Tomas Sedlacek: The Economics of Good and Evil
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What have the Book of Genesis and the movie Fight Club got to do with GDP? According to the radical Czech economist, Tomas Sedlacek, quite a lot. He believes notions of sin and belief recorded in ancient texts should influence our thinking about the contemporary economy - and he describes the biblical story of the 7 fat cows and 7 lean cows as "the first macro-economic forecast". He argues passionately that we need to make the economy work for us, rather than us working for the state of the economy. And he condemns the way most nations have got themselves hooked on debt, in a never-ending cycle.
Evan Davis interviewed Sedlacek,at University College London as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
Producer: Hugh Levinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the first in a new series of analysis. |
| 0:03.1 | On the menu this week, Sin, Money and Fight Club. |
| 0:06.4 | What's not to like? |
| 0:07.7 | Over to Evan Davis. This is the soundtrack of a show that packed out theatres in Prague in Slovakia, |
| 0:17.0 | and Finland, and which even came to London. |
| 0:25.0 | To the sound of a swanny whistle a rather strange-looking individual cycles onto the stage in a |
| 0:37.6 | suit, scarlet t-shirt with billowing red hair and a bushy ginger beard. He dismounts and starts talking and he starts talking about economics. Yes economics but not as you know it. |
| 0:50.0 | It's the stage version of a densely argued 300 page book called the economics of good and evil. |
| 0:56.0 | The author is a young check thinker called Thomas Sedler check. |
| 1:01.0 | The name, Thomas Sedra. Sedler check. No, no, no, |
| 1:03.7 | don't know the sedler check. |
| 1:04.7 | Job, |
| 1:08.0 | job, job, |
| 1:09.4 | Madam, economy, yeah. |
| 1:11.6 | Now economics has had a difficult few years, there's been a post-crash crisis of |
| 1:16.4 | confidence in the subject and its traditional way of thinking. Sedlachik is one of those who |
| 1:22.0 | writes about it in an untraditional way. |
| 1:24.8 | His work mashes economic models up with the Bible and the Matrix, with an outcome that has been |
| 1:30.0 | called Humanomics. |
| 1:32.1 | I caught up with him in London. I hope you enjoy the |
| 1:34.9 | encounter as much as I do. Welcome to University College London where we're the guests of the School of |
| 1:44.2 | Slavonic and East European Studies in celebrating its 100th birthday. We're at an |
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