Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

(Note: This episode originally ran in 2023.)

Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in decades. This dissonance is due, in part, to the difficulties of one important phase in the life cycle of a union: setting up a union in the first place. One place where that has been particularly clear is at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Back in 2008, Volkswagen announced that they would be setting up production in the United States after a 20-year absence. They planned to build a new auto manufacturing plant in Chattanooga.

Volkswagen has plants all over the world, all of which have some kind of worker representation, and the company said that it wanted that for Chattanooga too. So, the United Auto Workers, the union that traditionally represents auto workers, thought they would be able to successfully unionize this plant.

They were wrong.

In this episode, we tell the story of the UAW's 10-year fight to unionize the Chattanooga plant. And, what other unions can learn from how badly that fight went for labor.

This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Willa Rubin. It was engineered by Josephine Nyounai, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Keith Romer. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Americans love to buy new stuff and hate to get rid of old stuff, which is why storing it all has become a $45 billion business. Zachary Crockett cleans out the garage.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Zachary Dickens, executive vice president and chief investment officer of Extra Space Storage.
  • Anne Mari DeCoster, self-storage consultant.
  • Kara Kolodziej, self-storage unit tenant.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "A Fifth Of Americans Rent Self Storage, With Millennials Overtaking Gen Xers In Generational Storage Wars," by Francis Chantree (Storage Cafe, 2024).
  • "Lessors of Mini Warehouses and Self-Storage Units Show Significant Financial Gains During COVID-19 Pandemic," by Ben Chandler and Robin Enlow (United States Census Bureau, 2024).
  • "The Fate of Oversupplied Self-Storage Markets and How to Pull Back From the Brink," by Frank DeSalvo and David Perlleshi (Inside Self Storage, 2023).
  • "A Pandemic Space Race: Self-Storage Roars Back," by Ellen Rosen (The New York Times, 2021).
  • "Need to Store That? Booming Self-Storage Industry Says No Problem," by Liam Pleven (The Wall Street Journal, 2015).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • Storage Wars, TV series (2010-present).
  • Auction Hunters, TV series (2010-2015).

For the last year and a half, the story of FTX has focused largely on the crimes and punishment of Sam Bankman-Fried. But in the background, the actual customers he left behind have been caught in a financial feeding frenzy over the remains of the company.

On today's show, we do a deep dive into the anatomy of the FTX bankruptcy. We meet the vulture investors who make markets out of risky debt, and hear how customers fare in the secretive world of bankruptcy claims trading.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Amanda Aronczyk. It was produced by James Sneed and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang, and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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What's going on with consumers? This is one of the trickiest puzzles of this weird economic moment we're in. We've covered a version of this before under the term "vibecession," but it's safe to say, the struggle is in fact real. It is not just in our heads. Sure, sure, some data is looking great. But not all of it.

What's interesting, is exactly why the bad feels so much worse than the good feels good. Today on the show, we look into a few theories on why feelings are just not matching up with data. We'll break down some numbers and how to think about them. Then we look at grocery prices in particular, and an effort to combat unfair pricing using a mostly forgotten 1930's law. Will it actually help?

Today's episode is adapted from episodes for Planet Money's daily show, The Indicator. Subscribe here.

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On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, we continue the Living Better Together miniseries, featuring select authors of Living Better Together: Social Relations and Economic Governance in the Work of Ostrom and Zelizer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and hosted by its coeditor, Stefanie Haeffele.

Joining us today are Anne Hobson and Laura Grube. Together they explore the complexities of institutional diversity, community recovery, and crisis resilience through the lenses of Ostrom and Zelizer. Laura’s chapter focuses on community recovery following Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy and emphasizes the importance of local, community-driven solutions following disasters. Anne’s chapter explores the role of remittances in Cuba and how these financial supports act as economic circuits that maintain and strengthen familial and social bonds across geographical distances. Both emphasize the importance of social relations in community resilience.

Laura Grube is an Associate Professor of Economics at Beloit College. She is an alum of the Mercatus PhD Fellowship. Check out her chapter, "Institutional Diversity in Social Coordination Post-disaster."

Anne Hobson earned her PhD in Economics from George Mason University and now works in public policy. She is an alum of the Mercatus MA Fellowship. Check out her chapter, "Beyond Relief: Understanding the Cuban Diaspora's Remittance-Sending Behavior."

