Macroeconomics 8: Productivity & Getting Lit

This episode is packed with your best economic ideas from around the world and a penguin interview. It all comes together in this final session of Summer School 2026.Pack your parka, we’re headed to Antarctica.First, we’ll travel back in time to the late 1970s when NPR was a scra ...  Show more

This week’s stop on our world tour - Korea. A country divided into two very different power structures since the end of WWII. Today South Korea is the maker of some of the world’s favorite exports – from Samsung TV’s to BTS. But 75 years ago it was a much different story. How the ...  Show more

Our perceived productivity is determined by the quantity of what we get done, and the quality or alignment of what we do.

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We’re always worried about being productive enough with our time, but where does this compulsion come from? In episode 48, Ellie and David examine productivity culture and the drive to produce. Although research says longer hours don’t equal more productivity, capitalism encourag ...  Show more

How do we measure productivity? Our default metric tends to be activity. How many emails did you send? How many words did you write? How quickly did you respond to that Slack message? Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and author of “Slow Productivity: The Lost ...  Show more

When we think of "productivity," we usually think about getting more things done. Checking more off our to-do lists. But that's not the actual definition of productivity — and it's definitely not how we want to live our lives. In this episode, I talk about the real definition of ...  Show more