The New Bazaar

The common argument for why countries should be open to trading with each other has always been simple: free trade is good for economic growth, economic efficiency, and innovation. Businesses get access to more customers around the world, and consumers can buy a wider variety of goods and services made abroad. And for a long time, that logic was widely accepted. Countries lowered barriers to trading with each other, and global trade boomed.

Perhaps no longer. Something fundamental has changed. Policymakers are now using trade policy to pursue other goals besides just economic growth. Like national security goals, and goals related to the environment and human rights. Sometimes countries are using trade policy to fight other non-trade disputes with each other.

That is the thesis of this episode’s guest, journalist Soumaya Keynes. Soumaya has just finished a big report for The Economist magazine about this recent shift, and how it ties into the events of the past few years. The rise of populism, and the growing tensions between the US and China, and most recently the thing that’s been on a lot of people’s minds -- the clogging of global supply chains. 

As Soumaya explains, this new logic of trade involves complex tradeoffs for policymakers, as the non-trade goals they are now pursuing are often directly opposed to each other. 

Links from the episode:

• Soumaya is on Twitter at @SoumayaKeynes
• “The new order of trade” by Soumaya Keynes (https://tinyurl.com/5c7m3457)
• Trade Talks Podcast (https://tinyurl.com/25vb6m48)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Cardiff has a theory -- somewhat half-baked, he admits -- that only when Broadway has fully recovered from the pandemic will we know that the overall US economy has also fully recovered. The necessity of proximity to strangers made Broadway as an industry a perfect target for the pandemic, and so it may well be one of the last industries to return to its former health.

And with the return of theater visitors to New York, we may also see the return of jobs for performers and workers on Broadway and at the myriad restaurants, bars, and hotels that cater to these visitors. The labor market remains nowhere close to having recovered these jobs in the leisure and hospitality sectors, and New York City’s own unemployment rate is more than double that of the US overall. 

So, to explore this theory and get a Broadway 101 primer, Cardiff called up Lee Seymour, a journalist who covers Broadway and is himself a Broadway producer and Tony Award winner. They discuss the business of Broadway, how the industry fared through the shutdown, and how its nascent recovery is going.

Links from the episode:

• Lee is on Twitter at @LeemourSeymour
• The Inheritance (https://tinyurl.com/wvv8wnhk)
• Lee’s articles at Forbes (https://tinyurl.com/478hwnbm)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

In 1960, only six percent of all the doctors and lawyers in the country were either women (of all races and ethnicities) or men of color. All the rest -- the overwhelming majority -- were white men. Fast forward half a century. By the year 2010, women and nonwhite men were 38 percent of doctors and lawyers. A similar integration occurred in other high-paying professions that required college and post-graduate degrees. 

According to a paper by economist Chang-Tai Hsieh and his co-authors, this deepening integration accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of the per-capita economic growth in the country during this period. Like much of Chang-Tai’s other work, this paper is about what happens when people are finally able to apply their talents in ways that best take advantage of those talents -- and what a tragedy it is, for all of us, when they can’t.  

And that’s why this story is not entirely a happy one. Mainly because there is so much progress that is still left to be made. But also because the progress that was being made appears to be slowing down. And for some people, it might even be reversing. 

Links from the episode:

• “The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth” (https://tinyurl.com/988c6a8)
• “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation” (https://tinyurl.com/wcyh3mtd)
• Chang-Tai Hsieh’s research page (https://tinyurl.com/n86tufvs)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Stacey Vanek Smith is the author of the new book, Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace. She is also Cardiff’s former co-host on The Indicator from Planet Money! The two hosts reunite for this special episode, in which Stacey tells Cardiff about the hardheaded wisdom and encouragement she finds in Machiavelli, the economic data and case studies showing the particular set of obstacles that women confront at the office, and why professional advancement requires an understanding of the world as it is, not as we wish it were. 

Links from the episode:

• Stacey is on Twitter at @svaneksmith
• Machiavelli for Women (https://tinyurl.com/5cun5du7)
• The Indicator from Planet Money (https://tinyurl.com/4a8pa2cj)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Gentrification is a trend that can be confusing, contentious, and widely misunderstood. Perhaps most surprisingly, gentrification can offer “the promise of integration and sorely needed investment that can increase residents’ quality of life — but only if disadvantaged residents are set up to take part in the benefits of increased investment." Thus argues Jerusalem Demsas, policy reporter at Vox. In a wide-ranging conversation, she takes Cardiff through the research and academic literature on gentrification, explaining the nuances and complexities that are so often missing in debates about this controversial trend. 