Recommended Works: Robert Wise’s “Learning from Strangers,” Barbara Czarniawska’s “Narratives in Social Science Research,” Jieun Baek’s “North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How The Information Underground is Transforming a Closed Society,” Tom Gjelten’s “Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba,” and “Cuba and the Cameraman.”

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 season two, now releasing!

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

Learn more about Academic & Student Programs

Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

The background noises you hear in film and TV — from footsteps to zombie guts — are produced in specialized studios by professionals known as Foley artists. Zachary Crockett makes some noise.

 

• SOURCE:
  • Gregg Barbanell, foley artist at Universal Studios.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects," by Anna Wiener (The New Yorker, 2022).
  • "The Strangest Foley Sounds in Cinema," by Amber Gibson (ACMI, 2021).
  • "The Man Who Makes Hollywood’s Smallest Sounds," by Zachary Crockett (Priceonomics, 2015).

 

• EXTRA:
  • "No Hollywood Ending for the Visual Effects Industry," by Freakonomics Radio (2017).

TikTok, and other apps like it, are filled with financial advice. Some of it is reliable, some... less so.

There are videos about running a business, having a side hustle, generating passive income. And also, there are a lot of tips and tricks, many of them questionable, about saving on your taxes.

On this show, we run some of the greatest hits of TikTok tax advice by some bonafide tax experts. We'll talk about whether you can use gambling losses to reduce your tax bill, whether your pets qualify you for tax deductions – and we'll fact check the claim that all rich people own expensive Mercedes G-Wagons... for tax purposes.

Along the way, we'll drill down on the concepts like taxable income and the standard deduction. And we'll ask why so many videos on TikTok suggest that you (fraudulently) categorize personal expenses as business expenses. Sometimes with a literal wink and a nod.

This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain. It was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Willa Rubin, who also fact-checked this episode. It was edited by Molly Messick and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's Executive Producer.

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This episode originally ran in 2015.

About one hundred years ago, a scientist and statistician named Francis Galston came upon an opportunity to test how well regular people were at answering a question. He was at a fair where lots of people were guessing the weight of an ox, so he decided to take the average of all their guesses and compare it to the correct answer.

What he found shocked him. The average of their guesses was almost exactly accurate. The crowd was off by just one pound.

This eerie phenomenon—this idea that the crowd is right—drives everything from the stock market to the price of orange juice.

So, we decided to test it for ourselves. We asked Planet Money listeners to guess the weight of a cow.

Spoiler: You can see the results here.

This episode was hosted by David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. It was produced by Nadia Wilson and edited by Bryant Urstadt. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Those letters at the end of web addresses can mean big bucks — and, for some small countries, a substantial part of the national budget. Zachary Crockett follows the links.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Vince Cate, technical contact for the .ai domain in Anguilla.
  • Kim Davies, Vice President of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Services and President of Public Technical Identifiers at ICANN.
  • Tianyu Fang, contributing editor at Reboot.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "The Two-Decade Fight for Two Letters on the Internet," by Jacob Judah (The New York Times, 2024).
  • "Whose Domain Is It?" by Tianyu Fang (Reboot, 2023).
  • "How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Capital of Cybercrime," by Jacob Judah (MIT Technology Review, 2023).
  • "The Tropical Island With the Hot Domain Name," by Rachel Metz (Bloomberg, 2023).
  • "The Never-ending ccTLD Story," by Peter K. Yu (SSRN, 2003).

Last month, Japan's central bank raised interest rates for the first time in 17 years. That is a really big deal, because it means that one of the spookiest stories in modern economics might finally have an ending.

Back in the 1980s, Japan performed something of an economic miracle. It transformed itself into the number two economy in the world. From Walkmans to Toyotas, the U.S. was awash in Japanese imports. And Japanese companies went on a spending spree. Sony bought up Columbia Pictures. Mitsubishi became the new majority owners of Rockefeller Center.

But in the early 1990s, it all came to a sudden halt. Japan went from being one of the fastest growing countries in the world to one of the slowest. And this economic stagnation went on and on and on. For decades.

On this episode, the unnerving story of Japan's Lost Decades: How did one of the most advanced economies in the world just fall down one day — and not be able to get up? Japan's predicament changed our understanding of what can go wrong in a modern economy. And gave us some new tools to try and deal with it.

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and engineered by Cena Loffredo. It was edited by Molly Messick. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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