Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

Remember pagers? They were huge in the 80s — these little devices that could receive short messages. Sir Mix-A-Lot even had a song about them! But then cell phones came along, and pagers more or less became obsolete.

Except there's one group of people who still carry pagers: medical doctors. At a surprisingly large number of hospitals, the pager remains the backbone of communication. Need to ask a doctor a question? Page them. Need to summon a doctor to an emergency? Page them. And then... wait for them to call you back.

Almost everyone agrees that pagers are a clunky and error-prone way for doctors to communicate. So why do so many hospitals still rely on them?On today's show: A story about two doctors who hatched a plan to finally rid their hospital of pagers. And the surprising lessons they learned about why some obsolete technologies can be so hard to replace.

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Keith Romer and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez with help from Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Today on the show, we have two episodes from our daily podcast, The Indicator, about things we spend a lot of time thinking about this time of year: food and drink.

First up, we explore how changes in economic conditions led to one of the U.K.'s iconic (and affordable) staple foods becoming a luxury.

Then, the story of one Indigenous woman whose small business went head-to-head with Coca-Cola over a trademark dispute.

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How did love stories about vampires, cowboys, and wealthy dukes become the highest-grossing fiction genre in the world? Zachary Crockett gets swept away. 

 

SOURCES:

• Delaney Diamond, romance novelist.
• Danielle Flores, high school math teacher and avid romance novel reader.
• Brenda Hiatt, romance novelist.
• Diane Moggy, vice president of editorial at Harlequin.

RESOURCES:

• "Even as Overall Book Sales Are Declining, Romance Novels Are on the Rise," by Elena Burnett, Sarah Handel, and Juana Summers (All Things Considered, 2023).
• "Key Takeaways from the Authors Guild’s 2023 Author Income Survey," press release by the Authors Guild (2023).
• "How Amazon Turned Everyone Into a Romance Writer (and Created an Antitrust Headache)," by Ann Kjellberg (Observer, 2022).
• "Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out," by Mimi Swartz (Texas Monthly, 2020).
• "A Brief History of the Romance Novel," by Amanda Pagan (New York Public Library Blog, 2019).
• "How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance," by Kelly Faircloth (Jezebel, 2015).
• "Fifty Shades of Amish: A Strange Genre of the Romance Novel," by Leah McGrath Goodman (Newsweek, 2015).

Would you say that you and your family are better off or worse off, financially, than you were a year ago? Do you think in 12 months we'll have good times, financially, or bad? Generally speaking, do you think now is a good time or a bad time to buy a house?

These are the kinds of questions baked into the Consumer Sentiment Index. And while the economy has been humming along surprisingly well lately, sentiment has stayed surprisingly low.

Today on the show: We are really bummed about the economy, despite the fact that unemployment and inflation are down. So, what gives? We talk to a former Fed economist trying to get to the heart of this paradox, and travel to Michigan to check in on the place where they check the vibes of the economy.

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In the state of Oregon, there is a glut of grass. A wealth of weed. A crisis of chronic.

And, jokes aside, it's a real problem for people who work in the cannabis industry like Matt Ochoa. Ochoa runs the Jefferson Packing House in Medford, Oregon, which provides marijuana growers with services like drying, trimming and packing their product. He has seen literal tons of usable weed being left in marijuana fields all over the state of Oregon. Because, Ochoa says, there aren't enough buyers.

There are just over four million people in Oregon, and so far this year, farmers have grown 8.8 million pounds of weed. Which means there's nearly a pound of dried, smokable weed for every single person in the state of Oregon. As a result, the sales price for legal marijuana in the last couple of years has plummeted.

Economics has a straightforward solution for Oregon's overabundance problem: trade! But, Oregon's marijuana can only be sold in Oregon. No one in any state can legally sell weed across state lines, because marijuana is still illegal under federal law. On today's episode, how a product that is simultaneously legal and illegal can create some... sticky business problems.

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Welcome back to the Environmental Economics series, hosted by Jordan Lofthouse. On this episode, he interviews Bobbi Herzberg on a polycentric approach to solving climate change. Bobbi and Jordan discuss the importance and meaning of "polycentricity", how we can vote with our feet, major themes from public choice, Elinor Ostrom's work on climate change, and the six advantages that polycentric systems have for coping with climate change: (1) competition among decision makers, (2) cooperation among decision makers, (3) perceptions of legitimacy that lead to coproduction, (4) mutual learning through experimentation, (5) institutional resilience/robustness, and (6) emergent outcomes that are socially desirable but not centrally planned.

