Stay ConnectedThrough long-form interviews with economists, policymakers, and other guests, The New Bazaar explores how the economy is constantly reshaping the way we live — and how our choices in life are reflected back into the economy. Hosted by Cardiff Garcia, The New Bazaar is a production of the Economic Innovation Group.
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How close is the 2024 presidential election?
Here is how the New York Times framed it recently: “Never in modern presidential campaigns have so many states been so tight this close to Election Day. Polling averages show that all seven battleground states are within the margin of error, meaning the difference between a half-point up and a half-point down — essentially a rounding error — could win or lose the White House.”
A recent Times-Sienna poll has the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris deadlocked at 48 to 48. Other polls are similarly close — which does not mean they are all telling the same story. Today’s guest, Kristen Soltis Anderson, writes that although “several of them show a dead heat, beneath the surface, they diverge in how they arrive at that result”.
What stories can we glean from each poll? What theories of this election can we derive from those stories? Are the polls even right? And why, despite verbal gaffes and incendiary rallies and international conflict and general campaign turmoil, have the polling averages remained so steady in recent months?
Kristen is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm, and contributing Opinion writer to the New York Times, where she often writes about what is knowable and not knowable based on the polls. We talk about all these themes, including a theory of the election that Kristen came upon while watching football in Phoenix on a Sunday.
Finally, we discuss a detailed survey of American workers that Echelon Insights, Kristen’s firm, put into the field for the Economic Innovation Group — and its most surprising findings.
All this and more on today’s episode!
RELATED LINKS:
Opinion | The Polls Show a Dead Heat, but They Don’t All Tell the Same Story
Opinion | Two Weeks to Go, but Only One Way to Stay Calm
Opinion | This Year’s October Surprise May Be That There Isn’t One
Opinion | Why the Election Is Coming Down to Defining Kamala Harris - The New York Times
Opinion | I’ve Studied the Polls. Here’s Why Harris Isn’t Running Away With It.
The American Worker Project Survey: Key Findings Deck
American workers and the 2024 election
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What is the right foreign economic policy toward China? Did the Fed cut rates in time to avoid a recession? Have agglomeration economies been changed by work-from-home and the dematerializing economy?
On September 21st, Paul Krugman joined host Cardiff Garcia live on stage for a sweeping conversation at the #EconTwitterIRL conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
They discussed not only Paul’s view of the economy and his achievements in economics, but also his approach to communicating his ideas about economics — which is likely to be as important a part of Paul’s legacy as the (Nobel prize winning) economics itself.
Among the other topics they covered:
And at the end of this fun, dense, and surprisingly humorous chat, you’ll hear Paul answer the questions he fielded from the audience of economists, journalists, think tankers and others in attendance.
RELATED LINKS:
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"The introverts have taken over the US economy."
That's the provocative title of a recent Bloomberg column from economist Allison Schrager. As she looked into the data on how Americans have been spending their time since the pandemic, she noticed that they are spending less time socializing with their friends on weekends and more time in front of screens. Even when they do go out, it's increasingly for an early dinner. That's all in addition to the bigger share of Americans who now work remotely, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic and is unlikely to ever fully reverse.
Who are the winners and losers from these trends? And what's going on?
Obvious explanations include pandemic experimentation, smartphones, better entertainment and telecommunications technologies. But Allison also likes to see these trends through the prism of risk. She tells Cardiff that the "risk-free rate" that Americans can earn from indoor, introverted activity has climbed. With so much choice over the movies, music, and books you can consume in your home, not to mention access to social media and swipe-able dating apps, you are guaranteed to have at least a pretty good time by staying in. Going out means making an "investment" with possibly more upside (meet the love of your life, see a memorable live performance, attend an epic party) but also a vastly more uncertain payoff.
Allison and Cardiff discuss these ideas and whether the economy's new introvert-friendliness is likely to stay. They also talk about other trends that could soon favor extroverts, the risks of AI and automation in the labor market, and the skills and traits that will matter for the jobs of the future.
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When people talk about the crisis at the border between the US and Mexico, what specifically are they referring to?
The Department of Homeland Security keeps track of a statistic called “border encounters” at the US border with Mexico. This includes primarily the large number of people who try to cross the border without documentation, or illegally, and aren't crossing at a formal port of entry. It also includes people who do try to cross the border at a port of entry but who are then found not eligible to be admitted into the US.
In the past three years, under the Biden administration, the number of these border encounters each year has been more than quadruple the average of what it was throughout most of the previous decade, under the Trump and Obama administrations.
The system for processing all these migrants has been entirely overwhelmed. And if you’re a politician or a pundit or someone else pushing an agenda, the temptation is to make it political. To argue that this is either all Joe Biden’s fault for being "too soft" on immigration, or the fault of Donald Trump for not fixing the problem sooner, or Congress for refusing to collaborate on a bill that would address the issue.
Today’s guest does something different altogether. Andrew Selee is the head of the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, which is the think tank Cardiff turns to when he wants factual, nonpartisan, non-stupid commentary on immigration—but especially when he just wants to inform himself on the topic outside the nonsense of how debates on immigration tend to play out in public.
So Cardiff speaks with Andrew about the real, fundamental reasons behind the crisis at the border, and what can be done about it.
They also talk about legal immigration, which despite many problems has actually been a kind of quiet success of recent years.
Other topics they discuss include the two eras of border management, the multi-layered effects of the pandemic on immigration, and a new idea for how to reform immigration to become more responsive to the needs of the US labor market.
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Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball?
On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
Inspired by the sportswriter Bill Simmons, Tyler wrote his book from the standpoint of a fan—having fun, taking sides, admitting biases, unapologetically trying to entertain the reader instead of presenting sober (boring) analysis.
Cardiff and Tyler—both huge basketball fans—first discuss Tyler's ranking of the great economists and his lament for what economics used to be. Tyler also gives his reasons for releasing the book as a ChatGPT trained on its text, the first such book of its kind.
Then begins the fun. They take turns finding analogs for the great economists from the history of the NBA. And they do the same in reverse for basketball's own GOATs. Which economist changed the nature of the field similar to the way Steph Curry set off the three-point revolution? Is there an economist whose comprehensive genius rivaled the ability of LeBron James to engineer exactly the outcome he wants on the court? What basketball player matched the charisma, brilliance, and even investment success of Keynes?
And why does Cardiff argue that Tyler himself is the Charles Barkley of economists despite their differences in personality, size, and other obvious dimensions?
