Textual Analysis of 672 EconTalk Podcasts • Tony Klausing

I’m a big fan of EconTalk, a podcast hosted for over a dozen years by the great spoken word champion of classical liberal ideas, Russ Roberts. Russ is a scholar formerly of George Mason University, now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I appreciate Russ’ candor, his good-naturedness with all types of guests, and the general subject matter of the show: serious–but not too serious–applied microeconomics.

Since I’ve invested several weeks of my life (!) to listening to the show, I thought it would be fun to analyze the available transcripts of 672 of the shows to see what we can find. I got the idea when I heard Patrick Collision of Stripe talk about an analysis he did of Nobel Prize winners to gauge whether innovation in the hard sciences has slowed. I got to thinking: “Were there Nobel Prize Winners in Economics which EconTalk had never even mentioned on the show?” And if so, what could that mean? Theoretically, it might indicate a few things. Maybe a) the winner’s work wasn’t really that great after all; or b) that the English-Language or US-centric nature of the show has made us forget about foreign contributions to economics; or c) Russ’ formal education simply didn’t cover a certain topic; or maybe even that d) Russ’ interests or biases don’t extend to the topics covered by the Prize winner.

So I compiled a list of 672 shows web pages. Each show as an associated “Audio Highlights” section. For recent shows, this is essentially a transcript. For older shows, it really is more like highlights or even jotted-down notes and definitely not transcribed spoken word. I scraped the data from the “Audio Highlights” section for each of the 672 shows. The resulting text file can be found here. The file contains about 5 million words.

I searched the compiled transcripts for mentions of each of the Economics Nobel Prize winners, who were mentioned a total of around 3,000 times. Listeners won’t be surprised to find that F.A. Hayek tops the list of most mentions: 1,308. In fact, if a Nobel Prize-winning economist was mentioned on the show, there was a 1 in 3 chance that it was Hayek. This is fine by me; I find Hayek to be one of the most nuanced and novel social theorists of the 20th Century.

But who else made the top 10? Let’s see:

Top 10 most-mentioned Economics Nobel Prize Winners

Name	Mentions
Friedrich Hayek	1308
Milton Friedman	616
Ronald Coase	303
James M. Buchanan	168
Paul Krugman	156
George Stigler	101
Gary Becker	92
Paul Samuelson	85
Robert Lucas, Jr.	55
Daniel Kahneman	50

The list is heavy on U. Chicago economists: Friedman, Becker, Coase. Russ went to U. Chicago, so this makes sense. The outlier Krugman, perhaps because of his New York Times megaphone, also made the list.

This data might be misleading in some ways, but I did take basic steps to avoid miscounts. For example, the lone female winner of the Economics Nobel, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, had an equally erudite husband, political theorist Vincent Ostrom. I made sure to remove reference’s to Vincent from Elinor’s count. I made sure too that Smiths of the “Adam” type did not count for Smiths of the “Vernon” flavor and took care to separate “Julian Simon” for “Herb Simon.” And when guests talk first names–as in “Merton [Miller] was incredible”–I tried to have that not confuse the count for Robert Merton. I also didn’t give any special count to guests on the show. Paul Romer (not Christina Romer, mind you) was on the show a few times, but even if he spoke for hours, his mentions didn’t get any special increase. I excluded speaker labels and names in the URLs of the Audio Highlights sections.

So, anyway, getting back to my original line of inquiry, were there any Economics Nobel Prize winners who were not mentioned at all? Yes, by my count, there were 18. And were they disproportionately not American? Well, not really. 10 of the 18 were not American. The full results can found at the bottom of this post. Many of the economists who received short shrift of EconTalk attention were econometricians, a group Russ is vocal in critiquing. There are some exceptions however. Oliver Hart, for example, is an American specialist in the field of Law and Economics, which seems like an especially interesting omission.

Incidentally, if Adam Smith had won the Nobel Prize, he would have likely been the second-most mentioned economist. The full phrase “Adam Smith” – not even counting his other rightful “Smith” mentions – was uttered at least 531 times.

Let’s take a look at some other notable EconTalk phrases.

