tbs eFM Highlights (101.3MHz‪)‬ tbs eFM

tbs eFM Special Feature "Diverse Voices Heard" - Part 2

tbs eFM Special Feature "Diverse Voices Heard" - Part 1

tbs eFM Highlights
Interview with Tom Windish
tbs eFM This, That & Amy interviews the legend, Tom Windish 2016.10.06

About This, That & Amy:
This, That & Amy is a late morning talk show that offers great music and exciting daily segments that cover all the latest trends and issues in culture, entertainment, travel, food, and more!

About Tom Windish:
Tom Windish is the founder and president of the Windish Agency, a progressive-thinking booking agency with an impressive client list that includes Diplo, Lorde, and Aphex Twin. The company, which he started in his Chicago apartment in 2004, now has multiple offices and Windish himself has made a name for himself as one of the most innovative and influential figures in the music industry.

tbs eFM Highlights
Interview with Bengt Holmstrom
tbs eFM This Morning interviews the legend, Bengt Holmstrom 2016.10.17



[The Best Incentive, No Incentive]

Turning the world of economics on it’s head, Bengt Holmstrom along with Oliver Hart received the Nobel Prize in Economics for their research into incentivised contracts and how they really work in the real world.


So in amongst all the different prizes that have been handed out in recent weeks we now have the pleasure of catching up on the line with professor Bengt Holmstrom from Finland, a US based scholar who has been awarded jointly with professor Oliver Hart from Britain the Nobel Economics Prize for their research into real life contracts. Good morning to you, first of all from Seoul. It’s great to have you on the line.

-Good to hear you.

And, I mean obviously your day job is working at MIT Department of Economics, this subject is very familiar to you, but this research goes back decades, doesn’t it? You looked into contracts, the way they’re structured, can you tell us what was so ground-breaking that drew the Nobel Economics Prize’s attention?

-Well, it is correct that this is work that was done, you know, in the late 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and these were times when people started getting interested in the role of information in economic decision making and how to treat, you know among other things, contracts and what kind of incentive they provide and so on. And this is not the first prize in incentive contracting but it is the first prize perhaps focusing on what’s called contract theory, which deals with incentivising people to do things right.

I mean some of that borrows from common sense, doesn’t it? How do you take the common sense idea that, you know, if I want to get a job done I give someone a contract to perform and I try to make sure the contract is as appealing as possible to suit both parties? How do you take that further, that idea?

-Yes, it’s very important to understand that there are two stages of a model, if you want to apply it, you know, there’s a part of this stage which is about trying to understand why contacts look the way they do in reality, and this was new. You know, the traditional economic theory just assumed that if we write a contract and then it’s enforced the way it is and that’s what happens, that’s what’s written in the contract. This theory takes into account the fact that you don’t know the same information as the other side and so on so it’s much more complicated in that sense to even study the question of quality and conceptual issues. But some of the, when you do models, you do want them to be giving obvious answers to obvious questions. So, you know, some of it seems to the outside as obvious because partly there’s a sense that the model is sensible one. And the model is like a conversation partner; you want it to answer in a sensible way to simple questions. You know, so if I give you stronger incentives do you want it to provide, the person to work more or do more closely what you want and so on. So that, I would say that there are a couple of things in my book that matter, there are other things that work that Oliver was very significant, discoveries that he made. In my book, the key thing was to understand exactly what information is relevant for contracting? And a lot of people at the time I wrote my thing thought that you know, if it gets very noisy the information it becomes irrelevant. But to make matters simple in some sense I showed that that’s not the right way to think about it. And it turns out that it’s always relevant, or most of the time relevant and when it’s not relevant it’s for a very different reason than they used to think. It led to relative performance evaluation, there’s a lot of people who think it’s natural but even there there’s a question of how you weigh the different measure that reflect relevance and the logic of why relative performan

tbs eFM Highlights
Interview with Peter Singer
tbs eFM This Morning interviews the legend, Peter Singer 2016.9.29


[Bringing and Bearing the Moral Law]

Peter Singer is a philosophy Professor at Princeton University and considered controversial for not shying away from today’s tough issues, from abortion to burkinis. Hear what he has to say on This Morning.



Now, influential, controversial, practical, some words to describe the philosopher Peter Singer who’s pioneered discussions in the world of ethics on very sensitive topics from coming to the rescue of children in peril to abortion, from animal rights to global poverty. To celebrate our new fall or autumn season at tbs eFM, we can now bring in professor Singer. Good morning to you from Seoul.

-Good morning, good to talk to you.

Wonderful to have you on the line. Just a quick bit of background, you are a professor of bioethics at Princeton University in the United States, laureate professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne Australia, and your books include ‘Animal Liberation’ and ‘The Most Good You Can Do’. And that’s keeping it brief, so it’s a great honor to have you on the line with us. I mean, this book, ‘The Most Good You Can Do’ the title in itself sends a clear message to us, doesn’t it? That we should perhaps be doing what we can to help others?

