Macro N Cheese

This week Steve talks with Linwood Tauheed, someone we’ve heard about from several of our recent guests. Dr. Tauheed is an institutionalist economist; he looks at the economy not as a macroeconomy or a microeconomy, but as an economy that's founded on institutions. Beyond the economy, or perhaps intertwined with it, institutional frameworks enable and constrain all parts of social life. They are sometimes the unconscious or conscious ideas that structure the way ordinary people live their lives. Such an expansive, dialectical look at society inspires Steve to take this interview down a number of paths, visiting both recent and distant history. They talk about the stark differences between the French and American revolutions. Slavery was outlawed during the French revolution, which was fought by the poor against the rich: It was a class-based revolution, whereas the American Revolution was a revolution of the very well-off in this country against the monarchy, the very well-off in Britain. And so it wasn't a