The New Bazaar

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: Jose Fernandez's research

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 mi...

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...

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....

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: Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing What's Your Problem?

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 t...

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...

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 U...

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. T...

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 e...

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 betwe...

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...

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 an...

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 pas...

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...

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...

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"

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 storie...

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 o...

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...

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 co...

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 ag...

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 l...

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 th...

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 with...