The economics of war: Vikings, Conquistadors and Vietnam
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How does economics help us understand conflicts through history?
That’s the question that economist and journalist Duncan Weldon tries to answer in his new book, Blood and Treasure.
Tim talks to Duncan about the economic perspective on Viking raiders, Spanish conquest and the Vietnam war.
Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Neil Churchill Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:30.3 | Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:34.0 | We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news, in life and in war. |
| 0:39.7 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:45.5 | We economists are always banging on about the surprising and counterintuitive things that we can spot in the world around us to our super cool economics goggles. |
| 0:55.5 | And rightly so, economics goggles are cool. |
| 0:58.5 | So put on a pair with me and let's gaze at the world around us, which happens to contain |
| 1:03.8 | clashing swords, flying cannonballs and exploding bombs. |
| 1:08.4 | We will be joined in our observations by journalist, economist and friend of |
| 1:13.0 | the programme Duncan Weldon. He's written a new book, Blood and Treasure, which uses these |
| 1:18.9 | economics goggles to study war and conflict. So we should think of some examples, and one of the |
| 1:25.7 | ones that caught my eye was the Vikings. |
| 1:28.5 | So I would have thought that being pillaged by Vikings is very bad news for your economy. |
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