In the past decade the city paid out nearly $3 million drivers whose cars were damaged by poor road conditions. Is asphalt to blame?
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Intellectual Property
When the great novelist Charles Dickens arrived in America in 1842, he was hoping to put an end to pirated copies of his work in the US. They circulated there with impunity because the United States granted no copyright protection to non-citizens. Patents and copyright grant a monopoly, and monopolies are bad news. Dickens’s British publishers will have charged as much as they could get away with for copies of Bleak House; cash-strapped literature lovers simply had to go without. But these potential fat profits encourage new ideas. It took Dickens a long time to write Bleak House. If other British publishers could have ripped it off like the Americans, perhaps he wouldn’t have bothered. As Tim Harford explains, intellectual property reflects an economic trade-off – a balancing act. If it’s too generous to the creators then good ideas will take too long to copy, adapt and spread. But if it’s too stingy then maybe we won’t see the good ideas at all.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Copyright stamp, Credit: Arcady/Shutterstock)
the memory palace - Episode 109 (The Year Hank Greenberg Hit 58 Home Runs)
Music, Footnotes & Ephemera
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary, story-driven shows.
Music
- We start out with some of Pound for Pound from The Bad Plus
- Go to Waltz by Mother Falcon
- Into the Light by Marisa Anderson
- With Everything that Breathes by Greg Haines
- Day One Four by F.S. Blum and Nils Frahm
- Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, and Jeanne Lee do Nuba
- And then Davis S. Ware does Mikuro’s Blues, which I’ve loved for a long time.
Undiscovered - Boss Hua and the Black Box
A team of social scientists stumbles onto a cache of censored Chinese social media posts—and decides to find out what the Chinese government wants wiped from the internet.
On China’s most influential microblogging platform, a wristwatch aficionado named Boss Hua accuses a government official of corruption. But, his posts aren’t censored. So what disappears into the black box of Chinese censorship...and what stays online? A team of social scientists cracked this question—by mistake—with big data.
(Original art by Claire Merchlinsky)
FOOTNOTES
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See the picture that got ‘Smiling Official’ Yang Dacai fired.
Read Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s first study on Chinese government censorship (American Political Science Review).
Read the results of Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s social media experiment (Science).
Read Gary, Jen, and Margaret’s latest study, about what the Chinese government secretly posts to the internet.
Hear Gary King on Science Friday.
CREDITS
This episode of Undiscovered was reported and produced by Annie Minoff and Elah Feder. Editing by Christopher Intagliata. Fact-checking help from Michelle Harris. Original music by Daniel Peterschmidt. Our theme music is by I am Robot and Proud. Art for this episode by Claire Merchlinsky. Story consulting by Ari Daniel. Translations and voicing by Isabelle. Thanks to Science Friday’s Danielle Dana, Christian Skotte, Brandon Echter, and Rachel Bouton.
Crimetown - S1 E18: The Prince of Providence
Buddy Cianci was once a crusading prosecutor who took on the mob. Now, he’s behind bars. For the mayor of any other city, this would be the end of the road. But Buddy isn’t any other mayor. And Providence isn’t any other city.
For a full list of credits, and more information about this episode, visit crimetownshow.com.
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Curious City - Boystown: How Chicago Got Its Gay Neighborhood
Political activism and businesses helped shape the city's gay neighborhood, but there's a debate about its future.
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Video Games
From Spacewar to Pokemon Go, video games – aside from becoming a large industry in their own right – have influenced the modern economy in some surprising ways. Here’s one. In 2016, four economists presented research into a puzzling fact about the US labour market. The economy was growing, unemployment rates were low, and yet a surprisingly large number of able-bodied young men were either working part-time or not working at all. More puzzling still, while most studies of unemployment find that it makes people thoroughly miserable, the happiness of these young men was rising. The researchers concluded that the explanation was simply that this cohort of young men were living at home, sponging off their parents and playing videogames. They were deciding, in the other words, not to join the modern economy in some low-paid job, because being a starship captain at home is far more appealing.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Photo: Hands holding game pad and playing shooter game on TV screen. Credit: Getty Images)
Undiscovered - Hi! We are Undiscovered.
We're a podcast about the left turns, false starts, and lucky breaks that move science forward.