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For the past few years, there’s been a persistent and mystifying disconnect in the economy: the data show that the economy is doing great, but Americans have never been more bummed about it than they have been this year. This is showing up in weird ways: Usually when we feel bad or anxious about the economy we’ll spend less. But we just aren’t. What gives? To help us solve this macro mystery that’s been befuddling economists, we brought in an expert in the micro: Oyin Adedoyin, a personal finance reporter with The Wall Street Journal. She is out in the world talking with people about their finances, their hopes, and their economic stresses. Taken together, the stories she’s covered paint a nuanced and complex picture of our economic health. Based on that reporting, we sat down to try out some theories to explain this disconnect. Further reading: WSJ: They’re in Their 60s and Their Student Loans Won’t Let Them Retire by Oyin Adedoyin Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System via FRED: Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking: adults with 3 months emergency savings  University of Michigan:  Survey of Consumers, survey questions  Bank of America Institute: Consumer Checkpoint: Strength in numbers Foreign Policy: No One Has a Plan for American Decline by Nick Danforth Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Adriana Robertson is a law professor at the University of Chicago who, a decade ago, got fixated on index funds. They seemed so important – the best, or maybe only, good investing advice was to put your money in an index fund, right? So, she wondered, what exactly is an index fund? How does one get made? She poked around and couldn’t find research that answered her questions. So unfortunately she had to do it herself. And what she found was that these “passive” investing vehicles aren’t really passive at all. At the end of the day, somebody has to pick the stocks. She joins us to tell us what index funds – and for that matter, capital markets in general – are supposed to be doing, and if they are actually doing it.  Further Reading: Adriana Z. Robertson - Passive in Name Only: Delegated Management and “Index” Investing Harry Markowitz - Portfolio Selection Lucian A. Bebchuk - The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power Yueran Ma - What Adam Smith Didn’t Foresee About Capitalism   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

When we go to buy something – online, on our phones, in person, doesn't matter – there’s an entire invisible infrastructure behind whatever price we see. Companies have dedicated data scientists who use our zip codes, computer type, browsing history, cursor movements, SO much information, to determine how much they can charge us, how much we are willing to pay. On the consumer side, basically nobody likes it. So how did it get to this, and what can we do about it? In part it’s because our technological capabilities have advanced at a faster rate than our social structures, rules and laws. Stephanie Nguyen was Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2025, where she worked on cases against companies who were surveillance-pricing us unfairly. She unpacks how companies are spying on us, when that crosses a line, and what changes we’re starting to see as consumers fight back.   Further Reading: Surveillance Prices. Hidden Fees. Shifting Costs. This Madness Must Stop. - The New York Times "The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices" by Samuel A.A. Levine and Stephanie T. Nguyen  “The Degradation of Prices: Platform Power, the Erosion of Price Comparison, and Rebuilding Comparison Shopping in the Digital Economy” by Stephanie T. Nguyen & Shaoul Sussman FTC’s complaint in its case against Amazon Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All - Politico (on price collusion)  Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Critical minerals and rare earths – special rocks – do everything from make our cars go to treat cancer. But the vast majority of production, processing, and manufacturing largely happens in or is controlled by China. For decades, we didn't think that was a problem. Plus, mines were dirty and dangerous and we preferred that they be located elsewhere. But in recent years, as global trade has turned from a tool of diplomacy to a weapon, we and every other country realized that it’s probably suboptimal to cede these literally-critical elements. Mining economist Gracelin Baskaran loves these rocks, and tells us what makes them so important, why the US was so lackadaisical about them, and what we’re doing about it now.   Further Reading & Listening: Planet Money - How to get what Greenland has, with permission Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Over a decade ago, Eric Zwick got assigned an unusual project at the U.S. Treasury: Find out how much tax businesses were paying. But the data was a mess, so Eric and two friends helped comb through it and, in doing so, got to build a topographic map of business activity and profitability in America. And it suddenly revealed a class of people who had been hard to see before: the “everywhere millionaires,” or the “stealthy wealthy.”  People who built an amazing amount of wealth selling things like cars, $5 electric toothbrushes, and seamless gutters. He tells us about these everywhere millionaires, the policies that helped them get so rich, and how this revelation helped reshape his understanding of the U.S.  Further Reading/Listening Owen Zidar & Eric Zwick - The Everywhere Millionaire Planet Money - My Favorite Tax Loophole Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

