Baseball is a winner-take-all career. There is a very small chance of making massive amounts of money. But more importantly, there is a very big chance of making almost no money. Some minor leaguers earn $8,000 dollars per year. To have more chances at winning the baseball lottery, some players are deciding to get together and face the odds as a group. They are joining "income pools," which could change the way baseball players, and lots of professionals, think about how we get paid.

David Ricardo was the first economist to think rigorously about international trade, and his theory of comparative advantage has stood the test of time. So why do so many politicians ignore it? And what would he do about Brexit? Peter Neary of the University of Oxford talks to Tim Phillips.

Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his work on matching markets. Examples include marriage, matching kidney donors to kidney recipients, and students to schools in cities that allow choice in their public school systems. Roth also discusses repugnance--the unease some people have with allowing buying and selling of some goods and what it's like to watch a kidney transplant knowing your research has helped make the surgery possible.

From Hidden Brain:
We don't always behave the way economic models say we will. We don't save enough for retirement. We order dessert when we're supposed to be dieting. We give donations when we could keep our money for ourselves.

Again and again, we fail to act rationally and selfishly — the way traditional economics expects us to.

We've seen this during the coronavirus crisis: People selflessly mobilizing to help each other, like the retired Kansas farmer who sent an N95 mask to New York to help a nurse or a doctor.

At the same time, though, we've also seen some people do exactly what economic theory assumes they will: Place their own self-interest above everything else. There are those who have even tried to profit from the pandemic, like the man in New York accused of stockpiling N95 masks to sell at an inflated price.

Think about this man who hoarded masks and the man who donated a mask. In almost every sphere, our public and economic policies are designed around the assumption that most of us are going to behave like the first man. Legislators pass laws that take aim at transgressors. Regulators and police departments come up with rules that punish lawbreakers. Parents and teachers discipline truants.

As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?

Solar panels used to be something only rich people could afford.

But then a few things happened — some by accident, and some on purpose — that drastically lowered the price.

Now solar is cheap. And its key market demographic has shifted away from rich environmentalists to people who want to save money on their power bill. Here's how it happened.

Solar panels used to be something only rich people could afford.

But then a few things happened — some by accident, and some on purpose — that drastically lowered the price.

Now solar is cheap. And its key market demographic has shifted away from rich environmentalists to people who want to save money on their power bill. Here's how it happened.

The field of economics studies what people do in a world of scarce resources. One of the biggest scarce resources is time.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and we have only so many days on earth. The question of what we do with that time has puzzled philosophers, artists — and economists.

Today on The Indicator, we talk to economist Daniel Hamermesh, whose new book Spending Time examines time's complicated relationship to money, stress, and gender.