165. The Economist Who (Gasp!) Asks People Wh...

She’s the C.E.O. of Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company. Steve asks Aicha about the big promises the A.V. industry hasn’t yet delivered — and the radical bet Zoox is making on a driverless future. Plus, Steve wants to know how she’s maintained her spark. This episode originally a ...  Show more

Steve continues his conversation with his good friend, MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, and fellow University of Chicago economist. Sendhil breaks down the hypothesis of his book Scarcity, explains why machines aren’t competition for human intelligence, and tells Steve why it’ ...  Show more

An academic from India and writer from Denmark talk to Ella Al-Shamahi about how the way economies are measured influences policy and undervalues both unpaid and paid care work, and affects the lives of women on every level. Emma Holten is a Danish feminist commentator whose book ...  Show more

Stefanie Stantcheva, economist at Harvard University, founded the Social Economics Lab to study inequality, our feelings about it, and how policies influence it. She says when we estimate how much money our colleagues make or how much taxes impact us, we are often very far off fr ...  Show more

When Esther Duflo took her first economics class, she hated it. In 2019, she won a Nobel Prize in economics. Esther talks with Adam about her groundbreaking experiments to fight poverty, busts myths about what motivates people, and reveals how to make meaningful progress toward s ...  Show more

Ideas are currency. This couldn't be more true in academia, where it's the job of researchers to think of questions and, hopefully, find answers. Bapu talks with economists Steve Levitt and Emily Oster about how they come up with ideas for studies, why most never make it off the ...  Show more