Season 2, Ep.3- Sina Badiei: Normative Economics and its foes: from Marx to Freedman 

November 6, 2023

In this episode of the Fly-Bottle podcast, Soroush Marouzi talks to Sina Badiei, assistant professor and research associate of the Walras-Pareto Center at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. During their conversation, Sina first discusses his diverse academic background. He began as an undergrad student of engineering in the UK and his academic journey takes him to research and studies in the fields of philosophy, history of science, and economics in the UK, Iran, and France. Soroush then asks Sina about his ongoing work on the dichotomy of normative vs. positive in the history of economic thought. Offering a critique of major theorists of both left- and right-wing economics, figures such as Marx, Mises, and Friedman, Sina points to the dangers of misrepresenting normative economics as positive economics. 


Sina Badiei is a Lecturer (Premier assistant) and a Research Officer (Chargé de recherche) at the Centre Walras-Pareto of the University of Lausanne, and Director of Program in the Philosophy and Human Sciences Department at the Collège International de Philosophie (Université Paris Lumières). His PhD dissertation from Université Toulouse won the 2022 Best Dissertation Prize of the “Association Charles Gide pour l’Étude de la Pensée Économique”, awarded to the best dissertation on the history, epistemology or philosophy of economics.


Soroush Marouzi is a graduate of a doctoral degree at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the University of Toronto. Currently, he is a research fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University.


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Sound: Behdad Chalaki

Music: Reza Nadri

Cover art: Puya Fatoureh-chi

Produced by Ata Heshmati & Yeganeh Khazaei in the Flybottle Podcast