Ep. 1039 WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird

The Tom Woods Show

Tom Woods

Politics, Economics, Libertarian, Government, News

4.8 • 3.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2017

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Economist Peter Leeson has just released a challenging new book, via Stanford University Press, that tries to make sense of seemingly irrational practices from far-off times and places -- ranging from wife sales to trial by battle, as well as things far weirder -- through the lens of economics.

Show notes for Ep. 1039

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Tom Woods Show, episode 139.
0:03.6	Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.
0:08.2	Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.
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0:27.5	head to awaytravel.com slash woods and use promo code Woods at checkout.
0:33.4	Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. Very glad to be joined today by Pete Leeson. And we're going to talk about his brand new book, WTF, an economic tour of the Weird. Very interesting new book by Stanford University Press. Pete was on a long time ago, way, way, way back, maybe like before even episode number 200 of the show.
0:54.8	And now here he is with his brand new book, and I've had a number of requests to have him on to talk about it.
0:59.3	That's precisely what we're doing.
1:01.0	Pete is Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University.
1:05.8	Before that, he was a visiting professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and he also taught at West Virginia
1:11.2	University. He is the North American editor of Public Choice and Associate Editor of the Review of
1:17.5	Austrian Economics. Find out more about him at Peter Leeson, L-E-E-S-O-N.com. Pete, welcome back.
1:24.7	Thanks so much for having me, Tom. It's my pleasure to be here. It takes guts to write a book called WTF, for heaven's sake.
1:30.5	I just told people the full title.
1:32.0	But now, let's start off with actually the way you frame this.
1:37.7	At the beginning, you actually talk about rationality and what it means to be rational.
1:42.3	And it sounds to me like you're taking a fairly Misesian approach to what it means to be rational. And it sounds to me like you're taking a fairly
1:44.2	mezesian approach to what it means to be rational. Yeah, I'm taking an entirely
1:49.2	mesesian approach to what it means to be rational. From my perspective, what it means,
1:54.4	and I think from Mises's perspective as well, it simply means that people have goals
	...

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