Britain between 1551 and 1851. You can check out his Medium blog for some of the articles we discuss.

Anton has collected a data set of over 1,000 British innovators who worked during this period. He has documented their education, their experience, and their relationships with one another. Some of the interesting patterns that emerge in his data are the large fraction of innovators who developed technologies in industries outside of their areas of expertise, as well as the high degree of interconnectedness between innovators. (more…)

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.

The post Innovation, Invention, and Britain’s Industrial Revolution with Anton Howes appeared first on The Economics Detective.

This episode features Anton Howes of Brown University. He is a historian of innovation, and in this conversation we discuss his work on the explosion of innovation that occurred in Britain between 1551 and 1851. You can check out his Medium blog for some of the articles we discuss.

Anton has collected a data set of over 1,000 British innovators who worked during this period. He has documented their education, their experience, and their relationships with one another. Some of the interesting patterns that emerge in his data are the large fraction of innovators who developed technologies in industries outside of their areas of expertise, as well as the high degree of interconnectedness between innovators. (more…)

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.

The post Innovation, Invention, and Britain’s Industrial Revolution with Anton Howes appeared first on The Economics Detective.

What follows is an edited partial transcript of my conversation with Stephen M. Jones. He is an economist for the US Coast Guard. However, we are discussing his own research, so nothing in this conversation should be taken to represent the official views of the US Coast Guard.

---

Petersen: So Stephen, let’s start just by defining regulatory discretion. What does that mean in this context?

Jones: Sure. So, I think first off, we should probably define regulation because when Congress writes a law, they pass the law on to regulatory agencies and it will say something to the effect of “agencies: issue a regulation.” So, when we talk about regulations this point isn’t always clear because people just aren’t familiar with this process. The regulation is a statement that kind of clarifies existing congressional law or is written in direct response to congressional law. And this could be as specific as, say, Congress can direct an agency to set an exact amount of pollution that is permitted for an industry to as broad as saying something like “protect consumers from unreasonable risks.” And then the agency has room to interpret that statement as wide as it wants to.

So, when I talk about agency discretion what I’m really talking about is Congress wrote a rule that gave the agency power to issue legally binding rules that may or may not trace directly back to Congress. (more…)

Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.

The post Regulation, Discretion, and Public Choice with Stephen M. Jones appeared first on The Economics Detective.