YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamee Moudud

lines on the record: 51
first: 2026-02-21
most recent: 2026-02-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Massive emissions of greenhouse gases. I mean, that's clearly unsustainable, and we all know that. So I feel like I don't know that I would necessarily think about it in terms of positive or negative sum gains. I would just say that market activity does generate enormous social wealth, but also enormous social costs. And so then that's where I think the conversation has to go to, how to reduce our social costs.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not aware of that, Tracy, that is not from my standpoint. I do think that. Markets and the sort of private initiatives in markets that does generate wealth. I mean, you go back to Smith, he says that. So in that sense, it's true that market activity does generate enormous social wealth. Yes, it does. But what people tend to forget is that there's also a flip side to that, the social costs. And so we have to then think about, okay, can we somehow, how do we reduce some of those social costs in terms of affordability or pollution or climate crisis? That's, I think, saying that, okay, markets are great, but what are they sort of embedded on that infrastructure that I was talking about that is sort of leading to”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Appears in the US Constitution, it does appear in a lot of these European constitutions, and that matters. You have the rights of personhood, the 14th Amendment, but you know very well that how that's been weaponized for corporate personhood and so on. That's, I think, part of the story as to why the welfare state has been somewhat more robust, though it's also seen fractures in Europe than here where that has not been the case. We're still stuck with this constitution, which at least in my view is not a very good constitution.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That kind of sent a jolt for a lot of people. And I think that kind of revived the left in some sense because fascism and there was a clear understanding that massive inequality was one of the ingredients of the rise of fascist movements in the 1920s and 30s. And so reducing inequality, embedding social and economic rights and constitutions. I'm thinking here for the German constitution, super important as a kind of insulation, at least to some extent, against a repetition of those horrors. So this created a kind of a different social model based on these progressive constitutions. We haven't had that. Our constitution is a first generation constitution. And in that way, there are no explicit commitments to economic and social rights. Human dignity, the expression I don't think.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Require not as an elective, but require them to actually read economic history in most places in their training so they don't know the history. And so this new notion of the market prevails and then they don't know their own history. I don't think that's any different in Europe, and we can talk about that. But there are interesting... Issues here. So, for example, the American historically, the American taxation system was much more progressive than in Europe. Right, so there is that, but I think what happens in the post war period, post Second World War period, is that”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And therefore, we need to basically go back to some pre New Deal romanticized small government. You know, Steve Bannon makes his comment. That's why the attack against the administrative state is premised on this. The problem is the many legal historians and legal economic historians have pointed out this is not true, that the U.S. developed a very robust developmental state in the Reconstruction period. So there's a really a lot of history there that is not part of the public domain and the discourse on economics because the teaching of economics does not require students to actually”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, we do have a long history of municipal socialism. It's called such socialism in this country. I mean, so in other words, a lot has been written actually that what Mamdani is doing here, it's actually pretty, there's a long history behind that. Gail Radford has written about this, a historian. I think the issue is, and so that's the first point. The second point is that if you look at, and this comes back, I think, Tracy, to your question, which is that in the public discourse, we don't know, there's a kind of an idea that the New Deal was an outlier.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So those are the kinds of questions. So coming back to your question, that's an impediment because if you're going to say that, well, I want to make some aspect of social services. Affordable or something, then you'll always come up to this impediment that well, are you a state interventionist, whereas this is the free market? And that's the lingua franca. And that's the hard part of it to say that, well, okay, to push the conversation farther, as opposed to saying, well, okay, if you think of markets in different ways, then it may be hard to make the change, but at least the market is not pre-political. So for me, that's the problem.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for that. Thank you. I think that these kinds of conversations are helpful because at least it opens up the space for thinking about that, well, I mean, okay, so when you're talking about foundational questions like the market economy, what exactly do you mean by that?”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a place like America. Well, that's a great question. And I think the issue is that these kinds of ideas are not in the public domain. And so, whenever you use the word economics, let's say it comes up, let's say who are the experts who come, say, let's say to CNN, they're already coming implicitly, even if they don't say it, from this idea that markets are sort of prime and then everything else follows afterwards. So, I mean, in order to push back against that, you need to have more conversations about the discipline of economy.