Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

 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.

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China's economic growth for the past few decades has been extraordinary. And much of that growth was fueled by real estate – it was like this miraculous economic engine for the country. But recently, that engine seems to have stopped working. And that has raised all kinds of questions not just for China but also for the global economy.

Today on the show, we look at what's happening inside China's real estate market. And we try to answer the question: how did we get here?

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This week, Peter Boettke interviews Jennifer Burns, author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Milton Friedman achieved tremendous sucess as an economist including being a John Bates Clark Medal winner, a Nobel Prize winner, and the president of the American Economic Association (AEA). In this episode, they discuss Friedman's time at Columbia University, the origin of his economic theory, the influence of Frank Knight, Friedman's female coauthors including Anna Schwartz and Rose Friedman, Friedman's association to conservatism, and more.

Jennifer Burns is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. She is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (November, 2023) and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009). An expert on this history of conservative ideas and politics, she has written for The NewYork Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Dissent, and has discussed her work on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere.

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Virtual Sentiments, our new podcast series from the Hayek Program is now streaming! Subscribe today and listen to season one on digital democracy.

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Executives shell out millions of dollars for the privilege of flying private — but that convenience comes at a steep cost to the rest of us. Zachary Crockett prepares for takeoff.

 

RESOURCES:

• "High Flyers 2023: How Ultra-Rich Private Jet Travel Costs the Rest of Us and Burns Up the Planet," by Chuck Collins, Omar Ocampo, and Kalena Thomhave (joint report by The Patriotic Millionaires and the Institute for Policy Studies, 2023).
• "French Green MPs Want to Ban Private Jet Flights, to 'Bring the Rich Back Down to Earth,'" by Stéphane Mandard (Le Monde, 2023).
• "Markey, Velázquez Announce Legislation to Make the Rich Pay for the Public Costs of Private Jet Pollution," press release by Senator Edward J. Markey (2023).
• "Private Planes and Luxury Yachts Aren’t Just Toys for the Ultrawealthy. They’re Also Huge Tax Breaks," by Paul Kiel (ProPublica, 2023).
• "A Teenager Tracked Elon Musk’s Jet on Twitter. Then Came the Direct Message," by Neil Vigdor (The New York Times, 2022).
• "This Article is More Than 1 Year Old: A 17-Minute Flight? The Super-Rich Who Have ‘Absolute Disregard for the Planet,’" by Oliver Milman (The Guardian, 2022).
• "Private Jets — the Achilles Heel of EU Air Traffic Security?" by Crina Boros and Juliet Ferguson (EUobserver, 2018).
• "In Defence of the Ever-Unpopular Corporate Aircraft," by Joe Nocera (Financial Post, 2017).

 

EXTRAS:

• "Freakonomics Radio Takes to the Skies," series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).

 

SOURCES:

• Chuck Collins, program director on "Inequality and the Common Good" at the Institute for Policy Studies.
• Anthony Tivnan, founder and president of Magellan Jets.

When best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston began playing around with OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, he was, at first, impressed. But then he realized how much in-depth knowledge GPT had of the books he had written. When prompted, it supplied detailed plot summaries and descriptions of even minor characters. He was convinced it could only pull that off if it had read his books.

Large language models, the kind of artificial intelligence underlying programs like ChatGPT, do not come into the world fully formed. They first have to be trained on incredibly large amounts of text. Douglas Preston, and 16 other authors, including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Piccoult, and Jonathan Franzen, were convinced that their novels had been used to train GPT without their permission. So, in September, they sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

This sort of thing seems to be happening a lot lately–one giant tech company or another "moves fast and breaks things," exploring the edges of what might or might not be allowed without first asking permission. On today's show, we try to make sense of what OpenAI allegedly did by training its AI on massive amounts of copyrighted material. Was that good? Was it bad? Was it legal?

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The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries, high up in their ivory towers. On the other, there's the messy world we're all living in, where those economics are actually playing out.

Sometimes, researchers will write about something that they themselves have never actually experienced. Sure, they've thought about it, theorized, come up with smart analyses...but that's not the same as getting out of that armchair and into the real world.

So, in this episode, we play our own version of Never Have I Ever. We dare two researchers to go places and do things they have never done before, in hopes of learning something new about the economic world around us.

(Okay, fine, it's maybe more like Truth or Dare...but go with us here.)

Today's episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Sally Helm, fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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How did a little green nut become a billion-dollar product, lauded by celebrities in Super Bowl ads? Zachary Crockett cracks open the story.

 

RESOURCES:

• "Almond Acreage Decline Prompts Industry Introspection," by Mitch Lies (West Coast Nut, 2023).
• American Pistachio Industry 2021 Annual Report, by American Pistachio Growers (2023).
• "California’s Agricultural Water Policies Are Nuts," by Douglas R. Noble (The Gainesville Sun, 2021).
• "Amid Drought, Billionaires Control a Critical California Water Bank," by Chloe Sorvino (Forbes, 2021).
• "Wonderful Pistachios Achieves Billion-Dollar Brand Milestone," press release by The Wonderful Company (2020).
• "Pistachios: The Quirks of Agricultural Trade in a Nutshell," by Andrea Durkin (Global Trade, 2020).
• "California Pistachios With Perfect Timing," by Mark Blackburn (The New York Times, 1979).

 

SOURCES:

• Sawyer Clark, director of asset management at Gold Leaf Farming.
• Diana Salsa, vice president of marketing for Wonderful Pistachios.

When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in policy circles. In it, she argued that antitrust enforcement in the U.S. was behind the times. For decades, regulators had focused narrowly on consumer welfare, and they'd bring companies to court only when they thought consumers were being harmed by things like rising prices. But in the age of digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook, Khan argued in the article, the time had come for a more proactive approach to antitrust.

Just four years later, President Biden appointed Lina Khan to be the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the main government agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust in America, putting her in the rare position of putting some of her ideas into practice.

Now, two years into the job, Khan has taken some big swings at big tech companies like Meta and Microsoft. But the FTC has also faced a couple of big losses in the courts. On today's show, a conversation with FTC Chair Lina Khan on what it's like to try to turn audacious theory into bureaucratic practice, the FTC's new lawsuit against Amazon, and what it all means for business as usual.

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Earlier this fall, the Federal Trade Commission filed a high-stakes lawsuit against Amazon.

In that suit, the FTC claims Amazon is a monopoly, and it accuses the company of using anti-competitive tactics to hold onto its market power. It's a big case, with implications for consumers and businesses and digital marketplaces, and for antitrust law itself. That is the highly important but somewhat obscure body of law that deals with competition and big business.

And so, this week on Planet Money, we are doing a deep dive on the history of antitrust. It begins with today's episode, a Planet Money double feature. Two classic episodes that tell the story of how the U.S. government's approach to big business and competition has changed over time.

First, the story of a moment more than 100 years ago, when the government stepped into the free market in a big way to make competition work. It's the story of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and a muckraking journalist named Ida Tarbell.

Then, we fast forward to a turning point that took antitrust in the other direction. This is the story of a lawyer named Robert Bork, who transformed the way courts would interpret antitrust law.

These episodes were produced by Sally Helm with help from Alexi Horowitz Ghazi. They were edited by Bryant Urdstadt. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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