Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

The world’s oldest advertising medium has reconfigured itself for the digital age. Zachary Crockett looks up.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Anna Bager, president and C.E.O. of the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America.
  • Dan Levi, chief marketing officer at Clear Channel Outdoor.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Advertising Proves Resilient Amidst Economic Uncertainty," (Magna Global, 2025).
  • "Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings, Inc. Reports Results for the First Quarter of 2025," (Clear Channel Investor Relations, 2025).
  • "The Bigger, The Bolder: Outdoor Advertising," by Judy Gonyeau (Journal of Antiques and Collectibles, 2024).
  • "How Digital Billboards Target Passersby (Hint: It's Cellphone Data)," by Karen Duffin (NPR, 2020).
  • "The hottest advertising trend of 2018? Billboards." by Zachary Crockett (The Hustle, 2019).
  • "Model Legislation for Banning Billboards," (Scenic America).

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It’s here! It’s free to download and playtest! It’s the Planet Money game! (Download here.)

• Download and playtest the game go here 
• Sign up for the 11/1 virtual AMA event and get updates about the game
• Submit your feedback on the game
• Watch the how-to video with Kenny and Elan for playtest instructions

In this episode, the story of how we arrived here. Ride along as our game-making partners at Exploding Kittens help us turn our (sometimes wild) economics game ideas into the next blockbuster game. It’s a behind the scenes look at how to design a game from scratch — a game that is somehow filled with economics, impossible to put down, but does not feel like you’re cramming for school. Which is… harder than we thought.

After months of trying to find the perfect balance of ideas and entertainment, the Planet Money game is ready for our next phase. And that’s where you come in, listeners! We need you to playtest the Planet Money game to help us perfect it.

Subscribe to Planet Money+

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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The N.F.L. is a powerful cartel with imperial desires. College football is about to undergo a financial reckoning. So maybe they should team up? (Part one of a two-part series.)

The post The Merger You Never Knew You Wanted appeared first on Freakonomics.

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On this episode, Chandran Kukathas delivers a lecture at the Mercatus Center on capitalism, human nature, and the meaning of life.

Kukathas argues that capitalism is less a fixed system than a constantly evolving set of rules and relationships, shaped by our restless desire to transform the world. He shows how politics, rent-seeking, and shifting definitions of capital are woven into its fabric, making it impossible to separate “pure markets” from the social and political contexts in which they operate.

Kukathas challenges both critics and defenders who treat capitalism as the source of every social ill or success, urging instead a sober recognition of human limits, the diversity of our ends, and the case for modest, freedom-preserving reforms.

Dr. Chandran Kukathas is Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Political Science at School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University and a Distinguished Affiliated Fellow at the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of many books, including Dialogues on Immigration and the Open Society (Routledge, 2025) and The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2007).

Show Notes:

• Thomas Hobbes’ book, Leviathan
• G.A. Cohen’s book, Why Not Socialism?
• Elijah Millgram’s book, The Great Endarkment
• Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, After Virtue

**This lecture was recorded August 13, 2025.

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!

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CC Music: Twisterium

We want to make a board game. It must, of course, teach the world about economics. It must be fun. It’d be nice if it sold lots of copies! How hard could that be!? (Monopoly and Catan are hugely popular and basically little economy simulators, after all.)

Well, turns out, it’s quite hard!

We’re in a golden age of tabletop games. Thirty years ago there were around 800 new games each year. Now it is more like 5,000. Just a handful of those get to be hits. 

In the first episode of our new series, Planet Money sets forth on an epic quest to beat the odds. 

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Erika Beras. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Peaslee and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Gilly Moon and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

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Polly Trottenberg and Kenneth Levin discuss the highs and lows of the American air traffic control system. To get subscriber-only episodes, sign up for SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

The post A 30,000-Foot View of Air Traffic Control appeared first on Freakonomics.

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Some singles choose to skip the apps and get fixed up the old-fashioned way — but it doesn't come cheap. Zachary Crockett puts himself out there.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Maria Avgitidis, C.E.O. of Agape Match and author of Ask a Matchmaker: Matchmaker Maria's No-Nonsense Guide to Finding Love.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Dating Apps Have Hit a Wall. Can They Turn Things Around?" by J. Edward Moreno (New York Times, 2024).
  • "Love, (un)automated: Human matchmaking in the era of online dating," by Liesel Sharabi (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2024).
  • "The New Old Dating Trend," by Faith Hill (The Atlantic, 2023).
  • "What It’s Like to Work With a Matchmaker," by Alyson Krueger (New York Times, 2021).
  • "New York State Dating Service Consumer Bill of Rights."

 

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The next time you open your fridge, take a second to behold the miracles inside of it: Raspberries from California, butter from New Zealand, steak from Nebraska. None of that would have been remotely possible before the creation of the cold chain. 

The cold chain is the name for the end-to-end refrigeration of our food from farm to truck to warehouse to grocery store and ultimately to our fridges at home. And it’s one of the great achievements of the modern world. 

On today’s show, Nicola Twilley, food journalist and author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, tells us the story of how our world got cold, and what that’s meant for the economy.  

We’ll hear about two pioneers of cold: The cheapskate meat baron Gustavus Swift, and the train-hopping chemist Polly Pennington. And we’ll take a look at whether all this refrigeration might have created some new problems. 

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Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Nick Fountain and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by James Sneed and edited by Keith Romer. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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In this episode we first published in 2021, the political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang argues that different forms of government create different styles of corruption — and that the U.S. and China have more in common than we’d like to admit.

The post Is the U.S. Really Less Corrupt Than China? (Update) appeared first on Freakonomics.

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On Wall Street, fortunes are often won and lost with the tiniest advantages. And for the past few years, one trading firm has stood out from the rest for both huge profits and careful secrecy — Jane Street Group.


But last year, one of Jane Street’s biggest and most lucrative trading strategies was unexpectedly revealed in a Manhattan courtroom. The news ricocheted around the world. It drew the attention of competitors and regulatory agencies, destabilized billions of dollars worth of trades, and called into question some of the most fundamental strategies in global finance. 

Some Planet Money episodes about finance:

• The rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management
• How George Soros forced the UK to devalue the pound

Further reading: 

• Jane Street Group, LLC v. Millennium Management LLC, Douglas Schadewald, and Daniel Spottiswood
• “Jane Street’s Indian Options Trade Was Too Good,” from Bloomberg
• SEBI's report: "Interim Order in the matter of Index manipulation by Jane Street Group"
• “Jane Street Defends India Trading Activity, Blasts Regulator,” from Bloomberg

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This episode was produced by Eric Mennel, with production help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Cooper Katz-McKim. It was edited by Jess Jiang. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Planet Money’s executive producer is Alex Goldmark


Music in this episode:

Bob Bradley, “Cyber Crime”

Jason Bowld; Colin Doran, “Falling Apart 2”

Runman, “Dark Shop”

Martin Haene [SUISA], “Heavy Trip”

Adam Riches [PRS], Murray David Stockdale [PRS], Sammy Gordonski [PRS], “Monster”

Alex Arcoleo;Josh Oliver, “Day Dreamer”

Alex Arcoleo, “Best Part”


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