All throughout the chat, Tyler and Cardiff are exploring the common traits that define greatness in both hoops, the social sciences, and perhaps other domains. A treat for fans of either economics or hoops, or who simply enjoy the virtues of fandom itself.
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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has unusually written an unusual book.
The data analysis included in "Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions" normally would have taken Seth, a trained economist, multiple years of writing and running code. But because of new artificial intelligence tools, he finished the book in just thirty days. And he used AI tools not just for the coding, but also for the artwork, copy editing, and even to write the appendix.
He discusses with Cardiff the lessons he learned about using AI, and what such accelerated productivity might mean for the future of the labor market.
Then they discuss the actual findings in the book, an investigation into the backgrounds of the basketball players who make it to the NBA and succeed when they get there. How much of success is genetic? What accounts for the NBA's market failures—the traits of players who get paid too much and too little relative to their contributions? Why do some foreign countries have such astonishing success at sending players to the NBA? Does the choice of college really matter for future success?
The answers to these questions are surprisingly revealing about the experiences of non-basketball players, and about the relationships between luck, skill, parenting, undiscovered talent, the economy, and other familiar variables.
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Martha Gimbel and Gopi Shah Goda were formerly economists within the White House Council of Economic Advisors, or CEA.
They look back on their time inside an important economic policymaking institution, telling Cardiff about:
And Martha clears up a big misunderstanding about an infamous graph controversy. All this and more!
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Angus Deaton—Scottish immigrant, Nobelist, and one of Cardiff's favorite economists—has written a new, forthcoming book titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explore the Land of Inequality.
It’s great, if also hard to categorize.
Partly it’s a memoir, about his humble origins in Scotland, where he was born; his studies at Cambridge with better-heeled peers; and his subsequent decades as a Princeton University, Nobel Prize winning economist.
The book is also partly a reflection on a lifetime of practicing economics, and the good and bad of the economics profession. There's plenty of both.
And finally it’s a series of observations about the American economy, including a fascinating self-analysis of his own ambivalence towards the US, his adopted country—the many great things here, including the lives that he and his family have led; and also, yes, some of the devastatingly grim things about life here for so many others.
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We're sharing another episode of a podcast we think you might like. It's called The Closer and it's hosted by executive producer of The New Bazaar, Aimee Keane. In each episode, Aimee speaks to dealmakers and insiders about landmark financial deals that have changed our lives in some way. In this episode, Aimee speaks to writer Abraham Josephine Riesman about Vince McMahon's influential dealmaking career. McMahon took over his father’s regional wrestling business in the 1980s, and made it into an international media and entertainment juggernaut valued at billions of dollars. This is the story of how McMahon cleverly bulldozed competitors, acquired rivals and capitalized on the public’s hatred of his tactics. Find The Closer here or by searching for the show on your podcast app of choice.
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These are confusing times for the economy and for financial markets—and for the relationship between the economy and financial markets.
At the moment the economy is doing well. The labor market is still creating hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. Unemployment is low. Inflation has come down over the past year. And economic growth has been stronger than a great many economists and others had forecast heading into the year.
But that’s just how the economy is doing right now. What about six months from now? Or a year? Forecasting is always hard, and it may well be impossible. But economists sometimes look at “leading indicators” that are meant to give at least a sense of where the economy is headed. And some of those are flashing red, suggesting we might be headed for a recession in the near future. Then again, those same indicators have looked bad for a while now, and still the recession is nowhere in sight, so who knows.
Meanwhile, look at the US stock market. It collapsed last year. But it’s come roaring back this year—and this despite the Federal Reserve continuing to raise interest rates aggressively. Is the stock market now overpriced, too expensive? Is it underpriced, a good time to get in? And what happens if we do go into recession?
What about bonds and other markets? What happened to crypto and all those meme stocks?
Returning to the show to discuss all this and more is William Bernstein. Bill is the author of no fewer than three of Cardiff's favorite books on finance and the economy, including “The Four Pillars of Investing”, which just came out in a second edition roughly two decades after the first. It has all new updated information, data, and charts, plus the lessons learned in the intervening years.
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Within economics, there's a semi-famous quote from the economist Paul Krugman: “Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run, it's almost everything.”
Krugman’s point is that ultimately, how much productivity climbs each year—roughly speaking, how much more efficient an economy’s workers become at producing goods and services—is also what determines how much our living standards also rise from year to year. And so in the long run, there really is almost nothing that matters more.
Unfortunately, since about the early 1970s productivity has climbed much more slowly than in the earlier postwar decades. We have been stuck in a period that economists have labeled The Great Stagnation. And a big reason why is that the pace of innovation—the kind of scientific and technological innovation that leads to fast productivity growth—has also been slow.
But now, there’s now a lot of people—including Cardiff!—who are optimistic that maybe the Great Stagnation is ending. That we’ll get back to the faster productivity growth of the past. Among other reasons why:
Which policies and institutional designs can best lead to new technologies and innovations? How do we reform public institutions like the National Institutes of Health, with its $47 billion budget, to fund the kind of science research and development that leads to transformative new technologies? What have we learned about the way science is actually done now?
In other words, how do we get right the economics of innovation?
That effort is where today’s two guests come in. Heidi Williams is an economist and the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank. Caleb Watney is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress.
They discussed with Cardiff not only the Great Stagnation, but also recent industrial policies passed by the US government, like the Chips and Science Act (which is aimed at developing a domestic semiconductor industry) and the Inflation Reduction Act (which will spend money to develop new clean technologies, among other things).
And they discussed new ideas for how the country’s existing scientific institutions—its commercial labs, universities, and public bodies—should approach the process of scientific discovery.
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We're sharing a special episode of a podcast we think you might like. It's called The Closer and it's hosted by executive producer of The New Bazaar, Aimee Keane. In each episode, Aimee speaks to dealmakers and insiders about landmark financial deals that have changed our lives in some way.
In this episode, Aimee speaks to an executive at the center of Whatsapp’s $19 billion sale to Facebook, Neeraj Arora. He explains how the deal finally came together, the dispiriting conflict that roiled the companies after the deal closed, and how the deal affected the way he thinks about our privacy online.
Search for The Closer on your podcast app of choice or go to TheCloser.fm.
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The combination of a markets-based capitalist economy and a liberal democracy with almost-universal suffrage is very young, having existed for barely more than a century. But what we’ve learned in that short time is that there has never been a more successful political and societal arrangement. None of the tyrannies and the plutocracies that have been the default for nearly all of human history has ever been nearly as good at raising people’s living standards, and at giving people the individual freedoms to choose how they live their lives.
