The New Bazaar

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: Samuelson Friedman book page (https://tinyurl.com/wykc796w) Keynes Hayek book page (https://tinyurl.com/5ade64dz) Inte...

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 tradi...

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 theat...

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 p...

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 showin...

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....

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...

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.&nbsp...

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...

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 yea...

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 ou...

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...

A new podcast about how the economy shapes our lives. The first episode will be available on Thursday, August 12. See you then!