Category: Series

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.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/risk-uncertainty-profits-and-modern-portfolio-theory

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.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/farmland-protection-policy-act-crisis-politics-and-quiet-socialization-land

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. 

Related episodes: 
Why Americans don’t want to move for jobs anymore 
How to build abundantly 
How big is the US housing shortage? 
The highs and lows of US rents 

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

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

Inflation does more than just force up prices. It destroys the wealth-producing process, especially with young people who are prevented from acquiring the same kinds of assets earlier generations procured. The result is inter-generational conflict.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/inflation-interventionism-and-intergenerational-resentment