Mary in America

Adriana Robertson is a law professor at the University of Chicago who, a decade ago, got fixated on index funds. They seemed so important – the best, or maybe only, good investing advice was to put your money in an index fund, right? So, she wondered, what exactly is an index fund? How does one get made? She poked around and couldn’t find research that answered her questions. So unfortunately she had to do it herself. And what she found was that these “passive” investing vehicles aren’t really passive at all. At the end of the day, somebody has to pick the stocks. She joins us to tell us what index funds – and for that matter, capital markets in general – are supposed to be doing, and if they are actually doing it. 

Further Reading:

Adriana Z. Robertson - Passive in Name Only: Delegated Management and “Index” Investing

Harry Markowitz - Portfolio Selection

Lucian A. Bebchuk - The Case for Increasing Shareholder Power

Yueran Ma - What Adam Smith Didn’t Foresee About Capitalism

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When we go to buy something – online, on our phones, in person, doesn't matter – there’s an entire invisible infrastructure behind whatever price we see. Companies have dedicated data scientists who use our zip codes, computer type, browsing history, cursor movements, SO much information, to determine how much they can charge us, how much we are willing to pay. On the consumer side, basically nobody likes it. So how did it get to this, and what can we do about it? In part it’s because our technological capabilities have advanced at a faster rate than our social structures, rules and laws. Stephanie Nguyen was Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2025, where she worked on cases against companies who were surveillance-pricing us unfairly. She unpacks how companies are spying on us, when that crosses a line, and what changes we’re starting to see as consumers fight back.

Further Reading:

Surveillance Prices. Hidden Fees. Shifting Costs. This Madness Must Stop. - The New York Times

"The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices" by Samuel A.A. Levine and Stephanie T. Nguyen 

“The Degradation of Prices: Platform Power, the Erosion of Price Comparison, and Rebuilding Comparison Shopping in the Digital Economy” by Stephanie T. Nguyen & Shaoul Sussman

FTC’s complaint in its case against Amazon

Maybe There Was an Egg Cartel After All - Politico (on price collusion) 

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Critical minerals and rare earths – special rocks – do everything from make our cars go to treat cancer. But the vast majority of production, processing, and manufacturing largely happens in or is controlled by China. For decades, we didn't think that was a problem. Plus, mines were dirty and dangerous and we preferred that they be located elsewhere. But in recent years, as global trade has turned from a tool of diplomacy to a weapon, we and every other country realized that it’s probably suboptimal to cede these literally-critical elements. Mining economist Gracelin Baskaran loves these rocks, and tells us what makes them so important, why the US was so lackadaisical about them, and what we’re doing about it now. 
 

Further Reading & Listening:

Planet Money - How to get what Greenland has, with permission

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Over a decade ago, Eric Zwick got assigned an unusual project at the U.S. Treasury: Find out how much tax businesses were paying. But the data was a mess, so Eric and two friends helped comb through it and, in doing so, got to build a topographic map of business activity and profitability in America. And it suddenly revealed a class of people who had been hard to see before: the “everywhere millionaires,” or the “stealthy wealthy.”  People who built an amazing amount of wealth selling things like cars, $5 electric toothbrushes, and seamless gutters. He tells us about these everywhere millionaires, the policies that helped them get so rich, and how this revelation helped reshape his understanding of the U.S. 

Further Reading/Listening

Owen Zidar & Eric Zwick - The Everywhere Millionaire

Planet Money - My Favorite Tax Loophole

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When novelist Min Jin Lee writes a book, she goes deep. She spends years researching, interviewing relevant people whose experiences and jobs will comprise her characters and plot. In her new book American Hagwon, she threw herself into the intense schooling and education systems, and extracted lessons that are sincerely useful, which she unpacks in this episode, including: a focus on achievement obscures the point of learning; community is how to survive; karma is real, just be patient; and how – unprompted! – it all goes back to bond markets.
 

Further reading/listening:
Min Jin Lee: American Hagwon

Min Jin Lee: Pachinko

Planet Money: Economic fact in literary fiction

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Being a country’s central banker is a technical job. But, just like high school, if you are a popular central banker, it pays off. Aditi Sahasrabuddhe is a political scientist at Brown University, and has researched just how much it pays to be popular. It’s the kind of question that the field of economics largely neglects. Aditi looks at central-bank-likeability through the manifestation of swap lines, currency exchanges made available between two economies. These become especially important in a moment of crisis, and a close connection between central bankers can mean the difference between an economy that sinks and one that swims. 

Further Reading:

Aditi Sahasrabuddhe: Banker’s Trust

Liaquat Ahamed: Lords of Finance

Financial Times: Swap lines are geopolitical infrastructure

Financial Times: A less independent Fed raises risks to a key crisis tool

Financial Times: Will the Fed continue to assume its global responsibilities?

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Emily Oster is not a doctor. She’s an economics professor at Brown University, and for years she’s been applying her economics lens and ability to read studies and analyze data to help decode health research. Her conclusions sometimes produce runaway hits – as in Expecting Better, her book upending the “conventional pregnancy wisdom” – and at other times are wildly unpopular – as with her recommendation to re-open schools while the pandemic was still raging. Emily tells us about the gaps that open up as science progresses, and how people jump into those gaps with theories, political agendas, and grifts. We talk about why we tend to make health and science a political team sport, if we can learn to parse data ourselves, and how to practice living with uncertainty.

Further reading:

Expecting Better, by Emily Oster

Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders by Emily Oster

The Safety Turducken by Emily Oster

Can America’s Students Recover What They Lost During the Pandemic? by Alec MacGillis

Transformative Experience by L. A. Paul

The Rise of Female Autonomy and the Decline of Fertility: The Role of Mismatch, by Claudia Goldin

Earthing the Human Body Influences Physiologic Processes

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Bonds around the world have been selling off, kind of a lot. And that selloff has sent interest rates on government debt to or near their highest in decades— for US government debt, but also debt from the UK, Germany, France, Japan. What gives? We pulled in one of the people who buys and sells those bonds, Ed Al-Hussainy, at Columbia Threadneedle, which manages a lot of money for other people and institutions. Ed reads the market tea leaves for us about why this is happening, what it means for participants in the US economy, and how much we need to worry. 

Further Reading:

Harper’s: Debt Reckoning, by Mary Childs

WSJ: The Bond Market Issues World Leaders a Failing Grade, by Greg Ip

Goldman Sachs: Why Global Bond Yields Are Expected to Stay Elevated

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Gold was on a tear in August. People, investors, and central banks around the world were buying more and more, in large part because it’s seen as a stable alternative to the dollar, or to any currency. But…why? Why gold? What makes it so special? Friend of the show Jacob Goldstein wrote a book called Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, and he explains the real, physical reasons why we love gold so much, and the long history of our collective obsession.

Further Reading

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, by Jacob Goldstein

ThePollenNation.com

America Is Having A Fiscal Midlife Crisis

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If you live in the worlds of financial markets and economics, sometimes it can be hard to remember that not all of life can be neatly packaged into data points and lists of pros and cons. And Nobel-Prize-winning-economist and Stanford professor Al Roth is pretty convincing that markets are Good, and that, if you think it through, we *should* allow some kind of market in the trade of *some* human organs. But across the Stanford campus, philosopher Debra Satz says those frameworks are missing things, important things. She wrote a book that suggests that some things simply should not be for sale. That book is called Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale. We needed remedial help remembering why some things should not be for sale. What things, exactly? And why?

Further Reading

Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Debra Satz 

Organs, Sex Work, and Drugs: A Nobel Economist on Why Banning Things Can Backfire, Mary in America

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