Loading…
Hosted by Michael Munger · 🇺🇸 US · EN-US · 80 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
" 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 ( 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.....
Michael Munger hosts The Answer Is Transaction Costs, a science show with 80 episodes published.
Send us Fan Mail We start with a simple mystery: how the same person can make a proud plan at night and break it in the morning, even while still believing the plan is good. We connect akrasia, free will, and moral respo
Send us Fan Mail We trace a straight line from a 1697 blasphemy execution to modern cancel culture by focusing on one variable: the cost of turning speech into coordinated punishment. We break down how social media creat
Send us Fan Mail We tell a story about German academic quarter hours-- akademische Viertel -- and use it to argue that lateness is an economics problem of coordination, incentives, and transaction costs, not just manners
Send us Fan Mail We try to make sense of a real problem many of us feel: paying a lot for U.S. healthcare while still waiting months to see a doctor. We trace how engineered transaction costs, from the Flexner Report to
Send us Fan Mail BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: The information in this episode comes from Red Flags Press. Their main web site is very useful for research purposes, and I recommend it! We follow the idea of the “social parasite”
Send us Fan Mail We break down how sportsbooks function as brokers that match contracts, set prices through the point spread, and earn their living through the vig. Kevin Braig joins us to explain how law, technology, an
Send us Fan Mail Hereditary monarchy seems like a ridiculous way to pick a leader, yet it dominates most of human political history. We argue the reason is transaction costs: succession systems survive when they settle “
Send us Fan Mail Permits feel like “just paperwork”, until they quietly become the biggest barrier to building, investing, and even basic economic growth. We use Chile’s fight with “permisologia” to show how bureaucracy
Send us Fan Mail 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 qui
Send us Fan Mail 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, p
Send us Fan Mail 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 monopo
Send us Fan Mail 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
Send us Fan Mail 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
Send us Fan Mail We trace how Alex Schuessler, the once and once-again President of SmartEquip --also a scholar of expressive choice!--built a platform that makes machines more profitable by erasing the friction between
Send us Fan Mail We explore why money became the default middleman and how a modern platform can make barter practical by slashing the costs of search, matching, and trust. Founder Jassim Baqer shares the story behind Tb
Send us Fan Mail Tracing out Adam Smith’s Book IV, chapters 1–6, to show how mercantilism mistakes money for wealth, how protection creates monopolies at home, and why free exchange raises real prosperity. Smith defends
Send us Fan Mail We trace how Adam Smith solves a historical puzzle: why Europe’s path to prosperity inverted the “natural order,” and how commerce quietly dissolved feudal power to make room for liberty. The story follo
Send us Fan Mail A conversation with Andrew Wagner, production and manufacturing engineer, now in aerospace, but with experience also in the auto industry. We trace how transaction costs shape production, from Adam Smith
Send us Fan Mail This episode explores Book 2 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, focusing on his revolutionary concept of the "division of stock" and how capital accumulation drives economic growth. • Smith distinguishes
Send us Fan Mail Book Two of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" provides the conceptual foundation for understanding how commercial society sustains growth through capital accumulation and the employment of stock. Smit
Sponsor detection runs nightly. Check back soon.
No public pitch examples yet for this show.
Generate your own personalised pitchBased on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:
Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.
Shows with the most semantically similar episode content. Pitch one, pitch all; producers cluster.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs has a verified contact on file. Create a free PitchCentric account to access it and generate a personalised pitch in seconds. Research at least 3 recent episodes first and lead with a specific angle that serves their science audience.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs is hosted by Michael Munger. The show is categorised under science (social) and has published 80 episodes.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs has published 80 episodes.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs regularly covers science, social, news. It sits in the science category, with a social focus.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs is accessible for guests with genuine science expertise. A personalised, episode-aware pitch will still outperform a generic one every time.
The Answer Is Transaction Costs hasn't explicitly signalled guest openness in recent episodes. That doesn't rule out pitching. your hook just needs to be especially compelling and relevant to their recent content.
Episodes of The Answer Is Transaction Costs average 58 minutes. a focused format where a clear narrative arc and tight preparation matter most.
Our data rates The Answer Is Transaction Costs's guest bar at 80/100 (Premium tier). Established thought leaders with verified media credentials. Sign in to PitchCentric to see how your own Pod Score compares against this show.
Methodology. Booking Probability™ blends Listen Score, 30-day Virality, open-to-guests detection, and Apple ratings. Data refreshed every 60 minutes. Listen Score and Booking Probability are calculated by PitchCentric. Last enriched 11 days ago.