Econtalk trends
I'm a big fan of Econtalk, the award-winning weekly podcast in economics hosted by Russ Roberts. It has extremely interesting guests and topics. It has been going on for years and the conversations are enriched by links to books and articles recommendations in their website. You can also find the transcript of each conversation going back to 2006.
I've recently been noticing a change on the kind of topics Russ talks about. There's been a noticeable change from economic issues to a more diverse and liberal focused topics such as, philosophy, arts, life....
Nothing wrong with that of course! the conversations are equally, or even more, fascinating, but I was curious if that was just my perception or a real trend. And so, I decided to analyse the data. I pulled all the transcripts on the website, and sorted them by year.
In total, 7.5 million words have been said (according to transcripts) by Russ and guests and the results are pretty clear:
The graphs below show economic and non-economic related terms measured as a percentage of all words said in the podcasts, by year.
econom_ratio include all the words that start with econom* such as: economy, economics, economists... (including capital letters).
educat_ratio includes all words that starts with educat* such as: education, educated,... (including capital letters).
relig_ratio includes all words that starts with relig* such as: religion, religious,...(including capital letters).
flurish_ratio includes all words that starts with flurish* (including capital letters).
market_ratio includes also the plural (including capital letters).
adamsmith_ratio includes "Adam Smith".
Economic terms trends:
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