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course Could, for example, provide for the smaller landlords, the ones or the less who don't have enough cash to fix the upkeep the building, that they could be given tax credits. So that compensation for the rent control would be that, okay, if you're a large real estate corporation and you've got lots of cash flows, then clearly you do have the cash flow to deal with the problems. But if you're a smaller landlord, then you could be given some kind of a tax credit. You could be given some kind of public subsidy that could deal with that kind of an issue, which brings you straight back to the question of the public financing of all of this. So that's the way at least I would tenditively think about the issue.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were talking about taxation earlier on. There was massive opposition during the Gilded Age. That if you have progressive taxation, if you even have the 16th Amendment, this is going to destroy the whole society. And so the struggles in that gilded age period, which ultimately led to the 16th Amendment, exemplifies the point that, yeah, I mean, there are going to be, there is going to be opposition.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think that if by that logic, then we shouldn't have ever done anything, anyways. So, for example, opposition, I mean, so like sort of moving this sort of the discussion a little bit away from housing, but let's say to taxation.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the automobile industry fought tooth and nail against seatbelts for decades, make him safer. The whole design of cars. So the point here is it's not as though that proposing a policy implies that you wave a magic wand and it just happens. There are going to be insuperable problems and there's going to be impediments. But that's always been the case. That doesn't mean that you cannot lose track of the fact that lack of affordability In this country and elsewhere in the world has seriously eroded democracy. We know and has fueled authoritarian politics. There's a clear relationship here between economic insecurity and authoritarianism.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so my response is that if we this is true, first of all, to concede, I think in any kind of a discussion, you concede what the other person is saying, and this is true about the sort of impediments of current politics and power structures, this, that, and the other. But that's always been the case. It's always been the case. And so if we thought of that as the supreme impediment to actually making things better, then we would have abandoned society, would have abandoned any attempts to, let's say, have safer cars.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politics than the nature of the politics matters. I mean, is it an authoritarian state? Is it a democratic state? So I don't like authoritarianism. So I think. Policy should reflect theory on the basis of democratic principles in a broad sense.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Thank you for putting it that way. Because that already exemplifies the problem, which is that how on earth are you designing a policy based on a theory for which you have, which has not been subjected to any kind of theoretical intellectual engagement with reality in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when prominent neoclassical economists were asked, wait a second, are you now going to rethink your models? Because this should not have happened per the neoclassical framework. They said, no. And I think that's the problem here. That policy is being designed in this particular way on the basis of theory of this nature. But If you bring in a more engaged way of thinking about policy”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess the question is what defines science So the way, for example, the institutional economist that I was talking about, the way they design policy was on the basis of theory that was evidence-based. Social reality, historical reality, court cases, you know, this kind of thing. Neoclassical economics doesn't do policy that way, though, or theory. It's deductive. It assumes. So it's constructing this model on the basis of no evidence. So, neoclassical econom”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see what I'm saying? There's intelligent ways of thinking about public policy. So Mamdani's policies, whatever they may be, they may affect, I don't know, smaller businesses differently from a larger ones. So the ones that have less cash flow, they can get a tax credit as a write-off, right? I mean, you can think about all of these kinds of policies, and at least that's the way I think about it in practical terms.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happening was the price for food was rising So, the Illinois state legislature put a cap on that, went up to the Supreme Court, and so there was this whole idea, and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of price caps on these rates charged because they said, well, this is of social importance. Food should be affordable. There's a very long history of this in American constitutional history. That is basically exemplifying the basic point that at some points and in various points some of these social costs were deemed too high. And then in some way they would either be internalized or maybe smaller businesses could not internalize some of these costs. Okay, give them some kind of a tax credit.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of those social costs would need to be internalized. In other words, they would, as they always have been, throughout the history of capitalism. Again, so this is not just an arbitrary statement, but if you look at through other history of capitalism, this Janus faced nature of capitalist activity, wealth creation on the one hand, and social costs on the other hand, and then at various moments in time, some of those social costs were extremely high in terms of the rates charged on something on the other. Munvi, Illinois, 1877, landmark Supreme Court case came out of the Interstate Commerce Act Commission, which put caps on railroads and on grain elevators because what was happening was that the farmers were storing, they were charging extremely, they were being charged extremely high rates by grain storage elevators and railroads.