But that marriage between capitalism and democracy has always been a fragile one. And in the last decade or two, that system has been under threat from within the very liberal democracies where it exists, especially in the US and across parts of Europe. What happened?
The guest for this episode is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of a new book called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. As Martin writes:
The health of our societies depends on sustaining a delicate balance between the economic and the political, the individual and the collective, the national and the global. But that balance is broken. Our economy has destabilized our politics and vice versa… A big part of the reason for this is that the economy is not delivering the security and widely shared prosperity expected by large parts of our societies. One symptom of this disappointment is a widespread loss of confidence in elites. Another is rising populism and authoritarianism. Another is the rise of identity politics of both left and right. Yet another is loss of trust in the notion of truth. Once this last happens, the possibility of informed and rational debate among citizens, the very foundation of democracy, has evaporated.
Martin discusses these themes with Cardiff, what should be done to confront this crisis of democratic capitalism, what a "New New Deal" can look like, the threat (and opportunity) of China as a global superpower, and how Martin's own personal history influenced his values and thinking.
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This is a special episode from the podcast Macro Musings, hosted by economist David Beckworth.
David interviews Cardiff along with Heather Long of the Washington Post and Ryan Avent of The Economist about their reflections on the last three years.
What they got wrong, what they got right, what shocked them, and what the lessons of these extraordinary, tumultuous times herald for the future.
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Joining Cardiff for this episode is Avi Goldfarb, Rotman Chair In Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare At The Rotman School Of Management, University Of Toronto, and the co-author (with his fellow economists Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans) of an excellent new book, "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence".
In their chat, Avi and Cardiff discuss:
And all throughout the chat, they look at the fundamental question of whether artificial intelligence is about to make the economy—and the world—a whole lot weirder. And if so, just how far along that path to weirdness are we already?
Related links:
"Prediction and Power", by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
"The impact of AI on the future of workforces", The White House CEA and the European Commission
“Before the Flood”, by Sam Hammond
"The golden age of AI-generated art is here", by Tom Faber
"Historical analogies for large language models", by Dynomight Internet Website
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This is a special, between-the-seasons episode of the New Bazaar.
Right now, the white-to-black wealth ratio in the United States is roughly 6 to 1. Which means that when you add up all the wealth that someone can own—their cash, the value of their house, their investments in the stock market, and so on—the average White American has six times the wealth of the average Black American.
That figure alone should be disturbing enough. But making it even worse is that this wealth ratio of 6 to 1 is about the same as it was back in the 1950s, seven decades ago.
Some of the reasons for this long-term persistence of a big racial wealth gap are probably familiar to anyone who knows even just a little about American history. Not just the history of slavery, but also what came next: Jim Crow and segregation, the numerous racist laws and policies that were passed, and the history of racial violence—all of which made it impossible for Black Americans to accumulate as much wealth, and to get the same return on their wealth, as White Americans.
Maybe less understood is another cause. If you consider the immediate aftermath of emancipation and the Civil War as a starting point, Black Americans simply began with much less wealth from which to build more wealth—and that initial difference has continued to have a big lingering effect even a century and a half later.
These are just some of the conclusions in a new working paper from today’s guest, Ellora Derenoncourt, and from her co-authors Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick. Ellora is an economist at Princeton University, where she is also founder of the Program for Research on Inequality. On this episode of New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Ellora about this fascinating paper and about some of her other related work.
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This is the 50th (!) episode of The New Bazaar, and the Season 1 Finale. Cardiff and Aimee are planning to launch Season 2 later in the fall, and even before then will be airing a few surprise bonus episodes in September and October. Cardiff shares a bit more about future plans at the end of today's episode.
The final Season 1 guest is Stefanie Stantcheva. Stefanie is an economist at Harvard, where she also leads the Social Economics Lab, which uses large and carefully designed online surveys to better understand what the public thinks about a range of economic policies and topics.
On this episode, Stefanie shares some of the lab’s most recent work on what people think about four specific issues: 1) open trade between countries, 2) inequality, and where people rank by income within their country or economic sector, 3) racial economic disparities, and 4) climate change.
Stefanie also tells us how people are divided on some of these issues, for example by partisanship or by class; how they form their views; what they get right and wrong, and why; and how occasionally some people even change their minds when presented with new information. An illuminating, fun, and hopeful chat.
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Benjamin Friedman is an economist and the author of The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005) and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (2021).
He joins Cardiff to revisit the ideas in Moral Consequences, one of Cardiff’s favorite economics books, which argues that sustained economic growth not only leads to higher living standards but also can make a society more virtuous. They also talk about all that’s happened in the time since the book was published, the events that confirm or complicate its arguments, and the relationship between economic growth and issues like inequality, social mobility, and the environment.
Finally, Ben shares with Cardiff the main themes in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—and why our thinking about the economy remains influenced by religious schisms that date all the way back to the 16th and 17th centuries.
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Dakin Campbell is the chief finance correspondent at Insider and, full disclosure, Cardiff's close friend. He joins Cardiff on the show to discuss his new book, “Going Public: How Silicon Valley Rebels Loosened Wall Street’s Grip on the IPO and Sparked a Revolution”.
When a company is relatively young… let’s say it’s a startup, and it is privately owned… the owners are usually some combination of the company’s founders, and venture capitalists who bet on the company, and maybe early employees who get paid in shares of the company as opposed to just getting a salary.
And at some point, a private company like this can decide to go public. In other words, to list on the stock market so that you and I and anybody can buy and sell its stock. And so that the company itself can raise money to fund itself, and to give those founders and employees with early shares a place to sell them and cash in.
When a private company wants to raise new money and give its existing shareholders a place to sell their shares, it can hire investment banks to start the process of going public and listing on a stock exchange. That process, of course, is the IPO, or initial public offering.
Dakin’s book is about how a lot of private companies through the years have not loved the way that process works. These companies have often been skeptical that the IPO process works as well for them as for the investment banks that they themselves hire. And yet, the traditional IPO model also did not change meaningfully for decades, at least not for the biggest and most prominent companies trying to go public.
There were occasional one-off attempts to challenge the model, as when Google went public via auction in 2004. But it wasn’t until just about four years ago that a company, Spotify, not only tried a different model but also kicked off a new trend—one that’s still early, but which seems like it’s here to stay.
And as you’ll hear in the chat, Dakin’s book is also about why getting this process right matters not just for the companies that want to go public and for Wall Street, but also for people who want a chance to participate financially in the economy.
