VoxTalks Economics

In another of our special episodes recorded at the CEPR annual Symposium, we ask: is it time for Europe to rearm?The message from the US could not be clearer: it is time for European countries to take care of their own security. If Europe decides to rearm, it has the industrial base – but Moritz Schularick of the Kiel Institute and CEPR warns that it isn’t converting that capacity into credible deterrence. Tim Phillips asks him what European rearmament could mean in practice: not just scaling up production but buying smarter and investing in next-generation technologies that can spill over into the wider economy. And is there enough political will to create a European defence architecture that can stand on its own?

In another of our episodes recorded at the CEPR Paris Symposium, we ask: When Gen AI can do an undergraduate’s problem set in seconds, how should teaching, and the syllabus, respond? Who better to answer this than Wendy Carlin of UCL and CEPR? Wendy – who has recently become Dame Wendy – was at the symposium to talk about her project to change economics teaching through the CORE Project, which more than 500 institutions use to teach introductory economics in a way that flips the standard textbook treatment on it head.Recently Wendy and CORE have been working to harness the power of AI to help students apply their knowledge in unfamiliar settings, to reason and discriminate, to make AI into what she calls “A cognitive sparring partner”. She tells Tim Phillips what that means for the Economics Major, and why that might create economics graduates with the skills that employers value. Try CORE, it’s free: https://core-econ.org

Another special episode recorded at the CEPR annual symposium in Paris. The Trump administration says it wants America to lead in AI, but what does that mean in practice for trade and productivity? Will AI make growth great again, or just inflate a short-term capital spending boom?Gary Gensler of MIT and CEPR (also a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission) unpacks the administration’s AI action plan, helps us work out what's happening to export controls, and untangles the deal-making geopolitics of AI hardware. 

At the CEPR annual Symposium in Paris we sat down with Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a distinguished fellow of CEPR, and a global authority on geopolitics and trade to discuss the profound changes in the multilateral order in 2025, how countries will adjust to this new normal – and whether the changes we have seen will ever be unwound.

Who would be a policymaker right now? The list of economic problems that we need to solve ranges from “very difficult” to “existential”. An ambitious new book collects the ideas of many influential economists on how to approach these challenges. But can it avoid the mistakes of previous attempts to find an economic policy consensus?Andrés Velasco and Tim Besley are two of the editors of The London Consensus. Tim Phillips joined them at The London School of Economics to ask why the book was created, how policymakers can use it, and whether we should be wary of economists bearing paradigms.Here's a link to the the book (you can download it too).