While Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is popular in academic economics and finance, it fails to properly explain profits, mistakenly confusing entrepreneurial profit seeking with risk management.
Former FTC commissioner returns to Bad Faith to explain the Netflix/Paramount battle over Warner Brothers, and what media consolidation means for the price of streaming services, censorship, the quality of media content and the future of movie theaters.
For more than 40 years, the Farmland Protection Policy Act has socialized US farmlands and transferred wealth to politically-connected people. What it hasn’t done is protect farmland.
Cities like Austin and Atlanta used to top lists of places people moved to looking for relatively affordable places to live. Until, one day, they weren’t that affordable. On today’s show, how a low cost of living is threatened by growth, and how one sunbelt city in Alabama is planning ahead.
Venezuelan leader and activist Maria Corina Machado’s perilous journey to Oslo made headlines this week, but that was just the start of a new phase of international campaign to bring pressure on the Nicolas Maduro regime in her home country. NPR’s Miles Parks speaks with Ana Corina Sosa, Machado’s daughter, who accepted the Nobel Peace prize on her mother’s behalf, and talked about the future of Venezuela.
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Governor JB Pritzker visits the studio to talk to Lovett about Trump's Indiana redistricting fail, how Illinois is standing up to ICE's immigration raids, and how the governor's upbringing — a childhood of both privilege and tragedy — shaped his career in politics. Plus, Lovett asks the governor to defend his controversial Star Wars film rankings, quizzes him on some blackjack hands, and asks what we're all thinking: Is he running for President?
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Trump’s SAVE tool is looking for noncitizen voters. But it’s flagging U.S. citizens too. Host Miles Parks speaks with NPR reporter Jude Joffe-Block about tracking down citizens who are now having to prove they have a right to vote.
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This episode was produced by Linah Mohammed and Avery Keatley. It was edited by Brett Neely, Ben Swasey and Adam Raney. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
Whether we like it or not, global warming is happening. The global temperature has already gone up, and it’s going to go up more, because the atmosphere is already full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and we’re continuing to add to that stock. Quite how much it will increase by is a very important question for all of us.
Until relatively recently, during much of the 2010s and into the 2020s, many scientists claimed that if we kept on going down the path we were on, if we just kept on with business as usual, then by the end of the century global temperatures would increase by almost five degrees centigrade.
This projection was based on something called RCP 8.5, a statistical scenario used by scientists to model the future of the climate.
You can still find scientific papers published in 2025 that make the same claim. However, there’s a good case that RCP 8.5 should never have been used as the business-as-usual scenario. And in hindsight it doesn’t look like an accurate vision of the future at all.
So what’s going on?
Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at Stripe, explains the argument.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Series producer: Tom Colls
Sound mix: Donald MacDonald
Editor: Richard Vadon
Nate has ridden in a Waymo, and it was like stepping into the future. Maria’s never been in one, but she’s been stuck behind a lot of autonomous vehicles… They swap human-driven car horror stories and discuss some of the risks and benefits of a future full of self-driving cars.