Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Bobbi Herzberg interviews Matt Mitchell on Certificate of Need (CON) laws, what change in healthcare looks like, and socialized healthcare.

Matthew Mitchell is a Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economic Freedom at the Fraser Institute.

Read Matt's book, co-authored with Peter Boettke, Applied Mainline Economics: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Public Policy and check out his work on the Realities of Socialism.

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.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to seasons one and two!

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

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Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

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Performing at a strip club can be lucrative, but it requires financial and psychological savvy — and an eye for social trends. Zachary Crockett takes a look.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Layla, stripper.
  • Dave Manack, publisher and editor-in-chief of Exotic Dancer.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "A Look at Washington State’s ‘Strippers’ Bill of Rights’," by Aimee Ortiz (The New York Times, 2024).
  • "These L.A. Strippers Won a Union. But the Dance Isn’t Over," by Suhauna Hussain (Los Angeles Times, 2023).
  • "Dancers at Northwest Portland Strip Club Vote to Form City’s First Strippers Union, Second in U.S.," by Kristine de Leon (The Oregonian, 2023).
  • "'Everyone and Their Mum Is on It': OnlyFans Booms in Popularity During the Pandemic," by Matilda Boseley (The Guardian, 2020).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "Why is Everyone Having Less Sex?" by No Stupid Questions (2023).

In 2022, artist Stuart Semple opened up his laptop to find that all his designs had turned black overnight. All the colors, across files on Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, were gone. Who had taken the colors away? The story of what happened begins with one company, Pantone.

Pantone is known for their Color of the Year forecasts, but they actually make the bulk of their money from selling color reference guides. These guides are the standard for how designers pretty much anywhere talk about color.

On today's show, how did Pantone come to control the language of the rainbow? We look back at the history of Pantone, beginning with the man who made Pantone into the industry standard. And, we hear from Stuart, who tried to break the color monopoly.

Share your thoughts — What color should we choose to be Planet Money's color?

This episode was hosted by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Jeff Guo, and produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Debbie Daughtry with help from Carl Craft. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Who has the power? Workers or bosses? It changes through the ages, though it's usually the bosses. Today, we look at two key moments when the power of labor shifted, for better and worse, and we ask why then? What does history have to say about labor power right now?

We travel to Sicily, Italy in the year 1347, where the bubonic plague is about to strike. The horror known as the Black Death will remake European society in countless ways, but we'll focus on one silver lining: how economic conditions shifted for workers.

Then we head about 500 years into the future, to an English factory at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where textile workers take up arms against the machines taking their jobs and show how rapidly labor supply and demand can change. This is the famed tale of the Luddites, now a byword for knee jerk anti-technology, but the true story has nuance and a desperate but rational violent rebellion.

This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

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Why does treating a venomous snake bite cost as much as a house? Zachary Crockett slithers over to North Carolina to find out.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Steve Anderson, emergency medicine business unit leader at BTG Pharmaceuticals.
  • Nick Brandehoff, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado and executive director of the Asclepius Snakebite Foundation.
  • Sean Bush, emergency physician and president of the North American Society of Toxinology.
  • Nitin Deshpande, business consultant with Premium Serums & Vaccines.
  • Jack Facente, owner-operator of AGRITOXINS Venom Production Laboratory.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "This New Antivenom Defangs the Toxins of Cobras, Black Mambas and More," by Cassandra Willyard (Scientific American, 2024).
  • "Perspectives on Snakebite Envenoming Care Needs Across Different Sociocultural Contexts and Health Systems: A Comparative Qualitative Analysis Among U.S. and Brazilian Health Providers," by Eleanor Strand, Felipe Murta, Anna Tupetz, Charles J. Gerardo, et al. (Toxicon: X, 2023).
  • "Access to Antivenoms in the Developing World: A Multidisciplinary Analysis," by Julien Potet, David Beran, David J. Williams, et al. (Toxicon: X, 2021).
  • "The Lab Saving the World From Snake Bites," by Myles Karp (Smithsonian Magazine, 2020).
  • "Why Competition Hasn't Brought Down The High Price Of Snakebite Treatment," by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez (NPR, 2019).
  • "Summer Bummer: A Young Camper’s $142,938 Snakebite," by Carmen Heredia Rodriguez (KFF Health News, 2019).
  • "The Amazing Science Behind Fatal Snake Bites," (BBC News, 2015).
  • "Southern Californians See a Rise in Venomous Snakes," by Rebecca Fairley Raney (The New York Times, 2006).
  • Venom Week.

