IEA Podcast

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by IEA Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Dr Kristian Niemietz. The panel discusses the Clacton by-election and the rise of joke candidates, the very different ways the populist left and right use the word “establishment,” the debate sparked by J.D. Vance over whether GDP is the right...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Director General Lord Hannan speaks with Katherine Rich, Chief Executive of BusinessNZ and a former National Party Member of Parliament in New Zealand. The conversation covers the difference between being pro-market and merely pro-business, New Zealand’s decades-long shift towards deregulation, the rise of populism across Anglosphere politics, t...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Dr Kristian Niemietz for the weekly round up of the week in economics. The conversation covers three topics: Andy Burnham’s speech on devolution and decentralisation, a new report showing Britain has suffered the biggest fall in household wealth in...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, IEA Director of Communications Callum Price speaks with Casey Given, Executive Director of Young Voices, about how classical liberal ideas are communicated in a changing media environment. The conversation covers the shift from the traditional think tank model to new media, the rise of what Young Voices calls “messenger experts”, the widening politica...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Dr Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. Bateman has taught economics at both Cambridge and Oxford, and her earlier books include The Sex Factor and Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe. The conversation traces the economic role o...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Dr Kristian Niemietz to discuss whether Britain has become ungovernable, the state of public spending since the lockdowns, and the prospect of a seventh prime minister in ten years. They also mark ten years since the Brexit referendum and turn to t...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Dr Christopher Snowdon speaks with Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police officer and ex-Australian Border Force official who spent his final years in public service working on illicit tobacco. The conversation looks at the Laffer Curve as a real world example, using Australia’s tobacco duty, where revenue has f...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, IEA Director of Communications Callum Price is joined by Editorial Director Dr Kristian Niemietz and Senior Economist Dr Valentin Boboc. They discuss the Government’s proposed ban on social media for under-16s, the news that Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire, and economist Thomas Piketty’s latest proposals for degrowth and a global c...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs briefing, IEA Director of Communications Callum Price speaks with Dr Christopher Snowdon, the IEA’s Head of Lifestyle Economics, about his new book Inside the Sausage Factory: The Illusion of Evidence-Based Policy Making. The conversation looks at four public health measures from the 2010s, plain packaging for tobacco, minimum pricing for alcohol, the sugary d...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator, author and former investment banker, about his chapter “Why We Lost Faith in Capitalism” from the new IEA book On Morality, Human Behaviour and Economics, available now in bookshops and on Amazon. The conversation traces British attitudes to busines...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Callum Price is joined by Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz to discuss three of the week’s biggest economic stories. The conversation opens on the Piketty and Stiglitz-backed “roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth,” examining whether degrowth is a serious economic proposal or a fashionable pose that falls ap...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Callum Price speaks with Max Marlow, Director of Public Affairs at the Adam Smith Institute, about Tax Freedom Day 2025, which fell on Saturday 6th June, the latest date ever recorded. They discuss what the figure actually measures, how the tax take now stands at 36.1% of GDP, and why the complexity of the UK tax system is compounding the burden on ho...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, host Callum Price is joined by the IEA’s new Director General Lord Hannan and Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz. The episode covers the OBR’s admission that it underestimated the fiscal damage from the Government’s employer National Insurance rise, the banning of American commentators Hasan Piker and Usman Khan from entering the UK, and Zach Polans...

In this IEA talk, Dr Stephen Davies, Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs, delivers a lecture on the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, and what the long history of economic growth tells us about how the modern world came to be. The talk covers the extraordinary transformation in living standards since 1800 — from a world where one in four children died before their fir...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Callum Price is joined by Managing Editor Daniel Freeman and Senior Economist Dr Valentin Boboc to discuss three of the week's biggest policy stories. The conversation opens with Tony Blair's 5,000-word essay on what the Government is getting wrong, examining his ten-point plan for what he calls "radical centrism" and how much of it lines up with long...

In this Free the Power podcast, IEA Energy Analyst and COO Andy Mayer speaks with David Turver, independent energy expert and author of the Eigenvalues Substack. David has been writing for the IEA on the costs of net zero and has a forthcoming essay examining whether opposition party energy policies could meaningfully address those costs. The conversation focuses on the real and growing financial...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, Managing Editor Daniel Freeman speaks with Dr George Maher, Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, former partner at Tillinghast Towers Perrin, and author of Economic Success and Failure in the Roman Empire. The conversation centres on Dr Maher's new IEA Substack paper, Predicting the Unpredictable, which applies actuarial methods to fore...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz is joined by Senior Policy Fellow Lord Frost and Managing Editor Daniel Freeman to discuss three stories dominating British economic debate. The conversation covers a Financial Times investigation into London’s slowing growth and falling productivity, the Government’s cost of living announcements including tariff c...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs Economics 101 explainer, Dr. Stephen Davies breaks down one of the most profound yet misunderstood concepts in economics: opportunity cost. The episode covers why economists are always talking about costs, what scarcity really means, and why absolutely nothing in life is ever truly free. Dr. Davies explains why time is the most radically scarce resource of all...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs interview, IEA Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz speaks with Dr. Rainer Zitelmann, historian, sociologist, and author of New Space Capitalism , about the rise of private space industry and what it reveals about markets, incentives, and the limits of state-led enterprise. They examine how space exploration has shifted from a government monopoly to a competit...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, host Callum Price is joined by Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz and Senior Economist Dr Valentin Boboc. The episode examines the political turmoil in Westminster, the Government’s King’s Speech, and what both mean for the UK economy. The discussion centres on the bond market, fiscal credibility, and why political chaos matters far more when public...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs briefing, Dr Kristian Niemietz is joined by IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Dr Christopher Snowdon to examine a question with no easy answer: what kind of economy does Britain actually have? Neither neoliberal nor socialist, Chris makes the case that the UK has drifted into what he calls a “capitalist command economy” — one where industries remain largely in p...

In this Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, Lord Frost is joined by Kristian Niemietz, Editorial Director, and Dr Valentin Boboc, Senior Economist, to work through three of the week’s most pressing economic questions. The episode opens with a debate sparked by a Daily Telegraph piece from former IEA chair Neil Record, who argues that Britain may not have a housing shortage in the conventional s...

In this bonus episode of the Institute of Economic Affairs podcast, host Callum Price is joined by Director General Lord Frost and Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz to answer listener and viewer questions. Released to mark the podcast recently passing its 200th episode milestone, the panel tackles a wide range of topics submitted by the audience, from public spending and austerity to inflation,...

This week on the IEA Podcast, Lord Frost, Dr Kristian Niemietz and host Callum Price dig into the Bank of England’s decision to hold rates at 3.75% — and whether the Governor should still have his job after the near 10% inflation disaster of 2021-22. With three wildly different scenarios on the table and the spectre of rates hitting 5.5%, the question is whether the Bank is still too soft on infla...