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Here are three things to know about inflation.
First, according to a survey of public opinion by Pew Research taken in May, the public views inflation is the single biggest problem facing the country.
And—this is a direct quote from Pew Research—”no other concern comes close”.
Second, inflation right now is really high. The prices of the goods and services that people buy are more than 9 percent higher than they were last year.
And third, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve—the frontline institution tasked with managing inflation—recently said this while speaking on a panel: “I think we now understand better how little we understand about inflation.”
Even for the people in charge of dealing with it, inflation can be really hard to understand.
When inflation is high, is it the Fed’s fault? Is it the fault of Congress and the President? Is it Vladimir Putin’s fault? Is it greedy corporations? Is it nobody’s fault, just a thing that happens?
Matt Klein returns to explain the sources of this bafflement, this confusion. In his newsletter The Overshoot, he recently finished a two-part series about inflation that tries to understand what’s going on—and which crucially leaves room for all possible, complex, interacting forces that can drive inflation.
Matt and Cardiff also discuss how inflation fits into the wider economic context of the last couple of years. And then, to close, they recklessly ask the question: Is inflation finally about to start coming down?
Related links:
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Cardiff and Aimee answer your questions about markets, the economy, the first season of the podcast and our company, Bazaar Audio.
Go to bazaaraudio.com to find the full list of recommended links from the episode.
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This episode is all about remote wok. (Or as it is also sometimes known, telework, or telecommuting, or just working from home.)
The trend towards remote work has accelerated a lot during the Covid pandemic, as is clear in the data. What we don’t yet know is how much of the trend will last. And if it does last, what kind of economic and societal consequences will it have? What might be its effects on things like how we design our homes, and even our neighborhoods? What will happen to the downtowns of big cities, if their offices stay empty? What will it mean for how people get evaluated and promoted at work.
Today’s guest is economist Adam Ozimek, the chief economist of the Economic Innovation Group. Adam has done some of the most detailed and original analysis on remote work in recent years—not just chronicling the trend right now, but also looking at how it might conceivably change our lives in the long run.
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As a young man in his native Benin, Leonard Wantchekon was arrested for leading a student uprising against the repressive government, tortured in prison, and 18 months later escaped from prison into Nigeria.
Nearly four decades later, he is now a Princeton economist and the founder of the African School of Economics. But the experiences and observations from his astonishing early life embedded themselves into his work in economics—not just his research, but his mission to educate a new generation of African economists.
Leonard speaks with Cardiff about those formative events, and then they discuss the following research papers published by Leonard:
— “Education and Human Capital Externalities: Evidence from Colonial Benin” [Co-authored with Marko Klasˇnja and Natalija Novta]
— “The Curse of Good Soil? Land Fertility, Roads, and Rural Poverty in Africa” [Co-authored with Piero Stanig]
— “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa” [Co-authored with Nathan Nunn]
And they also discuss Leonard's goals as founder of The African School of Economics, and why it's so important for African students economists to be taken more seriously inside the economics profession.
Related links:
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Skanda Amarnath is the executive director of Employ America, an organization that advocates for strong labor markets. He recently published a research note titled "What Are You Expecting? How The Fed Slows Down Inflation Through The Labor Market", in which he and co-author Alex Williams explores how the Federal Reserve's tools work to influence employment outcomes and the prices of goods and services.
Skanda joins Cardiff to discuss:
— The definition of full employment
— How to investigate all the competing theories for what really causes inflation
— The specific channels through which monetary policy affects inflation
— What the Fed should do now to combat high inflation in the US
— What Skanda has learned about monetary policymaking in the pandemic era
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Martin Sandbu is European Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, where he also writes Free Lunch, a weekly newsletter about global economic policy. And he’s the author of The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All, which has just been released in paperback.
Martin joins Cardiff to discuss:
– How the failures of the social market economy threaten political stability and undermine openness to the rest of the world
– The pervasive economic effects of the loss of manufacturing jobs
– How policymakers failed
– Why it’s necessary to be honest about the jobs of the future
– Ideas for how policymakers can improve their management of the economy
– Why the world is experiencing high inflation, and the case for patience
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Economic historian Leah Boustan joins Cardiff to discuss her new book, "Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success", co-authored with Ran Abramitsky.
This wonderful book complicates and in some cases contradicts many of the prevailing myths and impressions of how immigration works, and it does so using a fascinating and cutting-edge approach to gathering data.
Leah and Cardiff talk about how modern immigration trends resemble those of America's prior immigration peak from 1880 to 1920, the economic mobility of immigrants and their children, the ways immigrants influence their adopted culture (and are influenced by it), and much more.
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Matt Klein, co-author of "Trade Wars are Class Wars" and old friend of the show, returns for another special collaborative episode. Matt writes the excellent Overshoot newsletter, where he is posting additional commentary and charts to accompany this chat with Cardiff. Check it out and subscribe!
Matt is Cardiff's favorite economic-data sleuth, and on this episode they discuss:
— The recovery of the US economy, and whether it really did reverse in the first quarter
— What accounts for such high inflation in the US, and whether it will self-correct
— The economic effects of the Ukraine-Russia war
— How the severe China lockdowns will
— The freakout in financial markets this year
More related links:
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Mary Childs—author of The Bond King, cohost of the Planet Money podcast, and dear pal of Cardiff and Aimee—joins The New Bazaar to discuss how finance is portrayed in culture and the arts.
Mary is both a finance journalist and herself a recreational painter with a comprehensive knowledge of the art world, and Cardiff asked her to choose an example each of a movie, book, song, TV series, painter, and contemporary artist to chat about on the show. Below are her choices, with links embedded:
MOVIE: American Psycho
BOOK: Lake Success
SONG: Paper Planes
TV SERIES: Succession
PAINTER: Bill Powhida
CONTEMPORARY ARTIST: Sarah Meyohas
Mary and Cardiff then close the episode by talking about Mary's new article in Town & Country on how rich financiers use art to wage cultural battles against each other. "These cases often spin out of control", Mary writes, "because art is always more than its component parts. It can become a manifestation of personal identity and control. Sometimes the art itself becomes a cudgel."
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Cardiff speaks with Jeremiah Johnson, the co-founder and political director of The Neoliberal Project, to discuss the historical evolution of what it means to be Neoliberal, and why advocates and critics of Neoliberalism so often talk past each other.
