Avsnitt
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It’s really hot. Extreme heat is one of the more invisible – and pernicious – climate-related threats that we have to figure out how to live with. It claims 2.3 million lives every year, and reduces productivity 2-3%, for every one degree Celsius above 20 degrees. Kathy Baughman McLeod, CEO of Heat Resilience Action, has been trying for figure out what tools we can borrow from financial markets and from the world of insurance to help mitigate the economic effects. She’s created insurance for nature, helped start naming heat waves like we do for hurricanes, and created tiny insurance for laborers that pays out when it’s too hot to work – which enabled thousands of people to safely sit out of the heat without losing out on wages. Kathy shows us a useful way to think about climate risks, and how simple it can be to price them.
This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.
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Liaquat Ahamed is a legendary and Pulitzer-prize-winning author and economic historian who is obsessed with scouring history to find the worst possible unforced financial errors. He wrote The Lords of Finance, about 1929, and just published 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, which tells the story of a bond-fueled boom, bubble, and bust. The events of that era set the stage for the world we live in. Liaquat jumps into some conspiracy-theory origins and defuses them with facts. He’s a celebrity to Mary, and she wanted to sit him down to find out what—if any— parallels we can draw and lessons we can extract from this history.
Further Reading:
The Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, by Liaquat Ahamed
Smile, by Charlie Chaplin
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Bestselling novelist Gary Shteyngart has spent the past 20 years predicting, with trademark pessimism and terrifying accuracy, the immediate future. His novel Super Sad True Love Story was written and published in the internet-as-savior optimistic early-2010s but predicts all of the negative consequences of technology that most of us failed to even remotely anticipate. The MySpaceification of formerly objective information, the concentration of influence, the factioning of identity groups -- he saw it all coming. How?? Can we also learn to see like this? Is it useful or terrible to have this kind of vision?
Further Reading -
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shtyengart
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart
The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart
Confessions of a Watch Geek, The New Yorker
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Did you hear the one about the lady in Austin, Texas who bought a marble bust at a Goodwill for $34.99 and it turned out to be a Roman antiquity? Well. When she took it to an auction house to sell it, she learned it had been looted during WWII. Which meant it had all kinds of history. To untangle what to do, that lady called Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer who works to repatriate art where it "belongs" — whatever that means.
FURTHER READING
Goodwill Sold a Bust for $34.99. It's an Ancient Roman Relic., The New York Times
Sotheby’s Just Lost Its Lawsuit Against Greece Over an 8th-Century BC Horse Statue—and the Decision May Have Lasting Implications for the Trade, ArtNet News
Alec Baldwin's Legal Tussle Over a Painting, The New Yorker
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Xochitl Gonzalez is a bestselling novelist, but, to me, she’s an economist. Her books are about collisions between economic classes; she captures precarity and luxury, access and scrappiness, often with gentrification as the site of these collisions. She has this freakishly astute lens because, she says, she herself has “changed economic classes,” not once but three times — an experience she’s now writing about in a forthcoming memoir.
Further Reading:
Last Night in Brooklyn Need Blind: A Memoir of Class in America “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?”, New York Magazine What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get, The Atlantic A Year of Confronting the Gentrification of Self, The AtlanticSubscribe to the show!
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Al Roth won a Nobel prize for his work helping create a market for matching kidney donors with people who needed kidneys. You know what would really help people who need kidneys though? If they could just buy them. But almost no country allows that, because it feels like it would create bad outcomes, and because it feels gross. Al loves thinking about these awkward intersections of money and morality. He calls these “repugnant markets.” And he has pretty thoroughly convinced me that it would be GOOD to let people pay for organs.
Further Reading:
Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work
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Mary in America, a new show from journalist Mary Childs about why we are the way we are. Out now. Join us. Subscribe to the show!
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