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic, yeah. I mean, it's always been that. And that's where I think in that sense, if you come back to issues of affordability and such, I would say that if you let housing prices be whatever they are so that people lose their homes, that's as much a political structure ring of real estate as otherwise. You see what I'm saying? Sure, yeah. So it's not any which way politics is there. The question is who's benefiting and who's losing. This is, I think for me, this is the question.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Straight back to the fact that the social cost that industry can inflict depends on the legal design of industry. So before the National Environmental Policy Act of 69, industry had far greater leeway to dump more chemical waste than after that. So I would just say that, yeah, I think we need to move away from this notion of market failure. And then, you know, so that's the usual debate. Well, okay, so you've got market failure. Then do we want state intervention or not? And I argue in the book that that's a bit of a family debate between liberals and conservatives because both sides agree that there's market failure and then one side said, well, we should probably not have state intervention. And the other side says the opposite. My point is they're always social costs and politics through the law is going to be structuring the composition and level of those.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's the way where I would say that market failures don't actually exist. Because think about one instance of what is often characterized as market failure, pollution. Now, pollution is ubiquitous. I mean, any act of production involves inputs of raw materials which are extracted from somewhere. Then you've got a physo-chemical process. Outcomes and output, and it could be an intangible output. It could be the output from your computer, right? And then there's waste. There's pollution. So now if pollution and waste are ubiquitous and if market failures are ubiquitous, then they're not market failures logically. They are the legal design of the property rights that enabled the owner of the factory to actually dump chemical waste offer Google to take your and my private data.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And here's why it matters. Now, if you just do, like, spend a few chapters on that, that already sets the stage for an intelligent conversation. But if you don't do that, and it's just that this is economics, then what happens is it kind of leaves out any possibility of even understanding the world, right? So Chinese economic miracle, the Japanese economic miracle, those are seen as somehow I don't know that they were cheating. There's this notion that these countries were cheating. As opposed to saying, well, they use industrial policy of a certain kind. So did Sweden of a different kind in the post-war period. And can we learn something from that theoretically? And what does that say about the relationship between politics and economics, which is exactly where we started out with? And I think that's the way the conversation should go.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, thank you for validating. I appreciate it. Okay. And I think those reflect two very rival methodologies. So I think that one of the things that so often gets missed out in the teaching of economics and in the learning of economics is that the students don't learn method. They could say that, I mean, a textbook should say, okay, this is neoclassical economics. Here is a method that is used. And here is this alternative, call it whatever you like to. I generally don't use heterodox economics. I say critical political economy or that kind of thing. It employs a different method.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's how the economist is kind of constructing this engine as opposed to an economist who is actually attempting to fix the engine, but also trying to see what the component parts are built, in other words, society. History.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think that, I mean, in some sense there's truth to what you're saying, because a lot of these economists who are involved in war planning. That's exactly what they were doing. I mean, you know, yeah, they were actually, but they were actually doing math modeling. I mean, the whole mathematization of post-war math econ. I mean, all of that really came from sophisticated mathematical models. So it did come from that. But I think maybe what you might be getting at over here, but just tell me what you're trying to say, what I'm hearing, is that this notion that the economy is an engine and the economist is like this technician who's just like tinkering around with things, right? And I think this idea.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the question really is not the tax per se, but what is it being used for? And so that's a separate conversation. But is that necessarily to orthodoxy? And yes, in a way it is, because it comes back to this idea that analytically, I mean, every textbook will tell you, well, you've got this self-contained black box called the economy, which equilibrates at general equilibrium the production possibility frontier, parito optimality, all these sort of aspects of orthodoxy. Opposed to the orthodoxy, this way of thinking about it. But if we think of the orthodoxy as a touchstone or as a gold standard, then of course you would say, well, these are outlandish ideas. But if you don't fall into that, then you would say, well, yeah, but this has been done. So what is so weird about it?”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 16th Amendment really legalized income taxes, right? And so if you look at across the Western world, like in the US, tax rates were actually much more progressive, as you know, in the 50s and 60s. Other countries had this growth of more progressive taxes, Britain and France and so on. None of that led to the collapse of capitalism.