From Alpha To Omega

This week our guest is Dr. William Paul Cockshott, a reader in the Computer Science Department of Glasgow University. Paul was trained as an economist, then as a computer scientist, and he has made contributions to the fields of image compression, 3D television, and parallel compilers. He is also known for his work in applying econophysics to classical economics, the field of economic computabilit...

This week our guest is Matias Vernengo. Matias is an Associate Professor of Economics, at Bucknell University, and a former Senior Manager of Economic Research at the Central Bank of Argentina. He blogs regularly at his site Naked Keynesianism, as well as for Triple Crisis, and is currently the co-editor of the Review of Keynesian Economics. We discuss a paper he recently co-authored with David Fi...

This week our guest is Conor McCabe. Conor is a Research Fellow in the School of Social Justice in University College Dublin, and has just released the second edition of his book, 'Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions That Shaped the Irish Economy'. The book is a brilliant class analysis of the Irish economy since the origins of the state, and seeks to give a deep systemic structural analysis...

The guest on this years Christmas edition is David Blacker. David is a Professor of Philosophy of Education and Legal Studies at the University of Delaware. His academic background is in the history of philosophy, and his writings pursue insights from that tradition within the context of contemporary education problems. His essays have appeared in the Monthly Review magazine, and he has just relea...

This week our guest is Dan Kervick. By day Dan works in the book publishing industry. By night, Dan is an independent scholar, specialising in the work of the British Philosopher David Hume, and a regular blogger on progressive and egalitarian economics over on: http://neweconomicperspectives.org We discuss the institutional working of the banking system, how reserves really work, bubble blowing a...

This week our guest is Dr Marco Raugei. Marco is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University (UK), and a Senior Researcher with the UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change of ESCI - Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain). His main research interests are in theoretical improvements of existing approaches for e...

This week we are joined by Professor Matheus Grasselli. Matheus is the Deputy Director of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, and an associate professor at McMaster University, where he is the co-director of PhiMac, the Financial Mathematics Laboratory. He also writes a blog on Quantitative Finance for the Fields Institute, where he discusses his work, and thoughts on econo...

This week we have the second part of our interview with C. Derick Varn. We discuss Derick’s new on-line literary journal 'Former People, A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers', the origins of modernism, the influence of Freud, relativity, and quantum mechanics on modernism, modernism's role in politics, and of course, a little Marx. Derick also reads a few excerpts from his writings and poetry. You can...

This week we are joined again by C. Derick Varn. Derick is a poet, teacher, and theorist. He blogs for the (Dis)Loyal Opposition to Modernity, Symptomatic Commentary, and is one of the chief editors of the on-line socialist magazine, the North Star. He also co-hosts the ‘Pop The Left’ podcast with Doug Lain, and has just started a new on-line literary magazine, Former People: A Journal of Bangs an...

This week we are joined by the renowned Marxist economist Michael Roberts. Michael predicted the whole economic and social crisis we now find ourselves in, years before it occurred. He is a working economist in the city of London, and the author of the book ‘The Great Recession’, which gives his Marxist analysis of the current crisis. You can read his prolific writings over on his excellent blog,...

This week, Doug Lain, the host of the excellent Dietsoap podcast, has returned to the show to tell us about his novel ‘Billy Moon’, that is due out from his publishers, Tor, on the 27th of August. Using Doug’s novel for the basis of the conversation, we meander through an array of topics including the May 1968 aborted revolution in France, the interaction of ideology, architecture, and space, the...

This week we are joined by Charles Eisenstein. Charles is an author and public speaker, and self-described "degrowth activist". His book ‘Sacred Economics - Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition’, puts forward a radical alternative to our current monetary economy, based on degrowth, realigning money with ecology, changing the nature of work, and the return of the gift. Charles has a re...

This week we are joined by Nicole Foss, of the ‘Automatic Earth’ blog. Before being a renowned blogger on energy and finance, Nicole was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, where she specialized in nuclear safety in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, and conducted research into electricity policy at the EU level. Nicole has just finished a long speaking tour of t...

This week we are joined by Prof. Bill Black. Bill is Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is an expert in white collar crime and banking regulation, and developed the concept of ‘control fraud’, in which a business executive uses the business he or she controls as a weapon to commit fraud. He is also the author of the book: ‘The Best Way to Rob a B...

This weeks guest is Professor Doyne Farmer. Doyne is a physicist, econo-physicist, and founder of the Prediction Company, which brought insights from physics to the world of finance and stock markets. He is a Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, where he co-directs the Oxford Martin Programme on Complexity, and is External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We ask him about econo-physi...

After a brief holiday to bask in the cold and brutal wet weather of Ireland and England, the show is back on the road, fueled up, and raring to go. This weeks guest is Professor Alan Freeman, where we talk about the falling rate of profit, crises of capitalism, and our way out of the current economic mire. The interview is loosely based about a paper of his just published in the Journal of Austral...

This week we speak to Professor Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, at the University of Cambridge. Prof. Wadhams is an expert in Arctic sea-ice, and is a review editor for the physical sciences component of the upcoming 2014 IPCC (or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ) Fifth...

Welcome to the 1st anniversary of the 'From Alpha To Omega' podcast. This weeks guest is KMO, host of the C-Realm and Z-Realm podcasts, and the author of ‘Conversations on Collapse’. We talk at length about Zombies, Vampires and the Apocalyptic Collapse meme. We also discuss his experiences living on a former commune in Tennessee, his recent move to the sprawling metropolis that is New York City,...

This weeks guest is the C Derick Varn, Poet, Lecturer, and resident of South Korea. Derick writes for ‘The (Dis)Loyal Opposition Blog’, and includes among his interests: alternative visions of the future, the failures of nationalist Marxism, early Leninism, and the relationship between anarchism and Marxism. We discuss the Russian revolution, the Vanguard Party and it's problems, the profound fail...

This weeks guest is the Jazz Pianist, Marxist, and YouTube Star Brendan Cooney, who has blazed a trail for himself on YouTube with his totally cool videos explaining Marx’s insights into the functioning of our capitalist economic system. He also is the man behind the Kapitalism101 blog. We discuss the success or failure of the Occupy movement, and critique it’s organisational structure. We also ta...

This week we welcome back Prof. Andrew Kliman to the show, where we discuss Marx’s value theory, his book ‘Reclaiming Marx’s Capital’ where he tries to dispel some of the myths surrounding Marx’s theories, and the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. I've recently just finished his book, and would recommend it to anyone wishing to get a deeper understanding of the issues we discuss in this show....

This weeks guest is Ugo Bardi, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence. He specialises in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, or ASPO, is the president ASPO Italy, and a contributor to the Oil Drum, the best energy blog on the w...

This week we welcome back Philip Pilkington to the show to talk about his latest writings on the life and times of Friedrich Hayek, the ideologue behind the Neoliberal project. Philip came over to my house this week and we sat about and waxed lyrical on such highfalutin topics as Classical Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Ordoliberalism. We also got around to political propoganda and the Mont Perelin...

Our guest week this week is Prof. Stephanie Kelton, Assistant Professor of Macroeconomics, Finance, and Money and Banking at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. We continue our exploration of Modern Monetary Theory, where we talk about full employment and the job guarantee, the fiscal cliff and the euro crisis, and the role of bond vigilantes and inflation, in times of energy crises. Professo...

On this Christmas episode, our theoretical physicist guest is Geoffrey West, Professor and former President of the Sante Fe Institute. We discuss his recent groundbreaking work in the world of biological and social complexity. In the last few years, the Professor has applied his high-energy atom smashing physics know-how, to the field of biology and came up with some startlingly general results, w...