EconTalk notable phrase and mentions

Phrase	Mentions
"the Fed"	1707
"minimum wage"	454
"tax", "taxation", etc.	3671
"regulation", "regulate", etc.	2256
"curious task"	25
"not only to be loved"	16
"emergent"	223
"skin in the game"	134
"bias"	694

I also wanted to gauge what world economies are getting less attention. I measured a country’s mentions per trillion dollars of GDP (I took the average of nominal and PPP GDP). I excluded the USA out of the practical difficulty of counting all the various forms of “U.S.”, “America”, “U.S.A.” and so on.

Top 10 national economies and their mentions per trillion dollars of GDP

National Economy	Mentions / trillion dollars GDP
USA	n/a
China	51
Japan	59
Germany	90
England	214
India	42
France	126
Brazil	17
Italy	64
Canada	124

By this measure, England is getting outsized attention–makes sense, they speak English. India and Brazil espcially are getting notably less attention than their economic output might warrant, while the European countries get, on the whole, get around twice as many mentions as their Asian counterparts, measured against GDP.

Some further research could potentially use a tool like the NLTK to do some sentiment analysis around certian keywords: how is “minimum wage” or “conservative” or “progressive” spoken about?

Full results below.

Nobel Prize Winners in Economics and their number of mentions on Econtalk

Year	Nobel Prize Winner	Mentions
1969	Ragnar Frisch	0
1969	Jan Tinbergen	2
1970	Paul Samuelson	85
1971	Simon Kuznets	17
1972	John Hicks	13
1972	Kenneth Arrow	34
1973	Wassily Leontief	8
1974	Gunnar Myrdal	9
1974	Friedrich Hayek	1308
1975	Leonid Kantorovich	0
1975	Tjalling Koopmans	6
1976	Milton Friedman	616
1977	Bertil Ohlin	4
1977	James Meade	11
1978	Herbert A. Simon	6
1979	Theodore Schultz	8
1979	Arthur Lewis	2
1980	Lawrence Klein	0
1981	James Tobin	12
1982	George Stigler	101
1983	Gérard Debreu	5
1984	Richard Stone	1
1985	Franco Modigliani	6
1986	James M. Buchanan	168
1987	Robert Solow	23
1988	Maurice Allais	0
1989	Trygve Haavelmo	0
1990	Harry Markowitz	9
1990	Merton Miller	9
1990	William F. Sharpe	19
1991	Ronald Coas	303
1992	Gary Becker	92
1993	Robert Fogel	6
1993	Douglass North	29
1994	John Harsanyi	0
1994	John Forbes Nash	2
1994	Reinhard Selten	0
1995	Robert Lucas, Jr.	55
1996	James Mirrlees	0
1996	William Vickrey	1
1997	Robert C. Merton	2
1997	Myron Scholes	23
1998	Amartya Sen	13
1999	Robert Mundell	2
2000	James Heckman	9
2000	Daniel McFadden	0
2001	George Akerlof	22
2001	Michael Spence	3
2001	Joseph E. Stiglitz	33
2002	Daniel Kahneman	50
2002	Vernon L. Smith	38
2003	Robert F. Engle	0
2003	Clive Granger	0
2004	Finn E. Kydland	7
2004	Edward C. Prescott	22
2005	Robert J. Aumann	0
2005	Thomas C. Schelling	17
2006	Edmund S. Phelps	13
2007	Leonid Hurwicz	1
2007	Eric S. Maskin	0
2007	Roger B. Myerson	0
2008	Paul Krugman	156
2009	Elinor Ostrom	41
2009	Oliver E. Williamson	14
2010	Peter A. Diamond	2
2010	Dale T. Mortensen	2
2010	Christopher A. Pissarides	1
2011	Thomas J. Sargent	11
2011	Christopher A. Sims	16
2012	Alvin E. Roth	4
2012	Lloyd S. Shapley	0
2013	Eugene F. Fama	19
2013	Lars Peter Hansen	2
2013	Robert J. Shiller	17
2014	Jean Tirole	0
2015	Angus Deaton	16
2016	Oliver Hart	0
2016	Bengt Holmström	0
2017	Richard Thaler	17
2018	William Nordhaus	3
2018	Paul Romer	16