We often view paradise as a place of safety, beauty, tranquility. It’s an ideal we long for but one we can rarely find. This hour, TED speakers search for utopia and come to terms with reality.
Original broadcast date: November 10, 2023
TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more at plus.npr.org/ted.
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China’s turbocharged growth may have made it rich, but now it has to deal with rich country problems.
High-speed trains that connect every town. Gleaming new bridges and skyscrapers. An apartment (or two) for every family. No country on Earth has seen the kind of economic growth that China has over the last 50 years. China has become the factory to the world, a grand experiment in central government planning mixed with personal ambition.
It was all enabled by what our guide for today calls, an engineering state, a central planning mindset where leaders believe they can engineer their way out of economic problems. And problems are mounting.
Today on the show, the perils of prosperity and the despair of success as China deals with overbuilding.
We’ll travel back to China’s free-wheeling boom-era of the early 2000s and hang out with a property developer who amassed his wealth at the center of the action – private jet rides, thousand-dollar fish soup, casual bribes. Then, as the economy slows, we ask what can we learn from the despair of success. Does rising youth unemployment signal a less prosperous future? With young people struggling to find white-collar jobs, some of them are opting out of work altogether.
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Featured Terms:
- Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
- Engineering State
- Malinvestment
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This episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Sophia Paliza-Carre, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Maggie Luthar. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark.
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Some people in this country think Antifa is a dangerous domestic terror organization. Some think that’s a complete myth. This week we go to the federal trial where, for the first time, the government sets out to prove that Antifa is real. Zoe Chace reports.
Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.
- Prologue: Host Ira Glass tells the story of what happened at the Prairieland
Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. The government claims this was an
attack by an Antifa cell. The defense says it was a protest gone awry.
This argument goes to court in a first of its kind trial. (7 minutes)
- Act 1: Reporter Zoe Chace walks us through one of the worst days for the
defense: all these guns. (5 minutes)
- Act 2: Zoe takes us through the testimony of the government’s Antifa expert.
The defense team is optimistic that things are going well for them. (8 minutes)
- Act 3: Zoe goes to jail to talk with one of the cooperating witnesses for the
prosecution, a former church lady named Lynette Sharp. She has a lot
to say about all the events of her life that led to taking a plea deal
and testifying against her friends. (24 minutes)
- Act 4: The verdicts come in. (12 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
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Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy a luxury brand item secondhand (say, a Chanel handbag) you had to have an in. There was no easy way to find one. But over the past decade, the market for secondhand luxury goods has exploded. There are now many online resellers where you can shop for used and discounted luxury items. One big problem — how can you be sure if it’s real and authentic?
Some online resellers claim to have solved this problem. They say they’ve developed a process of authentication, and so buyers can trust that the bag is really Gucci or Cartier or Hermès or whatever. But according to some luxury brands, authenticity is something that is often imitated but never replicated.
In today’s episode of Planet Money, the fight between Chanel and The RealReal. And how luxury brands are reacting to the enormous and growing secondhand market for luxury goods.
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This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Charlotte Isidore, who also fact checked this episode. Jess Jiang edited the show and it was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money‘s executive producer.
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NASA astronaut Anil Menon discusses his journey ahead of his first spaceflight to the International Space Station aboard Soyuz MS-29. Episode 428.
Our bodies are always sending signals … but are we listening? This hour, TED speakers explore new ways to track and understand our health — from cutting-edge technology to simple, everyday habits.
Guests include exercise physiologist Keith Diaz, genomicist Michael Snyder and writer Lizzie Braicks-Rinker.
TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more at plus.npr.org/ted.
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Come along as we travel the world in search of the best economic ideas to bring home!
From the beaches of Barbuda to the fjords of Norway, there’s money (and money problems) everywhere. For this summer travel season, Planet Money Summer School will take you on a world tour for your ears. Pack that sense of wonder and nose for adventure, this is our semester abroad. We’re going to explore exotic locales and discover cultural norms, but we’re also going to buckle down and learn the biggest economic lessons around the world from our guides.
We start as far away as you can get from Planet Money headquarters, New Zealand and Australia. We’ll visit a sheep farm to observe an innovative but controversial market for the most important substance on earth, and we’ll ask when do speculators help and when do they hurt the rest of us? Then, we’ll get to know the economist – and jazz musician – who changed how the entire world fights inflation when he released a secret number to tame the dreaded wild beast. How did that work? Spoiler: it was the great leap forward in economic mind tricks.
Featured Episodes:
Featured Terms:
- Multiple equilibria
- Inflation targeting
- Speculators (impact on liquidity)
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This episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Sophia Paliza-Carre, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Annlie Huang with help from Robert Rodriguez.
Music: NPR Source Audio – “The Boy from Ipanema,” “Desmontes,” “Long Drive,” and “Bondi.”
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On this country’s 250th birthday, we bring you stories about the most American people, places, objects, and social norms that make this country what it is.
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- Prologue: Ira talks to Pablo Torre about Major League Baseball’s new challenge system, and how it’s been optimized for maximum drama. (10 minutes)
- Act One: Writer Jiayang Fan wrestles with a very common question she has never quite understood. (5 minutes)
- Act Two: People come from all over the country to walk down one of Michigan’s tallest sand dunes, and then promptly turn around and trudge back up. Aviva DeKornfeld talks to Americans spending their limited vacation time on this punishing activity. (8 minutes)
- Act Three: Emanuele Berry talks to Ira about Season 13 of the reality TV show, Survivor, known to fans as the “race war” season. (8 minutes)
- Act Four: Years before his famous dictionary, Noah Webster wrote a book that took on a life of its own and served an unexpected purpose. (8 minutes)
- Act Five: Emmanuel Dzotsi investigates a musical phenomenon very particular to the United States: singers embellishing the end of the national anthem. (9 minutes)
Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org
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Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest soccer scorer of all time. But when it comes to penalty kicks, Messi is merely average. Why? Maybe the answer involves game theory.
According to game theory, there’s an optimal strategy for taking penalty kicks. This strategy involves an idea that was once somewhat controversial in economics — that is, until economists started studying soccer players in real life.
On today’s show, we kick it over to the hosts of the Soccernomics podcast to explain how game theory has changed soccer, and how soccer has changed game theory.
Watch the penalty shootout between Manchester United and Chelsea in the Champions League final in 2008.
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This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Annlie Huang. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
The Soccernomics episode was originally hosted by Ashish Malhotra, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski and sound designed by Alex Roldan.
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Whether you love fashion or hate it, we all have to get dressed in the morning, and the industry affects us in complex ways. This hour, the outrageous, environmental and seedy sides of fashion.
Guests include designer Machine Dazzle, supply chain expert Aparna Mehta, journalist Amanda Mull and supermodel Cameron Russell.
Original broadcast date: September 6, 2024
TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more at plus.npr.org/ted.
See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.
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