The Answer Is Transaction Costs
"The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it." -Adam Smith (WoN, Bk I, Chapter 5)
In which the Knower of Important Things shows how transaction costs explain literally everything. Plus TWEJ, and answers to letters.
If YOU have questions, submit them to our email at taitc.email@gmail.com
There are two kinds of episodes here:
1. For the most part, episodes June-August are weekly, short (<20 mins), and address a few topics.
2. Episodes September-May are longer (1 hour), and monthly, with an interview with a guest.
Finally, a quick note: This podcast is NOT for Stacy Hockett. He wanted you to know that.....
The Answer Is Transaction Costs
Latest Episodes
Honor Among Thieves: Anja Shortland and Ransomware
A talk with Dr Anya Shortland about the economics of ransomware and the gray-zone institutions that let extortion markets function when nobody can truly enforce trust. We dig into how cyber insurance quietly becomes a form of governance, why da...
Are Transaction Costs Really Just Human Distance
We connect Adam Smith’s moral psychology to the modern idea of transaction costs and argue that the biggest frictions in markets start with the cost of understanding other people. We show how sympathy, propriety, self command, and reputation tu...
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Episode 10: Always Contemporary
We assess Adam Smith’s enduring ideas—moral authorization of commerce, division of labor, emergent order—and confront where his optimism breaks: how democratic politics and business fuse to create monopoly privilege. The result is a maintenance...
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Episode 9: Spending, Taxing, and Debt
We walk through Book Five of The Wealth of Nations to map a state that defends, adjudicates, and builds wisely, then pays for it without killing growth. From militias to standing armies, fee-based courts to salaried judges, turnpikes to basic s...
Adam Smith Episode 8: A Nation of Shopkeepers
Smith closes Book IV by dismantling mercantilism through the lens of colonial policy, monopoly, and rent seeking, then weighs physiocracy against the system of natural liberty. We trace why colonies grew despite Europe, not because of it, and h...
Fan Mail
Hi Mike, I'm listening to your episode on pins and division of labour and it makes me think about how "specialization of labour" can be misleading, at least in today's economy. It may be that specialization in a particular factory job involves being particularly capable at a particular rote task, e.g. laying a brass wire flat, but equally a person who has particular knowledge of law, biology and programming may be in a sense exceptionally specialized in the task of "using large language models to aggregate medical patents". Multidisciplinary and specialized sound like they should opposites, but they're really not!
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