Jeremiah clarifies for Cardiff the current Neoliberal position on taxes, unions, healthcare, Universal Basic Income, privatization of public services, trade with China, the minimum wage, regulation, and more issues. They discuss the challenges of shifting the definition of a word that ideological opponents and others have already fixed in their minds, why disputes over definitions are nothing new, and why Jeremiah is hopeful.
This episode is simultaneously being featured on The Neoliberal Podcast, which Jeremiah hosts, and which features economists, academics, and industry leaders—including both advocates and, admirably, critics of Neoliberalism.
Related links:
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This week, we're sharing an episode from our friends over at Cautionary Tales. On the show, Tim Harford tells tragic stories from the past, pointing out the valuable lessons in the greatest mistakes, disasters and fiascos.
This episode tells the story of Sir Clive Sinclair, a computer whizz and business mogul to rival Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He was a visionary who could do no wrong... until he tried to launch an electric vehicle. The C5 “electrically assisted pedal cycle" doesn't seem so outlandish to us now... but 1985 just wasn't ready for the "aerodynamic bathtub" on wheels. Sir Clive was ridiculed and his business ruined. How did it all go so wrong?
You can listen to more episodes of Cautionary Tales at https://link.chtbl.com/newbazaarct.
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Jose Fernandez, chair of the economics department at the University of Louisville, has an unusually eclectic body of work.
He speaks with Cardiff about his findings on topics like autism, suicide, and health. They also discuss how he has navigated a career in which he has chosen topics that are so personal to him.
Related link:
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Jenny Schuetz is a scholar of the housing market, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has a new book out called Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America's Broken Housing System.
In her research and in her book, Jenny considers the housing market in all of its complexity, the reasons it’s broken for so many people, the entrenched barriers to fixing it – and some ideas that just might work. She and Cardiff cover all of this in their chat.
Related links:
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Glamour is a misunderstood concept. A lot of people associate it with glossy pictures of movie stars and celebrities in ritzy settings, or with other concepts like charisma or dazzle. Glamour is something a little different. It’s mysterious and concealing. It’s an illusion and it can be deceptive, sometimes so in problematic ways.
But whether we’re talking about a glamorous object or a glamorous person, glamour also provides a canvas on which people can project their own desires and longings. So when you find something glamorous, that something is also revealing what you yearn for in life.
This nuanced understanding of glamour is the subject of a book by one of Cardiff’s favorite writers, Virginia Postrel. It’s called The Power of Glamour, and in the book, Virginia defines glamour and provides specific examples of how it applies to our own lives. She talks to Cardiff about all of this, as well as the ways in which glamour influences our economic decisions.
Links from the episode:
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Erich Schwartzel joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy".
For the past couple of decades, the emergence of a huge middle class in China has become an incredibly attractive, and maybe even a necessary, market for Hollywood movies.
But the Chinese government carefully censors what kinds of movies can be shown in China. So if you’re a Hollywood studio and you wanna get your movie shown in China, you have to go along with the criteria that the Chinese censors give you.
And Hollywood studios have done just that, often imposing restrictions across the entire creative process of making a movie, starting with the script itself. As Erich explains in the chat, this has fundamentally changed Hollywood’s entire business model, and the kinds of movies it makes.
The deeper story here is about the messy realities of globalization. Deepening economic engagement between nations mostly leads to more prosperity, rising standards of living, and more choices for what people can do with their lives. But it can have bad side effects, especially when the economic engagement is between two countries with different political priorities.
“Red Carpet” is all about understanding the real-world nuances of how trade with China has sometimes led to a clash of values. On the one side are things like free speech, artistic integrity, the ability to express oneself fully, through movies and other cultural objects, without fear of censorship. And on the other side are the deepening commercial ties between two countries.
Understanding this clash in all its subtlety is the aim of Erich's book, and of his chat with Cardiff.
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Jacob Goldstein, author of "Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing" and host of the new podcast "What's Your Problem?", joins Cardiff to discuss the surprising origins of money, and why now is a great time to start a podcast about solving problems.
Related links:
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Today’s episode is about something you might have noticed just by looking around you. Especially if you’re old enough.
The economy has been shifting away from the material and towards the intangible -- things like data, design, personality, research, ways of expressing ourselves. The importance of these things has grown, reflected in the investments that businesses have made. More money now goes to branding, and research and development, training, and software, and the tech we love to use for pleasure and for work.
Today’s episode is all about the profound and subtle consequences of this shift. And it’s about why the economy and society have lagged behind it.
Joining Cardiff to explain it all is Stian Westlake. Stian and his co-author Jonathan Haskel wrote a book a few years ago called “Capitalism without Capital”, that chronicled the trend towards the intangible economy. And they have a new book out now called “Restarting the Future”, which explains how people and businesses and policymakers can finally catch up to the trend -- and harness it to make the world better.
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At first it was just Bitcoin. Now when someone refers to crypto, they might be talking about ethereum, NFTs, ICOs, smart contracts, DAOs, and a whole bunch of other technologies too numerous to mention.
Stacy-Marie Ishmael, managing editor for crypto at Bloomberg, joins the show to un-befuddle Cardiff and explain the implications of this suite of technologies.
Among other topics, they discuss:
And more!
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John Kemp is senior market analyst at Reuters, where he specializes in oil and energy systems. Having covered these systems for the past quarter-century, John now publishes a newsletter, which happens to be Cardiff's favorite way to keep up with trends in global energy markets.
This episode, recorded on the morning of Monday, February 28th, does touch on the astonishing and fast-moving events in Ukraine and Russia, but it is not principally about them. Nor is it mainly about the economic sanctions against Russia by the US and Europe, or their likely effects. The episode is about the latest trends and possible futures for the markets in oil, gas, renewable technologies, and other parts of the energy landscape.
But the chat also couldn’t avoid talking about geopolitical events like what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine because one of the themes of this episode is how energy markets have increasingly globalized in recent decades. What’s happening in Russia has big effects on what’s happening in Europe, which itself has a big effect on what’s happening in American energy markets. And what happens in East Asia, in Africa, and Latin America – especially in developing nations in those regions – also affects energy markets everywhere else.
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Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap are the authors of the book The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street.
And the story they tell in the book is intense. Back in the mid-2000s, a private equity firm called Apollo bought Caesars, the company that owns casinos and hotels all over the country, like Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The deal to buy Caesars was a leveraged buyout, also known as an LBO. Which just means that Apollo borrowed money through loans and bonds to buy it. And then after the deal, Caesars itself was on the hook to pay back those loans and bonds. This is all quite normal -- it's just how these deals work.