-Yes, certainly. But not only just something to help others, but whatever we are doing to help others, whether it’s giving our time or our money, that we should be thinking about will it be doing the most good we can? Because there are many different choices that we face and some of them are much better than others, and very often people just make emotional choices on this without a lot of thought. I’m arguing we should combine the head and the heart to make sure that we do the most good that we can.

Now it I may venture just a little into the way of philosophy, why should we help others? I’m sure many of us do have the urge to do so, but why?

-Well, I think one way of looking at it would be to say that other people are like us in a very important way and that is that their lives can go well or badly, and if we look at the world as the whole, if we detach ourselves a little from our own interests, I think we can see from that larger perspective we should be caring about the welfare of others as well as ourselves. We are not that different from others and if we think that our pain is a bad thing, that our suffering is a bad thing and conversely that it is a good thing when we are happy, then I think it’s very hard for us to deny that the pain of others is a bad thing and the happiness of others is a good thing.

No doubt, but for example, some of us will have a religion, have a divine belief that will help us along with that, help us solidify this need to help others, perhaps knowing or suspecting that there will be some sort of retribution if we are not as good as we can be or at least if we are evil, that there could be very negative effects. For those who have no such belief system, as long as things are going well for them, how can they rationally turn around and not help others?

-I mean I don’t have the kind of belief system that you mentioned. I think that we can do this simply on the basis of using our reason to see that we are one person among others, and that if we care about our own wellbeing, then to not care about the wellbeing of others, especially when we can quite easily make a big difference to their well being at either no cost or a very modest cost to ourselves. But that’s just a kind of a bias, just as we reject biases on the grounds of race or sex or something like that. I don’t think we should say this is me and that’s you or that’s them. I don’t think that that’s a good enough reason for saying their welfare doesn’t count.

And again, that scenario we could probably devote a long time to, but i

tbs eFM Highlights
Interview with Efi Latsoudi
tbs eFM This Morning interviews the legend, Efi Latsoudi 2016.9.28



[What Happens Out There Affects Us All]

Asylum seekers; refuges by the hundreds of thousands, people escaping war are flooding into Europe. A breakwater has been Lesvos, Greece a tiny Island home to Efi Latsoudi, winner of the 2016 UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award.



So the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has appointed two remarkable figures for this year’s Nansen Refugee Award. As part of our special interviews in celebration of the new season, we welcome one of them, Efi Latsoudi, cofounder of PIKPA, a self-organized camp in Lesvos taking care of women, children and the disabled. This has been the scene this month as well of a huge fire on this otherwise picturesque Greek island that has become famous for really anything but the sort of luxury holidays that maybe people would have dreamed of in years fairly recently gone by. Thank you very much for taking the time Ms. Latsoudi.

-Thank you very much for inviting me, thank you.

So this big fire, we know thousands of asylum seekers were displaced as a result of that, how much more challenging did that make your work?

-Look, we live in a situation that is really difficult, this crisis happening for more than one year now; it started in May 2015 and of course the reasons are there. There are thousands of people that need to flee their countries because of the war. So our country, Greece and the islands that we are living in like Lesvos are very near to a region that many people need to cross and to try to reach Europe. So it’s something that we are facing since many years. Lesvos has been receiving refugees since 2001, but in smaller numbers. Last year it was a huge number; 500,000 refugees arrived in Lesvos in one year, which is enormous for a small island.

Well, you were one of the arrivals in 2001 having moved from Athens from what I understand it. So what was it like for you then and how does it compare now fifteen years on?

-Look, the situation was very difficult always, even one refugee to deal with is a huge responsibility. Every person needs protection, and protection of his human rights, so every person is very important. But when you have like one hundred refugees per month it’s a different thing than having five thousand refugees per day. So for our island and for our capacity, it was huge. And also you have to have in mind that Greece is facing an economic crisis since years. So it’s even more difficult to deal with the situation and the solidarity that people in Lesvos showed to these refugees was even more important in this situation. And for me, it was not only the numbers of the people but, and the poor conditions, the deaths of the people. Many people died in the sea and we’ve had to deal with the relatives, we’ve had to deal with mothers that lost their kids and with families that lost mothers fathers; it was overwhelming for us.

I can imagine.

-Sometimes it was very difficult to deal with.

I’m sure many of us would find that tremendously challenging to offer comfort and to strangers effectively as well. But from your perspective, you did found PIKPA back in 2012 I understand? Tell us a bit more about what drove you to do that, I know you’ve given a few good reasons for setting up such a facility already but, you know, not every local person has gone this far.

-For us it was clear, when the flow of refugees started again to arrive to the island in 2012 we wanted to create humane conditions and an open center for the refugees. We didn’t want detention conditions for the refugees, and also it was really important to create an open facility because it’s very important that the refugees not to be isolated from the local community and to live near us and to be able to help them. For me at that point it was very crucial, the fact that the fascist party, the Golden Dawn, had raised their percentages in the G