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a big question in the sense that I can answer it in two ways. One is the narrative that this is going to tank the economy. So let's just talk about the tax bar. Let's just get that out of the way, that this small increase in the billionaire stack is going to tank the economy. And my responses were, geez, then capitalism would have been dead a long time ago because the 16th Amendment would have killed American capitalism.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all of us would be opposed authoritarianism. But there was industrial policy of a social democratic kind also. And we have plenty of examples of those just from post-war Europe.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These were demo social democratic states. And this is an important point. So, for example, the Bank of France is nationalized in 1945 or 44. And the National Credit Council, which is at the core of the BOF, has in it different constituents of French society, unions, employers, farmers, and so on, who are sort of involved in planning the allocation of credit to different sectors of society. Across the border in Germany, you have the KFW, which is a public bank, again with different stakeholders, including unions. And they are involved in sort of the economic and social reconstruction through credit allocation. But these were democratic states. I hear you that in the sense that for sure you can have industrial policy of a type which is consistent with authoritarianism.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the thing though. So, this I discussed is in one of the chapters in my book, and I had a lot of fun writing about this, is that if you look at post Second World War European Reconstruction It involved Not less affair. Not at all. It involved industrial and social policies, right? The mobilization of central banks and actually the U.S. Congress had two studies done on European central banks' role in mobilizing finance and credit to promote industrial and social policies, the reconstruction, building of hospitals, et cetera, et cetera, and the export economies in France and Germany and so on. So you did have pretty strong state.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this issue of the way by which the discipline itself has sort of captured the narrative in which math becomes rigor as opposed to history and society. And so then government intervention and non-intervention become the sort of flashpoints of the fight. But it's a false debate, I would argue.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 1985, the National Science Foundation convened a symposium on the state of economics teaching in the top graduate schools, and they were extremely concerned about what was being taught. That led to the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics. It was a survey of the top graduate programs in economics, and the article in question was published in the Journal of Economic Literature, and it was pretty dismal because it was saying that these students are learning math econ, but they cannot apply this to social reality. And the conclusion was quite interesting. They said the concern is that the profession is training idiots savants. That was an exact term in the JEL article.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. All knowing, all seeing, etc., etc. And that way of conceptualizing economics eclipses this older tradition and in so doing becomes dominant in the 1950s and 60s. And in this way, it was very much a state project in the sense that Employed at institutions that got a lot of money from the Department of Defense. So there was a very sort of an intellectual framework is being constructed about the economy in which many of these authors were very explicitly trying to model weapon systems, input, output, that kind of thing, and that how do you optimize this input output system, that the flying plane, how to shoot it down, et cetera. So the economy becomes this engine and becomes increasingly more and more mathematically sophisticated, but in so doing divorce from social reality.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens in the 1940s is the war, and then you had the role, and so Philip Morowski discusses this in his book, he's a historian of economic thought, machine dreams, in which he argues that economics eventually becomes dominated by mathematicians and engineers who kind of eviscerate society and politics and history and construct the economy as a machine populated by cyborgs, pre-programmed.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But as a sociologist, and he brings that method to the study of racial inequalities in this country in which he's constructing a theory of race and class by looking at actually the living standards of black people in this country. So it's a particular method that was not deductive, but it was inductive. It was engaging with social reality. So what happens is that when the AEA is constructed, American Economic Association, these are institutionalists of that kind, and they come to dominate American economics right through the 1930s, in forming many of these economists and lawyers who are part of Roosevelt's brain trust. Many of those folks were lawyers, but you had these folks who were trained in a way by which they were absolutely opposed to this idea that the economy is pre-political.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. But here's the funny thing that happens in this tradition. So, what is interesting about American economics is that the American Economic Association is founded by institutionalists, but institutionalists not of the neoclassical kind. So they were trained, these authors like Richard T. Eli and others. They were trained in the German historical school of economics. And the method of the German historical school of economics was that theory has to be constructed in dialogue with social reality. W.E.B. Du Bois trains at Berlin.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is really interesting because we're talking about the late 19th century. And this is a time of enormous social turmoil.