But the timing was awful. Soon after, the financial crisis of 2008 collapsed the economy. Caesars really struggled because people weren’t gambling anymore, and because its customers were no longer booking big conventions and events in its hotels. And so it was inevitable that Caesars would struggle to pay what it owed on all that new debt.
And so a bunch of distressed debt investors, including the hedge funds Oaktree and Apaloosa, bought the Caesars debt from the investors who owned it before. So now Caesars owed them the money. So those are the two sides... And they ended up waging an utterly brutal fight in the legal system for control of Caesars, the company.
This is a story that raises all kinds of fascinating questions about how finance actually works in the real world. Whether this kind of antagonistic, adversarial system is in the best interest of the capital markets, the economy, society. And whether it’s the best way for all these brilliant financiers and lawyers and others to spend their time. But also, if you have any interest in finance, it’s just one helluva suspenseful tale.
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Logan Mohtashami is the lead analyst at Housingwire, where he writes about the housing market and the US economy. And before that, he spent a few decades as a senior lending officer at a real estate company.
Well before the pandemic, Logan was arguing that during the years 2020 to 2024, housing prices in the US would climb to troubling levels, the result of various coinciding trends in the economy. And that is exactly what's happened. In his chat with Cardiff, Logan explains the forces that have been driving up home prices, and what might happen in the next few years. And he and Cardiff also talk about the ways that housing is such a different, even unique, kind of asset -- and why policies towards housing are so often full of contradiction.
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Tara Watson is an economist and the co-author, with Kalee Thompson, of a new book, “The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear”.
The "border within" refers to how immigration laws are applied to undocumented residents already living inside the country. And it also refers to how immigration laws, and how these laws are applied and enforced, can also create borders between people. Between neighbors. Between residents. Even between husband and wife, between parents and their children.
In her chat with Cardiff, Tara explains why policies that affect undocumented immigrants also affect the places where they live and the economies in which they work. And since most undocumented residents have lived inside the country for more than a decade, these policies also have big consequences for the families and communities in which they are rooted. Tara also surveys what the economics literature shows about the economics of immigration -- bringing needed clarity and nuance to a conversation that so often features little of either.
Links:
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Shira Ovide writes the excellent On Tech newsletter at the New York Times. On this episode of The New Bazaar, Shira tells Cardiff about the technology she wants to see in 2022, and whether the potential for technology to better connect the world was oversold. And they chat about the metaverse -- as Shira says, "What if we just called the ‘metaverse’ ...the internet?" -- and the lingering questions about its future.
Also on the show: Do "bits" technologies like social media get too much attention relative to "atoms" technologies that directly influence the physical world? What's the latest on gaming? What are the psychology lessons of the government's approach to sending out free Covid tests? How do online creators make a living?
Related links:
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More than two decades ago, economist Tyler Cowen published "In Praise of Commercial Culture" -- his first in a series of books about the relationship between the economy and culture.
The book's thesis was simple, but at the time controversial -- that markets and commerce offer the best societal arrangement for promoting creativity and cultural novelty. The book was initially resisted by popular and academic presses and nearly didn't get published, threatening to undermine its own arguments.
In the book, Tyler argues that markets are not just good for artists themselves and how they make a living, but for the quality and the originality of their work. He responds to right-wing critics who argue that a culture rooted in the artistic creations of markets becomes too permissive, and to left-wing critics who say that the profit motive inherent to markets is bad for artistic purity and integrity. Tyler argues that if you really care about creativity – and about diverse groups having access to becoming creators and artists – then markets are better than previous systems based on patronage, or on the direction of the state or the church.
In his chat with Cardiff, Tyler revisits his original arguments, considering them anew to account for all that's happened in the time since the book was published in 2000. What have been the effects on creativity of the dominance of streaming, the ubiquity of smartphones, and more recently the rise of Tiktok and NFTs?
Also on the show: Why were the Medici overrated and rap musicians underrated? Does the easy reproducibility of historically significant artistic works, made possible by new technologies, threaten to cannibalize emergent artists? Is there a meaningful distinction between high-brow and low-brow art? Where has Hollywood gone wrong? How have sports, cooking, amateur photography and other domains of life become more artistic and creative in recent decades?
Finally, Tyler and Cardiff discuss why it can be seductive and easy to become cultural pessimists -- and why both nonetheless remain cultural optimists.
LINKS:
-- In Praise of Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press)
-- Marginal Revolution (Tyler's blog with Alex Tabarrok)
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This week, we're sharing a special episode of a podcast we think you might like. It's called Cautionary Tales, and it's made by Tim Harford and the team at Pushkin Industries. You may remember Tim from our recent episode on economic storytelling.
On his podcast, Tim draws on history and social science to vividly retell the stories of great crimes, accidents and disasters of the past - pointing out valuable lessons for us all from the dithering, death and destruction.
In this episode, Tim tells the story of Lizzie J. Magie (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter!), who should be celebrated as the inventor of what would become Monopoly - but her role in creating the smash hit board game was cynically ignored, even though she had a patent.
Discrimination has marred the careers of many inventors and shut others out from the innovation economy entirely. Could crediting forgotten figures such as Lizzie Magie help address continuing disparities in the patenting of new inventions?
You can hear more episodes of Cautionary Tales at https://link.chtbl.com/newbazaarcautionary.
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Ben Ho’s latest book is called Why Trust Matters: An Economist’s Guide to the Ties that Bind.
His chat with Cardiff is about exactly that: How the concept of trust applies to all kinds of different economic interactions that we experience throughout our lives. And the research that helps us understand why trust so often breaks down, and potentially how to build it back up.
For example, how do you write a contract between two people or two companies that enhances trust rather than erodes it. When do prenuptial agreements enhance trust, and when don’t they? What about religion and its role in fostering the kind of trust that matters for the economy?
Why is gossip actually good for trust? When can we trust our economic policymakers? What affect does social media and tools to monitor online reputations have on our trust in each other?
All this and much more on today’s episode.
Links from the episode:
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To wrap up 2021, The New Bazaar answers questions sent in by listeners. The episode also features, for the first time in front of the mic, executive producer Aimee Keane!
Aimee and Cardiff take questions about pricing strategies, how they choose topics and guests for the show, the tricky tension between wonky and accessible, the Canadian vs the US economy, why the US economic growth has been weak since the 1970s, and more.
Thanks so much to everyone for listening to us this year! We are taking a short break, and we will be back with the next episode on Thursday, January 12th. Happy New Year!
