Show Notes
According to the TIAA Institute, American adults correctly answered just 49% of basic financial questions in 2024, suggesting a fundamental gap in economic literacy. In this episode Robert Shimer, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and John List, Professor of Economics and Director of the Becker Friedman Institute, discuss Economics for Everyone, a groundbreaking program that teaches economic reasoning without the math. From classroom experiments that predict market equilibrium to 60 professional videos watched worldwide and teacher training programs across Chile, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia, they explore how economic thinking shapes everything from Instagram scrolling to tariff policy, and why critical thinking about causality versus correlation has never been more important.
More from The Pie: An Economics Podcast
Roughly 3 million Americans own private businesses and have a net worth of at least $5 million. Together they hold more than $50 trillion, about 13 times the wealth of the entire Forbes 400. In this episode, Chicago Booth economist Eric Zwick discusses The Everywhere Millionaire, his new book with Owen Zidar, which draws on a decade of tax data to characterize this class of car dealers, dentists, and beer distributors in towns across the country.
By 2024, inflation was falling and unemployment was low, yet consumer confidence had sunk to levels last seen during the Great Recession. In this episode, Erik Hurst of Chicago Booth and his co-author Christina Patterson draw on payroll records for roughly 16 million workers to show how wages fell behind prices during the recent inflationary period and haven't caught back up.
Last December, Australia banned social media for anyone under 16. Four months later, only one in four 14- and 15-year-olds were complying, a share that has since fallen further. In this episode of The Pie, Leonardo Bursztyn, the Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and co-director of BFI's Political Economics Initiative, discusses why the ban hasn't worked, and what a successful one might entail.
US sanctions on Russian banks have complex spillovers for the importers and exporters who transact in dollars. On this episode of The Pie, Brent Neiman, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, returns to discuss recent research tracing how those sanctions ripple through the global payments network, and whether they are pushing heavily sanctioned economies away from the dollar and toward China's yuan.
When a police officer is shot, is it safer to wait for an ambulance or to be driven straight to the hospital in a squad car? In this episode of The Pie, Prachi Sanghavi, an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago and co-director of the Health Policy Data Lab, discusses new research tracing how shooting victims across 18 U.S. cities reach the hospital, and what it reveals about a decades-old debate over pre-hospital care.