EXTRA: People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard....

Podcasting started as a niche-nerd pursuit. Now it’s a $9 billion industry. Is that a lot? The strange economics of this thing we do. SOURCES:Jim Bankoff, chairman and C.E.O. of Vox Media.Ben Davis, head of digital at WME.Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of ...  Show more

An economist calls America’s beef industry a “miracle.” An antitrust scholar calls it “broken.” Maybe they’re both right? SOURCES:Austin Frerick, agriculture antitrust expert, fellow at Yale University, author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry ...  Show more

We make a countless number of decisions every day – but unfortunately, we often choose unwisely. Behavioral economist Richard Thaler has dedicated his life's work to understanding why that is. In 2017, Thaler received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for ...

We all behave irrationally. We pay for expensive gym memberships and only go once. We spend windfall cash on things we'd never buy with our salaries. We plan to do nice things in the distant future, but don't actually write them down in our calendars. These things can be bad for ...  Show more

Economists like to model people as rational creatures who make self-interested decisions. But humans don’t act that way. Why do investors, politicians and ordinary people act against their best interests – and how can they be nudged into making better decisions? To find out, FT e ...  Show more

This episode explores how to make the infernally difficult challenge of habit formation a little easier, with guest Richard H. Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his pioneering work in the fields of behavioral economics and finance. Thaler is the ...