Episode summary
Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics | Odd Lots
Odd Lots
· · Hosts: Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal · Guests: Jamee Moudud
Summary
Jamee Moudud argues that the core divide in economics is not just left versus right, but two different ways of understanding the economy itself. Neoclassical economics treats markets as an almost natural system that should be left alone except in cases of “market failure,” while older classical political economy, in his telling, saw markets as embedded in law, power, and institutions. He says Adam Smith is routinely misread as a simple free-market icon, when Smith and other classical thinkers were more concerned with property, class power, and the institutional rules that make markets possible.
Moudud traces how neoclassical economics became dominant in the late 19th and 20th centuries, especially as economics became more mathematical and detached from history and politics. He says postwar economics was heavily shaped by state funding, war planning, and models borrowed from engineering, producing a profession that often prizes rigor in the abstract over engagement with social reality. By contrast, he favors an approach grounded in history, legal structure, and evidence from actual institutions.
Applied to Zohran Mamdani’s agenda, Moudud argues that rent controls, taxation, and other interventions are not alien intrusions into a self-contained market; they are political choices about who bears social costs. He says affordability, pollution, and housing are all shaped by law and power, and that policy should be designed with that reality in mind rather than assuming markets are prepolitical.
Key takeaways
- Moudud says neoclassical economics treats the economy as an autonomous system, while classical political economy saw it as inseparable from law and politics.
- He argues Adam Smith was not a simple free-market theorist and that the “invisible hand” is overused as a shorthand for Smith’s thought.
- Moudud says the rise of mathematically driven postwar economics helped detach the field from social reality and historical method.
- He rejects the idea that “market failure” is the right lens for pollution or housing, saying social costs are built into legal and property arrangements.
- On rent control and billionaire taxes, he argues the real question is how policy allocates costs, not whether intervention is inherently illegitimate.
Notable quotes
“the economy is not some natural transhistorical institution or thing but is profoundly a product of history”
“the orthodoxy is neocclassical economics”
“there was an older idea of what markets and of capitalism are and that gets revived again in the 1920s and 30s”
“the concern is that the profession is training idiots savons”
“market failures don't actually exist”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts, radio, news. — Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLotss podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal — And I'm Tracy Aloway. — Tracy, it's uh January 28th. I think our new mayor in here in New York City, I mean, he hasn't done much, but the snowstorm seemed to go fairly well. Not too many big disruptions.
I wasn't here, but you were able to walk around, get out of your apartment. — There have been several mayors whose like entire reputation failed because they couldn't handle a snowstorm and so he seems to have passed the first test. So, I
It feels like a low bar for New York mayors. I got to say — My guess is if we looked at uh I agree it is a low bar but on the other hand it's like okay first big test of the new administration seems to be doing well. I don't think however ultimately the Zoran Donni administration will be judged on snow removal like this is not going to be how history probably remembers how well
No and he certainly wasn't elected on his snow removal capabilities. Although I did see the videos of him, you know, getting his shovel out and — He's so good at like retail politics. Like that was like such he was so good at that. Yeah.
But speaking of tests, I mean there are bigger tests coming up, right? Mostly concentrated in the economic policies here, — Right? I think we know like sort of and of course we talked to him but like the affordability question in New York City clearly central one of the if the most central topic in the campaign
And what I would say is that the very most not all of them but at least a handful of the ideas that he has proposed are the types of ideas that like economists hate them right so especially anything where the government is intervening in rent the idea of like I there might not be a more hated idea among economists than anything that smacks rent control or anything like that.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- rent control
- history of economics
- economics and legal theory
- institutional and political foundations of capitalism
- orthodoxy vs heterodoxy in economic thought
Watch the episode
Watch “Jamee Moudud on the Intellectual Roots of Zohranomics | Odd Lots” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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