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not that the economy was pre political. Now, those ideas, if you read Adam Smith, his Glasgow University lectures, that was before the Wealth of Nations, it's very clear that he's writing that. But what happens is the rise of neoclassical economics in the late 19th century eviscerates that history. And it changes the story. The political goes out of a political economy and it becomes economics. So the principles of economics. And so then this generation of economists are trained to think of the economy as completely separate from politics. And that in the post war period, so that leads to what is called the Walratian general equilibrium theory, and I'll be happy to explain that later.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Involved in, but those expectations are codified in a kind of a legal framework, right? So institutions, the formal institution is law. And informal institutions are cultural norms and notions are right and wrong and justice and all this. So Adam Smith, according to, I think is a convincing strain of thought was an institutionalist. He understood that, yes, the sphere of private behavior, private interactions, laissez-faire, actually sits on a foundation which is of human creation, the system of property rights and the system of power relations and all of that. Politics was already there.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The butcher So, I think the way to think about it is just to sort of get out something which I think is kind of important, which is institutions. Now, there have been many different readings of Adam Smith, and so I'll come to that in a little bit. But just to get it out there, when you talk about institutions, you're talking about the system of implicit and explicit social constraints within which we exist, right? So we are having the spontaneous conversation, but in the context of a building, Which is subject to certain zoning laws, and so on. And in current zoning laws, we cannot smoke.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This idea is not really there in Smith. And one of the things that people sometimes get surprised about, and I always tell this to my students, is read his chapter on wages in the wealth of nations. And he says very clearly that there is a difference in power between those who own property and workers who don't own property. So this idea that the market is sort of this place where equals meet to create contracts, that was not in Smith. It was not in Ricardo. And of course, you know, there was not there in Mars. But if you evoke Marx, then people often say, well, you talk about socialism. Well, Smith was not a socialist.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. But also, like, the rational individual general equilibrium theory, all of these things are supposedly just happen. And in that sense, this idea of laissez-faire that the economy is fundamentally pre-political, that it arises before politics, rather like the kernel of a walnut. Which the walnut, which is the shell, is if you think constitutional law or politics or law that emanates from politics, that would encase this thing called the economy. And only under extreme circumstances, this neoclassical economics, if there is quote-unquote market failure, then the state can step in a little bit to do this, that, or the other. But fundamentally, leave the market be and you're familiar with this argument. Yeah.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the question of law's role in structuring the economy, this kind of lurks in that intellectual tradition. And one of the implications was that the economy is not some natural transhistorical institution or thing, but it's profoundly a product of history. And I think that's where the big split arises, because if you teach or if you study neoclassical economics, it is taught in a way by which the economy is treated as something eternal, as something almost in naturalistic terms. And therefore...”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, great. To some extent, David Ricardo or Karl Marx, the physiocrats. I mean, so you had a range of authors in a wide range, ideologically not necessarily on the same page, but they had a vision of capitalism, which so the original name of economics was political economy. And that meant that you cannot really talk about economic questions without thinking simultaneously about politics.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the orthodoxy is neoclassical economics. It comes from an intellectual tradition which... So, if I may differ a little bit with what you said about Adam Smith Adam Smith is not the forerunner of neoclassical economics. The expression invisible hand, in fact, I have my students do this experiment every time because it's an 800-page book, The Wealth of Nations. How many times does the expression invisible hand appear there once? So the point here is that there was an older idea of what markets and of capitalism are. And that gets revived again in the 1920s and 30s, and I'll talk about that later. But that older idea, which is called classical political economy, did not make any assumptions about human behavior that human beings are inherently rational, that markets behave in this optimal manner at full employment, that would be neoclassical economics, right? That knowledge is more or less a perfect. There was none of that.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The technical stuff. So it's interesting that you pose it that way because one of the things that I do teach in econometrics is method. It's not just about number crunching, but where do you get the numbers from? And so, like, weaving in these questions of method as we're trying to understand social and economic reality is it makes for A solid training in economics. So those questions of method. Woven into the construction of theory, that kind of informs the way I teach. And why that matters, not just as kind of an intellectual exercise, but why that matters for practical issues like what you guys were talking about.”
2026-02-21 · Odd Lots · Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source