Links:
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Having guided Cardiff through the craft of economic storytelling in the prior episode, Tim Harford returns to explain the lessons of three economic stories from his own podcast, Cautionary Tales.
Links:
-- "The Truth about Hansel and Gretel"
-- "Buried by the Wall Street Crash"
-- "Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death"
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Tim Harford is the author of numerous terrific economics books and the host of two great podcasts: “Cautionary Tales”, about what we should learn from big mistakes; and “More or Less”, about statistics. He also writes columns and essays for the Financial Times.
And what sets Tim apart in all these different mediums is his exceptional storytelling. And when it comes to telling economic stories – stories that are meant to grab your attention, and keep you in suspense, and then ultimately land on a message or a lesson that really stays with you – I’m not sure there’s anyone better.
And Tim’s latest book, The Data Detective, is no different: there’s a lot of great stories in it. But what I really loved about it is that it’s very much also about the craft of storytelling itself. And that’s what today’s conversation with Tim is also about: What are the ingredients of a captivating story? Why is it that stories are so necessary for fighting back against misinformation? (Why aren’t the facts themselves enough?) And how do you wield the power of storytelling responsibly?
Links from the episode:
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Vicki Bogan is an economist who specializes in financial economics, household finance, and behavioral finance – in other words, a specialist in how people make investment decisions. Whether to invest in the stock market or the bond market; how much; and other kinds of investing too, like whether to pursue a graduate degree.
And the things she has found that influence our investment decisions are often things we don’t really consider. Like the kinds of households we live in, our health, or even things like the gender of our children. And as you’ll hear in the chat with Cardiff, she is interested in figuring out what is really going on. Not how people should make choices, but how they actually do make choices – and why those choices matter.
Links from the episode:
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The labor market is in a weird place -- millions of fewer workers are employed than before the pandemic, yet millions of more jobs are available and wages are climbing fast.
But there has been a lot of experimentation. Workers are quitting in near-record numbers. Working from home is an obvious example of an idea that many more companies are testing. New kinds of automation are taking the place of some jobs. More people are starting their own small businesses. Some companies are trying out a four-day work week. In a tightening labor market, employers have also started trying new ways of recruiting workers.
But will this experimentation last? And if it does, how will that fundamentally change the labor market -- and how we think about the nature of work itself?
Links from the episode:
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If you look at some of the big and mostly troubling economic trends in the overall US economy from the last three or four decades, the business of the sport of Mixed Martial Arts captures a stunning number of them: rising income and wealth inequality; increased firm concentration in some economic sectors, sometimes because they bought out their competition; the declining share of the money that companies make that goes to workers; the decline of unions; the gig economy; the lack of bargaining power that workers have when they negotiate wages with their companies.
John S Nash, a journalist for Bloody Elbow, joins Cardiff to discuss the economic history of MMA and the sport’s dominant company, the UFC -- and to reveal the many ways that the sport captures the extreme version of so many broader economic trends within the US economy.
And after the credits, they also give their predictions for UFC 269.
Links from the episode:
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Economists don’t just try to understand the economy. They also influence it. Because as they share their analysis and understanding of it, people and institutions and companies and politicians start to act differently -- precisely in response to that understanding of how the economy works. Which means that the economy itself then changes, and economists have to catch up and try to understand it again.
That is one of the themes in a new book called Cogs and Monsters, by the economist Diane Coyle, Cardiff’s guest in this episode. The book is also about how the digitization of the economy in particular presents such thorny new challenges for understanding it. Diane never goes for easy criticisms or easy solutions. She burrows deep. And she makes the point that the economy, like society at large, is always in flux. And so the job of the economist can never be finished.
Links from the episode:
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At least rhetorically, the politically conservative approach to economics was once associated with lower taxes, deregulation of the economy, cutting government spending, free trade and cutting the budget deficit (In reality, what conservatives have actually done when they have been in power has been different, but that was the governing philosophy). But all that seems to have changed in the last roughly half decade. There’s been a lingering and visible tension between the old-school free-market-y conservatism, and a different “populist” approach that’s largely, though not exclusively, associated with Donald Trump. And that tension has made it hard to answer the question: “What is conservative economics now?” If, or when, Republicans are in power again, what policies will they pursue? What will conservative pundits and policymakers and economists advise them to do?
Cardiff has no idea anymore. So he invited Karl Smith, an economist and columnist at Bloomberg, to the show. Together they discuss how conservative economics has shifted on the issues of trade, immigration, the deficit, entitlement spending, and more.
Links from the episode:
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For this special collaborative episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff has teamed up with his friend and former colleague Matt Klein, who writes The Overshoot newsletter. Matt and Cardiff spend the episode carefully -- and without jargon -- walking listeners through the data on the US economy. Is the economy back to its pre-pandemic strength? What about jobs? How much are people getting paid? What’s the deal with inflation? Is there anything surprising about the economy that more people should be aware of? They answer all these questions and more.
Matt is Cardiff’s favorite economic data sleuth because of his rare ability to make sense of an enormous variety of economic indicators, arriving at nuanced but intelligible conclusions. So if you’ve wanted one podcast episode that tells you, in plain language, just where the economy is right now, this is it. And as a bonus, Matt has simultaneously written a special post at The Overshoot, which you can find via the link below, adding details and analysis to their chat. Go check it out!
Links from the episode:
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Anne Case and Angus Deaton are the authors of the book Deaths of Despair -- which is also a phrase that refers to the combination of deaths resulting from three causes: suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol.
An epidemic of these deaths of despair started roughly a couple of decades ago. What Anne and Angus have found is that the increase in these deaths was entirely concentrated in people without college degrees. And they have looked at how other gaps between college and non-college folks have also become bigger and bigger in the last fifty years.
They’ve also looked at how that societal division also interacts in important ways with other societal divisions, like racial and ethnic inequality, and geographic inequality. And crucially, how those interactions between these different trends can change over time. Or as Anne says in the chat with Cardiff, the battlefield for understanding these trends is dynamic.
Anne and Angus also discuss with Cardiff the findings of their new study, which shows how Covid has affected mortality rates for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and also for people without college degrees versus people with college degrees (which they further break down by race and ethnicity, gender, and age).
Links from the episode:
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Nicholas Wapshott speaks with Cardiff about his new book, Samuelson Friedman, about the fierce economic debates between economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman -- debates that have evolved through the decades, yet are still relevant to this very day.
