Robert Barro on Disasters

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2008

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

Robert Barro of Harvard University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks about disasters--significant national and international catastrophes such as the Great Depression, war, and the flu epidemic in the early part of the 20th century. What do we know about these disasters? What is the likelihood of a catastrophic financial crisis in the United States? How serious is the current economic situation in the United States? The conversation also includes discussions of economic stimulus, tax policy, and the recent worldwide rise in commodity prices.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
0:29.9	Our email address is mailadicontalk.org.
0:33.6	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.4	My guest today is Robert Barrow, Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and
0:41.8	the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
0:46.4	Robert, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:48.4	Thanks.
0:49.4	Great to be here again.
0:50.4	Now I know you're currently working on disasters, and in the course of talking about disasters,
0:55.9	which is our main topic, I hope we end up talking about some of the macro wishes
0:59.8	that the Dad don't mean to scare any of our listeners, but they might be related.
1:04.0	So let's just start with disasters generally.
1:06.9	Tell us what you mean by disasters and how you're studying them.
1:10.6	I'm taking a macroeconomic perspective, so the main event from the U.S. history is the
1:17.2	Great Depression of the early 1930s, which I'm sure everybody is familiar with, to some
1:22.5	degree, but I'm taking a broader perspective on that, looking across many countries and
1:28.3	the long history.
1:30.1	Biggest macroeconomic disasters in this history going into the 19th century is the World
	...

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