Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

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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Graphite is sort of the one-hit wonder of minerals. And that hit? Pencils. Everyone loves to talk about pencils when it comes to graphite. If graphite were to perform a concert, they'd close out the show with "pencils," and everyone would clap and cheer. But true fans of graphite would be shouting out "batteries!" Because graphite is a key ingredient in another important thing that we all use in our everyday lives: lithium ion batteries.

Almost all of the battery-ready graphite in the world comes from one place: China. That's actually true of lots of the materials that go into batteries, like processed lithium and processed cobalt. Which is why it was such a big deal when, earlier this year, President Biden announced a tariff package that will make a bunch of Chinese imports more expensive. Included in this package are some tariffs on Chinese graphite. He wants to create a new battery future—one that doesn't rely so much on China.

In this episode, we get down on the ground to look at this big supply chain story through the lens of one critical mineral. And we visit a small town that realizes that it might be the perfect place to create an American graphite industry. And we find that declaring a new battery future is one thing, but making it happen is another thing entirely.

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On this episode, we’ll hear a book panel discussion on Peter Boettke’s book, The Struggle for a Better World (Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2021). In his comments, Boettke provides an overview of his book, emphasizes the role that institutions play in human societies, and discusses his focus on improving the human condition by lifting up those who are least prosperous in our world. The panel is moderated by Stefanie Haeffele, and they are joined on the panel by:

• Emily Chamlee-Wright, President and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies, and co-author of How We Came Back: Voices from Post-Katrina New Orleans (2015)
• Alain Marciano, Professor of Economics and Statistics at the University of Turin, distinguished affiliated fellow with the Hayek Program, and author of James Buchanan and Peaceful Cooperation: From Public Finance to a Theory of Collective Action (2024)
• Mark Pennington, Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy and Director of the Center for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London, and author of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy (2011)

View Emily Chamlee-Wright's "The Four Corners of Liberalism" graphic here.

Peter Boettke is a Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University and Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has published numerous books including Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (2012) and F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy (2018).

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!

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CC Music: Twisterium

Why do we use a specific kind of tree-bark tissue to seal up 70 percent of wine bottles? Zachary Crockett takes a sniff and gives the waiter a nod.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Carlos De Jesus, director of communications at Amorim Cork.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "This Ancient Material Is Displacing Plastics and Creating a Billion-Dollar Industry," by Marta Vidal (The Washington Post, 2024).
  • "Troubled Times For Wine In 2023: Global Production And Consumption Shrinking," by Per and Britt Karlsson (Forbes, 2024).
  • "Three Studies Take A Look At Various Wine Bottle Closure Preferences," by Thomas Pellechia (Forbes, 2019).
  • "How Millennials (Almost) Killed the Wine Cork," by John Gifford (The Atlantic, 2016).

Most economic textbooks will tell you that there can be real dangers in running up a big national debt. A major concern is how the debt you add now could slow down economic growth in the future. Economists have not been able to nail down how much debt a country can safely take on. But they have tried.

Back in 2010, two economists took a look at 20 countries over the course of decades, and sometimes centuries, and came back with a number. Their analysis suggested that economic growth slowed significantly once national debt passed 90% of annual GDP... and that is when the fight over debt and growth really took off.

On today's episode: a deep dive on what we know, and what we don't know, about when exactly national debt becomes a problem. We will also try to figure out how worried we should be about the United States' current debt total of 26 trillion dollars.

This episode was hosted by Keith Romer and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez with help from Sofia Shchukina and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise the cow, feed the cow, kill the cow, get the fat out of the cow, cook the fat, dip wicks into the fat. All that--for not very much light. Now, if we want to light a whole room, we just flip a switch.

The history of light explains why the world today is the way it is. It explains why we aren't all subsistence farmers, and why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers. (And, yes, people who make podcasts about the history of light.) The history of light is the history of economic growth--of things getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

On today's show: How we got from dim little candles made out of cow fat, to as much light as we want at the flick of a switch.

Today's show was hosted by Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum. It was originally produced by Caitlin Kenney and Damiano Marchetti. Today's rerun was produced by James Sneed, and edited by Jenny Lawton. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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