Links from the episode:
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The common argument for why countries should be open to trading with each other has always been simple: free trade is good for economic growth, economic efficiency, and innovation. Businesses get access to more customers around the world, and consumers can buy a wider variety of goods and services made abroad. And for a long time, that logic was widely accepted. Countries lowered barriers to trading with each other, and global trade boomed.
Perhaps no longer. Something fundamental has changed. Policymakers are now using trade policy to pursue other goals besides just economic growth. Like national security goals, and goals related to the environment and human rights. Sometimes countries are using trade policy to fight other non-trade disputes with each other.
That is the thesis of this episode’s guest, journalist Soumaya Keynes. Soumaya has just finished a big report for The Economist magazine about this recent shift, and how it ties into the events of the past few years. The rise of populism, and the growing tensions between the US and China, and most recently the thing that’s been on a lot of people’s minds -- the clogging of global supply chains.
As Soumaya explains, this new logic of trade involves complex tradeoffs for policymakers, as the non-trade goals they are now pursuing are often directly opposed to each other.
Links from the episode:
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Cardiff has a theory -- somewhat half-baked, he admits -- that only when Broadway has fully recovered from the pandemic will we know that the overall US economy has also fully recovered. The necessity of proximity to strangers made Broadway as an industry a perfect target for the pandemic, and so it may well be one of the last industries to return to its former health.
And with the return of theater visitors to New York, we may also see the return of jobs for performers and workers on Broadway and at the myriad restaurants, bars, and hotels that cater to these visitors. The labor market remains nowhere close to having recovered these jobs in the leisure and hospitality sectors, and New York City’s own unemployment rate is more than double that of the US overall.
So, to explore this theory and get a Broadway 101 primer, Cardiff called up Lee Seymour, a journalist who covers Broadway and is himself a Broadway producer and Tony Award winner. They discuss the business of Broadway, how the industry fared through the shutdown, and how its nascent recovery is going.
Links from the episode:
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In 1960, only six percent of all the doctors and lawyers in the country were either women (of all races and ethnicities) or men of color. All the rest -- the overwhelming majority -- were white men. Fast forward half a century. By the year 2010, women and nonwhite men were 38 percent of doctors and lawyers. A similar integration occurred in other high-paying professions that required college and post-graduate degrees.
According to a paper by economist Chang-Tai Hsieh and his co-authors, this deepening integration accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of the per-capita economic growth in the country during this period. Like much of Chang-Tai’s other work, this paper is about what happens when people are finally able to apply their talents in ways that best take advantage of those talents -- and what a tragedy it is, for all of us, when they can’t.
And that’s why this story is not entirely a happy one. Mainly because there is so much progress that is still left to be made. But also because the progress that was being made appears to be slowing down. And for some people, it might even be reversing.
Links from the episode:
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Stacey Vanek Smith is the author of the new book, Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace. She is also Cardiff’s former co-host on The Indicator from Planet Money! The two hosts reunite for this special episode, in which Stacey tells Cardiff about the hardheaded wisdom and encouragement she finds in Machiavelli, the economic data and case studies showing the particular set of obstacles that women confront at the office, and why professional advancement requires an understanding of the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
Links from the episode:
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Gentrification is a trend that can be confusing, contentious, and widely misunderstood. Perhaps most surprisingly, gentrification can offer “the promise of integration and sorely needed investment that can increase residents’ quality of life — but only if disadvantaged residents are set up to take part in the benefits of increased investment." Thus argues Jerusalem Demsas, policy reporter at Vox. In a wide-ranging conversation, she takes Cardiff through the research and academic literature on gentrification, explaining the nuances and complexities that are so often missing in debates about this controversial trend.
Links from the episode:
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For almost all of human history and pre-history -- going back tens of thousands of years -- the average human life expectancy was about 35 years or less. Steven Johnson, author of the new book Extra Life, describes this fact as The Long Ceiling. But something changed a few hundred years ago. A series of public health innovations started arriving in batches, each innovation building on the success of another, that finally began extending our average life expectancy to where it is now, at more than 70 years. Steven explains to Cardiff why these innovations began so late in the human experience, the institutions and public remedies needed for their benefits to spread, and what lessons they hold for the Covid era.
Links from the episode:
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In The Delusions of Crowds, finance theorist William Bernstein writes about some of the famous financial bubbles and religious manias of the past. He joins Cardiff to discuss the connection between these two kinds of events, why humans are so susceptible to mass manias, the good that sometimes comes from a financial bubble, and how we can all spot the visible signs of manias when they arise.
Links from the episode:
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Ulrike Malmendier is the premier economic scholar for understanding how our experiences affect our decisions, even in ways we might not recognize. Ulrike joins Cardiff to discuss the nuances and applications of her research, including why daily habits like grocery shopping affect our expectations for the economy; how the crises we live through determine the extent of our lifetime participation in financial markets; and how policymakers at the Federal Reserve are just as susceptible to the effects of their experiences as the rest of us are to our own. Plus, Ulrike offers an optimistic view on how our future decision-making might be transformed by the pandemic.
Links from the episode:
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A few years ago, Maria Konnikova took a leave from her job as a psychology journalist at The New Yorker to try something new: become a professional poker player. Hoping merely for a good story to write about, she stunned everyone -- including herself -- with her accelerated mastery of the game, winning big tournaments and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars within just the first couple of years. Maria joins Cardiff to discuss what she learned in the process about her own psychological makeup, her capacity for change, and how we can all take lessons from poker to make better decisions. It’s the subject of her latest book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, And Win, which is now available in paperback.
Links from the episode:
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Mark Hugo Lopez is the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. He and his colleagues recently conducted a sweeping survey about how Americans identify their racial, ethnic and foreign country origins.The results show that how we see ourselves isn’t fixed. It fluctuates and evolves -- revealing that identity can be as much a function of how we measure it as how we regard ourselves in a given moment. Cardiff and Mark also discuss immigration trends, how American views on diversity have changed over time, and even a little bit of politics.
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Economist Peter Blair Henry has dedicated his career to understanding how a developing country can become more prosperous, lift more people out of poverty, and give its citizens better choices for how to work and live. He joins Cardiff to share his findings on this question from “The Baker Hypothesis”, a newly published paper he co-authored with Anusha Chari and Hector Reyes. Peter also gives his thoughts on the “degrowth” movement, the tricky balance between market-friendly policies and the role of government, and the evolution of economics. Finally, he shares his own personal experience of an economic catastrophe in his native Jamaica, which forced his family to uproot when he was young and sent him down this career path.
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A new podcast about how the economy shapes our lives. The first episode will be available on Thursday, August 12. See you then!
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