 

• EXTRAS:
  • Venom Hunters, TV series (2016).

4.5 million households in the U.S. have solar panels on their homes. Most of those customers are happy with it - their electricity bills have just about disappeared, and it's great for the planet. But thousands and thousands of people are really disappointed with what they've been sold. Their panels are more expensive than they should be, and they say it is hard to get someone to come fix them when they break.

It turns out this sometimes crummy customer experience is no accident. It ties back to how big, national solar companies built their businesses in the first place. To entice people to install expensive solar panels, companies developed new financing models which cut upfront costs for customers. And they deployed lots and lots of salespeople to grow their businesses. But in the drive to get more households installing solar panels, consumer costs went up and the focus seemed to shift away from making sure those panels actually worked. All of this left some consumers feeling like they've been sold a lie.

On today's episode, we look into how the residential solar business model has turned some people sour on solar. And we'll try to figure out where the industry could go from here.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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Planet Money Summer School is back for eight weeks. Join as we travel back in time to find the origins of our economic way of life. Today we ask surprisingly hard question: What is money? And where did it come from? We travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean for the answer. Then we'll visit France in the year 1714, where a man on the lam tries to revolutionize the country's entire monetary system, and comes impressively close to the modern economy we have today, before it all falls apart. Check out our Summer School video cheat sheet on the origins of money at the Planet Money TikTok.

The series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

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On this episode of the podcast, Peter Boettke interviews Chris Coyne on his latest book, How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite, co-authored with Abigail R. Hall. How to Run Wars provides a satirical take on the logistics and ethical considerations involved in conducting wars, drawing inspiration from Bruce Winton Knight's How to Run a War. Chris discusses his motivations for writing the book, its contents, and his research agenda.

To learn more about Chris’s research that aims to better understand stable peace and conflict, check out his Initiative for the Study of a Stable Peace (ISSP).

Christopher Coyne is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, the associate director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Director of the Initiative for the Study of a Stable Peace (ISSP) through the Hayek Program.

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.

Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to seasons one and two!

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

Online companies promised to bring transparency to the mattress-buying experience. Did that work out? Zachary Crockett takes a look under the sheets.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Derek Hales, founder and editor-in-chief of NapLab.com.
  • Joe Megibow, C.E.O. of Casper Sleep.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Drake Has a $400,000 Bed − We Asked Why and Where You Can Buy It," by Emilia Hitching (Homes & Gardens, 2024).
  • "Casper Tests a New Store Design as It Rethinks Its Retail Strategy," by Anna Hensel (Modern Retail, 2024).
  • "Is The Direct-To-Consumer Bedding Business Turning Into A Bad Dream?" by Warren Shoulberg (Forbes, 2019).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "Are We in a Mattress-Store Bubble?" by Freakonomics Radio (2016).

We often hear that air travel is worse than it's ever been. Gone are the days when airplanes touted piano bars and meat carving stations — or even free meals. Instead we're crammed into tiny seats and fighting for overhead space.

How did we get here? Most of the inconveniences we think about when we fly can be traced back to the period of time just after the federal government deregulated the airlines.

When commercial air travel took off in the 1940s, the government regulated how many national airlines were allowed to exist, where they were allowed to fly, and how much they could charge for tickets. But the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 swept all these restrictions aside – and stopped providing subsidies for the air carriers. Airlines had to compete on ticket prices. That competition led to a more bare-bones flying experience, but it also made air travel a lot more affordable.

In this episode, we trace the evolution of air travel over the past century to discover whether flying really is worse today — or if it's actually better than ever. We'll board a plane from the "golden age" of air travel, hear the history of one of the original budget airlines and meet feuding airline CEOs. Along the way, we'll see how economic forces have shaped the airline industry into what it is today, and what role we, as consumers, have played.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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