Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

At the core of most of the electronics we use today are some very tiny, very powerful chips. Semiconductor chips. And they are mighty: they help power our phones, laptops, and cars. They enable advances in healthcare, military systems, transportation, and clean energy. And they're also critical for artificial intelligence, providing the hardware needed to train complex machine learning.

On today's episode, we're bringing you two stories from our daily show The Indicator, diving into the two most important semiconductor chip companies, which have transformed the industry over the past 40 years.

First, we trace NVIDIA's journey from making niche graphics cards for gaming to making the most advanced chips in the world — and briefly becoming the world's biggest company. Next, we see how the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's decision to manufacture chips for its competition instead of itself flipped the entire industry on its head, and moved the vast majority of the world's advanced chip production to Taiwan.

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Channeling the voices of celebrities can be a lucrative career — one that requires empathy and discretion as well as literary chops. Zachary Crockett checks the acknowledgements.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Valerie Frankel, ghostwriter.
  • Madeleine Morel, President and Lead Agent of 2M Communications.
  • Daniel Paisner, ghostwriter.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Ghostwriting History: Churchill, Kennedy and the Authenticity of Authorship," by Andrew Mumford (The International History Review, 2024).
  • "Column: How many ways can a political memoir backfire? Ask Kristi Noem," by Robin Abcarian (Los Angeles Times, 2024).
  • "Notes from Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter," by J. R. Moehringer (The New Yorker, 2023).
  • "Confessions of a Celebrity Ghostwriter," by Dina Gachman (Texas Monthly, 2022).

We wade into the heated debate over immigrants' impact on the labor market. When the number of workers in a city increases, does that take away jobs from the people who already live and work there? Does a surge of immigration hurt their wages?

The debate within the field of economics often centers on Nobel-prize winner David Card's ground-breaking paper, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market." Today on the show: the fight over that paper, and what it tells us about the debate over immigration.

More Listening:
- When The Boats Arrive
- The Men on the Roof

This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Annie Brown, and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2019.)

In 1794, George Washington decided to raise money for the federal government by taxing the rich. He did it by putting a tax on horse-drawn carriages.

The carriage tax could be considered the first federal wealth tax of the United States. It led to a huge fight over the power to tax in the U.S. Constitution, a fight that continues today.

Listen back to our 2019 episode: "Could A Wealth Tax Work?"

Listen to The Indicator's 2023 episode: "Could SCOTUS outlaw wealth taxes?"

This episode was hosted by Greg Rosalsky and Bryant Urstadt. It was originally produced by Nick Fountain and Liza Yeager, with help from Sarah Gonzalez. Today's update was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Molly Messick and our executive producer, Alex Goldmark.

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This is the second episode of a three-part miniseries on entangled political economy (EPE), hosted by Mikayla Novak. Entangled political economy is a sub-discipline of political economy that explicitly views individuals and the private and public sectors as being intertwined in overlapping exchange relationships along competitive and collaborative dimensions.

On this episode, Mikayla Novak is joined by David Hebert who details his time working with Richard Wagner, discusses his work on public finance and political parties viewed through the lens of entangled political economy, and explains his view of the future direction of EPE research.

David Hebert is a Senior Research Fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research and an Associate Director of EPERN. Previously, he was the chair of the Department of Economics and an Associate Professor of Economics at Aquinas College.

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

How did mobile kitchens become popular with hipster gourmands? And just how much money can a popular truck make from a lunch shift? Zachary Crocket drops some napkins.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Mariel-Leona Edwards, senior operations manager for Señor Sisig.
  • Matthew Geller, founding president of the National Food Truck Association and C.E.O. of the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association.
  • Evan Kidera, C.E.O. and co-owner of Señor Sisig.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Seed Planted in SF State MBA Program Grows Into Mini-Filipino Food Empire," by Jamie Oppenheim (SF State News, 2022).
  • "Inside Señor Sisig, the First Restaurant for a Pioneer of Filipino-American Cuisine," by Luke Tsai (Eater, 2019).
  • "Tamales, L.A.’s Original Street Food," by Gustavo Arellano (Los Angeles Times, 2011).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant (Update)," by Freakonomics Radio (2019).

When the vape brand Juul first hit the market back in 2015, e-cigarettes were in a kind of regulatory limbo. At the time, the rules that governed tobacco cigarettes did not explicitly apply to e-cigarettes. Then Juul blew up, fueled a public health crisis over teen vaping, and inspired a regulatory crackdown. But when the government finally stepped in to solve the problem of youth vaping, it may have actually made things worse.

Today's episode is a collaboration with the new podcast series "Backfired: the Vaping Wars." You can listen to the full series at audible.com/Backfired.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Leon Neyfakh. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang with help from Annie Brown. It was fact checked by Sofia Shchukina and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space company and wants to colonize mars. He also runs a company that just implanted a computer chip into a human brain. And he believes there's a pretty high probability everything is a simulation and we are living inside of it.

But the latest Elon Musk headline-grabbing drama is less something out of sci-fi, and more something pulled from HBO's "Succession."

Elon Musk helped take Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the biggest companies in the world. And his compensation for that was an unprecedentedly large pay package that turned him into the richest person on Earth. But a judge made a decision about that pay package that set off a chain of events resulting in quite possibly the most expensive, highest stakes vote in publicly traded company history.

The ensuing battle over Musk's compensation is not just another wild Elon tale. It's a lesson in how to motivate the people running the biggest companies that – like it or not – are shaping our world. It's a classic economics problem with a very 2024 twist.

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Youth baseball — long a widely accessible American pastime — has become overrun by $10,000-per-year, for-profit travel leagues. Zachary Crockett peers inside the dugout.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Linda Flanagan, author.
  • Nick Mackenzie, future New York Yankees shortstop.
  • R.J. Mackenzie, physical education teacher and baseball dad.
  • John Miller, journalist and baseball coach.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "The Cost of Youth Baseball Is Getting Absurd," by Adam Minter (Bloomberg, 2024).
  • "Perfect Game Sees Prosperity Thanks To New Investments In Youth Sports," by Wayne G. McDonnell, Jr. (Forbes, 2024).
  • "How America Sold Out Little League Baseball," by John W. Miller (America Magazine, 2022).
  • "In Youth Sports, Talent Helps but Money Rules," by Roman Stubbs (The Washington Post, 2022).
  • Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports and Why It Matters, by Linda Flanagan (2022).
  • "State of Youth Sports: Parents, Policymakers Better Appreciate Physical Activity, Face Barriers to Help Kids Play," by Jon Solomon (The Aspen Institute, 2022).

 

• EXTRA:
  • Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports and Why It Matters, by Linda Flanagan (2022).

There's a behind the scenes industry that helps big brands decide questions like: How big should a bag of chips be? What's the right size for a bottle of shampoo? And yes, also: When should a company do a little shrinkflation?

From Cookie Monster to President Biden, everybody is complaining about shrinkflation these days. But when we asked the packaging and pricing experts, they told us that shrinkflation is just one move in a much larger, much weirder 4-D chess game.

The name of that game is "price pack architecture." This is the idea that you shouldn't just sell your product in one or two sizes. You should sell your product in a whole range of different sizes, at a whole range of different price points. Over the past 15 years, price pack architecture has completely changed how products are marketed and sold in the United States.

Today, we are going on a shopping cart ride-along with one of those price pack architects. She's going to pull back the curtain and show us why some products are getting larger while others are getting smaller, and tell us about the adorable little soda can that started it all.

By the end of the episode, you'll never look at a grocery store the same way again.

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