Links from the episode:

• Jerusalem is on Twitter at @JerusalemDemsas
• “What we talk about when we talk about gentrification”, by Jerusalem Demsas (https://tinyurl.com/2kpasxn7)
• All of Jerusalem’s Vox articles (https://tinyurl.com/3sjvp3dc)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

For almost all of human history and pre-history -- going back tens of thousands of years -- the average human life expectancy was about 35 years or less. Steven Johnson, author of the new book Extra Life, describes this fact as The Long Ceiling. But something changed a few hundred years ago. A series of public health innovations started arriving in batches, each innovation building on the success of another, that finally began extending our average life expectancy to where it is now, at more than 70 years. Steven explains to Cardiff why these innovations began so late in the human experience, the institutions and public remedies needed for their benefits to spread, and what lessons they hold for the Covid era.

Links from the episode:

• Steven Johnson is on Twitter at @stevenbjohnson
• Steven’s website
• Extra Life, the book (https://tinyurl.com/yfksrh82)
• Extra Life, the PBS series (https://tinyurl.com/3hbk3sb7)
• The Ghost Map (https://tinyurl.com/5t48e5vy) 
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

In The Delusions of Crowds, finance theorist William Bernstein writes about some of the famous financial bubbles and religious manias of the past. He joins Cardiff to discuss the connection between these two kinds of events, why humans are so susceptible to mass manias, the good that sometimes comes from a financial bubble, and how we can all spot the visible signs of manias when they arise. 

Links from the episode:

• The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups (https://tinyurl.com/95ff3emt)
• A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (https://tinyurl.com/kn6pdr7k)
• The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created (https://tinyurl.com/v8mw4be2)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Ulrike Malmendier is the premier economic scholar for understanding how our experiences affect our decisions, even in ways we might not recognize. Ulrike joins Cardiff to discuss the nuances and applications of her research, including why daily habits like grocery shopping affect our expectations for the economy; how the crises we live through determine the extent of our lifetime participation in financial markets; and how policymakers at the Federal Reserve are just as susceptible to the effects of their experiences as the rest of us are to our own. Plus, Ulrike offers an optimistic view on how our future decision-making might be transformed by the pandemic. 

Links from the episode:

• Ulrike Malmendier is on Twitter at @umalmend
• Ulrike’s research (https://tinyurl.com/eyv99d4a)
• Ulrike’s AEA/AFRA Joint Lecture (https://tinyurl.com/9x94f8jr)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

A few years ago, Maria Konnikova took a leave from her job as a psychology journalist at The New Yorker to try something new: become a professional poker player. Hoping merely for a good story to write about, she stunned everyone -- including herself -- with her accelerated mastery of the game, winning big tournaments and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars within just the first couple of years. Maria joins Cardiff to discuss what she learned in the process about her own psychological makeup, her capacity for change, and how we can all take lessons from poker to make better decisions. It’s the subject of her latest book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, And Win, which is now available in paperback.

Links from the episode:

• Maria Konnikova is on Twitter at @mkonnikova
• Maria’s book, The Biggest Bluff (https://tinyurl.com/kexnvd4n)
• “Remembering Walter Mischel, with Love and Procrastination” in The New Yorker (https://tinyurl.com/zrbae2xx)
• Maria’s writing in The New Yorker (https://tinyurl.com/y8n88yy8)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]

Mark Hugo Lopez is the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. He and his colleagues recently conducted a sweeping survey about how Americans identify their racial, ethnic and foreign country origins.The results show that how we see ourselves isn’t fixed. It fluctuates and evolves -- revealing that identity can be as much a function of how we measure it as how we regard ourselves in a given moment. Cardiff and Mark also discuss immigration trends, how American views on diversity have changed over time, and even a little bit of politics.

Links from the episode:

• Mark Hugo Lopez is on Twitter at @MHugoLopez
• Pew Research identity report (https://tinyurl.com/y7mv3zn5)
• The growing diversity of black America (https://tinyurl.com/823dm2su)
• Census on race and ethnicity measures (https://tinyurl.com/h2696u3j)
• Mark's book recommendation, Bless Me, Ultima (https://tinyurl.com/zeyw7stu)
• Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeane
• Send us an email! You can write to us at [email protected]