Bobbi Herzberg is a Distinguished Senior Fellow for the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and a Senior Research Fellow. Previously, she served as assistant director of individual freedom & free markets at the John Templeton Foundation, as administrative director of The Institute of Political Economy, and as president of the Public Choice Society from 2014-2016.

Check out Jordan Lofthouse's work.

Referenced Works: Jordan and Bobbi's "The Continuing Case for a Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change", Elinor Ostrom's "A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change"

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!

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Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus

CC Music: Twisterium

Can a hit single from four decades ago still pay the bills? Zachary Crockett f-f-f-finds out.

 

RESOURCES:

• "The Knack Sue Run-DMC Over 'It’s Tricky' Riff," (Rolling Stone, 2006).
• Clip of "My Sharona" in the film Reality Bites (1994).
• "The Knack: Where Are They Now?" by David Fricke (Rolling Stone, 1986).
• "Top Singles of the Year," (Billboard, 1979).
• "My Bologna," by Weird Al Yankovic (1979).
• "My Sharona," by The Knack (1979).

 

EXTRAS:

• "What’s Wrong with Being a One-Hit Wonder?" by Freakonomics Radio (2023).

 

SOURCES:

• Sharona Alperin, real-estate agent and namesake of the 1979 hit-single "My Sharona."
• Berton Averre, lead guitarist and co-writer in musical group The Knack.
• Michael Closter, founder and president of Reach Music.

Here at Planet Money, Thanksgiving is not just a time to feast on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles and pie(s). It's also a time to feast on economics. Today, we host a very Planet Money Thanksgiving feast, and solve a few economic questions along the way.

First: a turkey mystery. Around the holidays, demand for turkey at grocery stores goes up by as much as 750%. And when turkey demand is so high, you might think that the price of turkey would also go up. But data shows, the price of whole turkeys actually falls around the holidays; it goes down by around 20%. So what's going on? The answer has to do what might be special about supply and demand around the holidays.

We also reveal what is counted (and not counted) in the ways we measure the economy.

And we look to economics to help solve the perennial Thanksgiving dilemma: Where should each dinner guest sit? Who should sit next to whom?

This episode was hosted by Erika Beras and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed with an assist from Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Josh Newell.

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 Is graffiti public art, or public nuisance? It depends who you ask. Zachary Crockett tags in where it all started.

 

RESOURCES:

• "Philadelphia Graffiti Pier: A Love Letter to the City’s Underground Arts," by Honora Feinberg (Guide to Philly, 2023).
• "USA TODAY Names Philadelphia 'Best City for Street Art,'" (Visit Philadelphia, 2023).
• "Cornbread, the First Graffiti Artist, Shows New Work at Philadelphia Gallery," by Peter Crimmins (WHYY, 2019).
• "Porch Light Program: Final Evaluation Report," by Jacob Kraemer Tebes, Samantha L. Matlin, Bronwyn Hunter, Azure B. Thompson, Dana M. Prince, and Nathaniel Mohatt (Yale School of Medicine, 2015).
• "Graffiti Triggers Crime, Littering, Study Shows," by Jeanna Bryner (NBC News, 2008).
• "Problem-Oriented Guides for Police: Graffiti," by Deborah Lamm Weisel (D.O.J. Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2004).

EXTRA:

• "Urinetown," by Tell Me Something I Don't Know (2017).

 

SOURCES:

• Thomas Conway, deputy managing director of the City of Philadelphia's Community Life Improvement Program.
• Jane Golden, executive director of Mural Arts Philadelphia.
• REPOZ, graffiti artist.

Some of the most influential and beloved novels of the last few years have been about money, finance, and the global economy. Some overtly so, others more subtly. It got to the point where we just had to call up the authors to find out more: What brought them into this world? What did they learn? How were they thinking about economics when they wrote these beautiful books?

Today on the show: we get to the bottom of it. We talk to three bestselling contemporary novelists — Min Jin Lee (Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires), Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility), and Hernan Diaz (Trust, In the Distance) – about how the hidden forces of economics and money have shaped their works.

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin, edited by Molly Messick, and engineered by Neisha Heinis. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez.

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

Always free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.

Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.

Music: Universal Music Production - "This Summer," "Music Keeps Me Dancing," "Rain," and "All The Time."

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