Robert H. Frank: The Darwin Economy
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 100 years time, Charles Darwin will be viewed as a better economist than Adam Smith, according to economics professor Robert H. Frank.
In his new book 'The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good', Frank argues that whilst Smith was correct to point out the benefits of competition, Darwin went further by showing how some times competition over rank could produce benefits to the individual at the expense of the group. This insight, believes Frank, applies to the economics of human societies as much as it does to the animal kingdom.
Recorded at The London School of Economics, Prof Frank explains his ideas to Paul Mason and an audience of economists and scientists, as well as the free marketeers he criticises.
Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and a regular Economic View columnist for the New York Times, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos. His books, which have been translated into 22 languages, include The Winner-Take-All Society (with Philip Cook); The Economic Naturalist; Luxury Fever; What Price the Moral High Ground?; and Principles of Economics (with Ben Bernanke). The Darwin Economy is published by Princeton University Press.
Paul Mason is the Economics Editor of BBC 2's Newsnight and is author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed.
Transcript
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| 0:39.5 | This week's program isn't our usual documentary format. Instead it comes from the London School of |
| 0:44.8 | Economics where Professor Robert Frank explains in front of an audience the |
| 0:49.2 | thinking behind his new book The Darwin Economy. He's interviewed by Newsnight Economics. I'm Paul Mason and in this |
| 1:09.1 | edition of analysis I'll be speaking to the economist Professor Robert Frank about the startling claim in his new book that Charles Darwin is a better guide to economic reality than Adam Smith. |
| 1:20.0 | Robert Frank is an economics professor at Cornell University. |
| 1:24.0 | His books have focused on the way status and emotion affect our economic choices |
| 1:29.0 | and on the way competition can produce increasingly winner takes all confrontations. |
| 1:35.0 | He's also co-author with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke of the textbook |
| 1:40.1 | Principles of Economics. |
| 1:41.8 | If only we had all read that before things went wrong. |
| 1:46.9 | Robert Frank, anybody who has read your book comes away with the startling image of the bull elk |
| 1:53.4 | and its big wide antlers. |
| 1:55.1 | Explain what you're getting at there. |
| 1:56.7 | What do you mean by that metaphor, that analysis? |
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