The economics of babysitting

This week Phil and Steve examine the concept of compound interest and its inextricable link to exponential growth in a world with finite resources. They discuss how interest was historically viewed as a sin—the crime of usury—across major religions until the industrial revolution ...  Show more

Phil points out that the US is likely to spend $1.5 trilion on defense/offense spending this year. Acknowledging that sovereign currencies can essentially create money to fund defense, doesn’t there get a point where too much is just too much? A significant portion of this expend ...  Show more

Judging by the amount of downloads for this episode, we’d say it was our listeners’ favorite from the past year. “Did Corporate Greed Break the Supply Chain?” with Rakeen Mabud from the Groundwork Collaborative exposes how the supply chain was actually designed: not for reliably ...  Show more

On today’s show we are taking a look at the Macro economy. The bureau of Labor and Statistics published the latest CPI data which came in a bit hotter than expected. This is implying that the Fed will need to keep interest rates higher for longer to combat inflation. The Fed k ...

On today’s show we are looking at our human ability to forecast non linear effects and in particular how this relates to economic forecasts. We are accustomed to looking at the world in very linear ways. When we see a car approaching most people are pretty good at estimating whet ...  Show more

Some of you recently shared articles about the so-called “birth rate panic,” pointing out that the intersection of economic policy with people’s decision to have children felt a little…off. So, I decided to dig into the coverage, some of the gaps I see, the cultural scapegoats, a ...  Show more