China's real estate crisis, explained
China's economic growth for the past few decades has been extraordinary. And much of that growth was fueled by real estate – it was like...
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Episodes
Latest first
The alleged theft at the heart of ChatGPT
When best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston began playing around with OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, he was, at first, impressed. But...
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Never have I ever
The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries,...
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FTC Chair Lina Khan on Antitrust in the age of Amazon
When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in...
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Antitrust in America (classic)
Earlier this fall, the Federal Trade Commission filed a high-stakes lawsuit against Amazon.In that suit, the FTC claims Amazon is a...
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All you can eat economics
You might expect to find economic concepts in the pages of an economics textbook. But you know where you can really see a lot of economic...
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Cutting school... by 20%
Right now, a lot of school districts across the country are making a pretty giant change to the way public education usually works. Facing...
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How unions are stopped before they start
Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in...
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Indicator exploder: jobs and inflation
When someone says "the economy is doing well"—what does that even mean? Like, for workers, for employers, for the country as a whole?...
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Maria Bamford gets personal (about) finance
Note: There is swearing in this episode.In 2017, The University of Minnesota asked comedian Maria Bamford to give their commencement...
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Why the price of Coke didn't change for 70 years (classic)
Prices go up. Occasionally, prices go down. But for 70 years, the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola didn't change. From 1886 until the late...
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A man, a plan, wind power, Uruguay
In 2007, Uruguay had a massive problem with no obvious fix. The economy of this country of 3.5 million people was growing, but there wasn't...
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The flight attendants of CHAOS
When contract negotiations between Alaska Airlines and their flight attendants' union broke down in 1993, the union had a choice to...
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A trucker hat mystery, the curse of September and other listener questions
Ba-dee-yah! Say do you remember? Ba-dee-yah! Questions in September!That's right - it's time for Listener Questions!Every so often, we like...
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The natural disaster economist
There seems to be headlines about floods, wildfires, or hurricanes every week. Scientists say this might be the new normal — that climate...
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A black market, a currency crisis, and a tango competition in Argentina
The Nobel-prize winning economist Simon Kuznets once analyzed the world's economies this way — he said there are four kinds of countries:...
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"Based on a true story"
When a group of amateur investors rallied around the stock for GameStop back in 2021, the story blew up the internet. News outlets around...
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How to launder $600 million on the internet
Erin Plante is a private detective who specializes in chasing down stolen cryptocurrency. In March of 2022, she got the biggest assignment...
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China's weakening economy in two Indicators
In China, data on the economy is sometimes difficult to come by. The Chinese government has put a pause on releasing some of its official...
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Is economists' favorite tool to crush inflation broken?
When economists and policymakers talk about getting inflation under control, there's an assumption they often make: bringing inflation down...
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