America's financial system is inseparable from America's enormous growth, productivity, and prosperity. Many myths about financial markets persist. Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp detail the many critical benefits of robust financial markets in Financing Opportunity.
Is 2024 the year the music festival died? Festivals are getting canceled left and right, from Northern California to Florida to Virginia.
Big name festivals that used to sell out in minutes struggled to sell tickets this year, too, like Burning Man and Coachella.
And it's not just America. By one count, over 60 music festivals were canceled in the UK this year alone. In Australia, so many festivals were canceled that one newspaper there recently asked, are the nation's music festivals extinct?
Today on the show, the music festival recession. What's behind it and is it temporary or a permanent cultural shift?
The U.S. economy is breathing a little easier after the International Longshoremen's Association reached a tentative agreement last week with the United States Maritime Alliance. The short-lived dockworkers strike reignited a debate over whether the president ought to intervene, invoking an old law on the books called the Taft-Hartley Act. On today's show, we explain what the Taft-Hartley Act is, why it was created and why it's still scorned by unions.
F.A. Hayek's contributions to economics are hard to overstate. This week marks fifty years since Hayek became a Nobel Laureate for that work. Economists Peter Boettke and Bruce Caldwell detail some of Hayek's enduring contributions.
National Geographic magazine recently wrote that ?people in the United States eat more than 672 billion pounds of corn per year, which breaks down to more than 2,000 pounds per person annually?.
Is this really true?
Tim Harford investigates all the things that we don?t eat, that are counted in this number.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Bethan Ashmead Latham
Production co-ordinator: Katie Morrison
Sound mix: Giles Aspen
Editor: Richard Vadon
It's Jobs Friday! It's that time of the month where we check in on the American worker.
In September, 254,000 jobs were added to the US economy and the unemployment rate ticked down very slightly to 4.1%. It's unexpectedly strong, and relieving news for workers after a pretty lackluster summer.
But ... given how the labor market cooled over summer, is the labor market still on thin ice? And if there were to be a plummet in jobs, could anything be done to speed up the recovery?
Today on the show: How it's easier to break the economy than to fix it, and whether we can escape from the patterns of the past.
Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz seems to have a poor understanding of what the First Amendment protects. Donald Trump pledges to use the Department of Justice to punish Google over the presentation of negative news stories about him. Cato's Brent Skorup and Nico Perrino of FIRE detail the candidates' troubling views.
In Germany, döner kebabs are more than just an affordable, satisfying street food. They're a symbol of Turkey's culinary influence in the country. Today on the show, how an effort to give döner kebabs a protected status under a little-known EU regulation could dish out some real economic consequences, in Germany and beyond.
Special thanks to Sidney Gennies, Sönke Matschurek, and Maren Möhring.
Federal health programs contribute to massive and unsustainable government overspending. Government control of most health care dollars continues apace. Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris has a plan to fix it. Michael Cannon explains.
Margaret Burroughs is well known as the founder of the DuSable Museum. Perhaps lesser known is her decades long work teaching art to incarcerated men. In collaboration with the Burroughs Legacy Project at the Invisible Institute, we hear reflections from Burroughs' former students.