When novelist Min Jin Lee writes a book, she goes deep. She spends years researching, interviewing relevant people whose experiences and jobs will comprise her characters and plot. In her new book American Hagwon, she threw herself into the intense schooling and education systems, and extracted lessons that are sincerely useful, which she unpacks in this episode, including: a focus on achievement obscures the point of learning; community is how to survive; karma is real, just be patient; and how – unprompted! – it all goes back to bond markets.  Further reading/listening:Min Jin Lee: American Hagwon Min Jin Lee: Pachinko Planet Money: Economic fact in literary fiction   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Being a country’s central banker is a technical job. But, just like high school, if you are a popular central banker, it pays off. Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a political scientist at Brown University, and has researched just how much it pays to be popular. It’s the kind of question that the field of economics largely neglects. Aditi looks at central-bank-likeability through the manifestation of swap lines, currency exchanges made available between two economies. These become especially important in a moment of crisis, and a close connection between central bankers can mean the difference between an economy that sinks and one that swims.  Further Reading: Aditi Sahasrabuddhe: Banker’s Trust Liaquat Ahamed: Lords of Finance Financial Times: Swap lines are geopolitical infrastructure Financial Times: A less independent Fed raises risks to a key crisis tool Financial Times: Will the Fed continue to assume its global responsibilities?   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Emily Oster is not a doctor. She’s an economics professor at Brown University, and for years she’s been applying her economics lens and ability to read studies and analyze data to help decode health research. Her conclusions sometimes produce runaway hits – as in Expecting Better, her book upending the “conventional pregnancy wisdom” – and at other times are wildly unpopular – as with her recommendation to re-open schools while the pandemic was still raging. Emily tells us about the gaps that open up as science progresses, and how people jump into those gaps with theories, political agendas, and grifts. We talk about why we tend to make health and science a political team sport, if we can learn to parse data ourselves, and how to practice living with uncertainty. Further reading: Expecting Better, by Emily Oster Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders by Emily Oster The Safety Turducken by Emily Oster Can America’s Students Recover What They Lost During the Pandemic? by Alec MacGillis Transformative Experience by L. A. Paul The Rise of Female Autonomy and the Decline of Fertility: The Role of Mismatch, by Claudia Goldin Earthing the Human Body Influences Physiologic Processes   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Bonds around the world have been selling off, kind of a lot. And that selloff has sent interest rates on government debt to or near their highest in decades— for US government debt, but also debt from the UK, Germany, France, Japan. What gives? We pulled in one of the people who buys and sells those bonds, Ed Al-Hussainy, at Columbia Threadneedle, which manages a lot of money for other people and institutions. Ed reads the market tea leaves for us about why this is happening, what it means for participants in the US economy, and how much we need to worry.  Further Reading: Harper’s: Debt Reckoning, by Mary Childs WSJ: The Bond Market Issues World Leaders a Failing Grade, by Greg Ip Goldman Sachs: Why Global Bond Yields Are Expected to Stay Elevated Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Gold was on a tear in August. People, investors, and central banks around the world were buying more and more, in large part because it’s seen as a stable alternative to the dollar, or to any currency. But…why? Why gold? What makes it so special? Friend of the show Jacob Goldstein wrote a book called Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, and he explains the real, physical reasons why we love gold so much, and the long history of our collective obsession. Further Reading Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, by Jacob Goldstein ThePollenNation.com America Is Having A Fiscal Midlife Crisis Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

If you live in the worlds of financial markets and economics, sometimes it can be hard to remember that not all of life can be neatly packaged into data points and lists of pros and cons. And Nobel-Prize-winning-economist and Stanford professor Al Roth is pretty convincing that markets are Good, and that, if you think it through, we *should* allow some kind of market in the trade of *some* human organs. But across the Stanford campus, philosopher Debra Satz says those frameworks are missing things, important things. She wrote a book that suggests that some things simply should not be for sale. That book is called Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale. We needed remedial help remembering why some things should not be for sale. What things, exactly? And why? Further Reading Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Debra Satz  Organs, Sex Work, and Drugs: A Nobel Economist on Why Banning Things Can Backfire, Mary in America   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

AI is creating unfathomable wealth for a handful of people, upending labor markets, and jacking up electricity bills for the rest of us. But somehow we have to figure out how to still be a society. We’ve done it before – AI is just the latest "General Purpose Technology" we have to adapt to. Many of the vectors we worry about here are even more pronounced abroad – visible inequality, inconsistent water and energy, and large populations of young people facing increasingly dire job prospects. Rohit Lamba, an economist at Cornell, studies AI’s spread around the world and especially in India. He offers a few ways to think about the big questions so this disruption can be less painful than past ones.  Further Reading: Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity, by Rohit Lamba and Raghuram G Rajan  Barron’s: Why India Is Becoming a Data-Center Hub, Whether Communities Like It or Not World Bank: AI Offers Lifeline to Developing Economies in an Era of Weak Growth FT: The AI threat to India’s IT jobs machine Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

At the end of July, you may have heard the sound of a hedge fund blowing up. Situational Awareness, a fund focused on the new AI world, had a sudden firesale of its holdings. It seemed like an AI bubble barometer—a way to tell whether the markets have gone too far. Amelia Pollard, investment correspondent at the Financial Times, has been breaking stories on the drama every step of the way. And she says this hedge-fund-implosion was weird and distinct from its hedge-fund-implosion peers and precedents in a few revealing ways. One big example: after it crashed, Situational Awareness didn’t go away. In fact, it’s kind of doing well. Have we learned how to bubble better? Or are we just postponing future pain?  Representatives for Citadel declined to comment. This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.  Further reading:  How Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘golden child’ of the AI trade, was laid low (gift link) Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Making educational content for kids is fun, but also really hard to do well. Kids are not an ideal audience: they are prone to wandering away, getting distracted, not remembering the plot. Scott Cameron is the head of content & IP strategy at Sesame Workshop, which makes the beloved and long running show Sesame Street. We were curious what makes kid’s content good, what it can achieve, and what Sesame’s history can tell us about how we live today. Further Watching: Andrew Garfield and Elmo Explain Grief - Sesame Workshop   Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website

Jae Woo Lee loves coding. To him, it’s an art form, like poetry. He’s a legendary professor of computer science at Columbia, where he teaches advanced programming to hundreds of students a year. Which means he’s on the front lines of the war between AI and education. And what he is seeing…is not exactly heartening. He tells us why coding by hand is still an art worth learning, why it’s still important to do things the hard way, and what we lose when we don’t.   Further Reading "The Mind Behind the Infamous Advanced Programming: Jae Woo Lee", The Columbia Spectator Subscribe to the show! YouTube Instagram TikTok Website