EP 651 Highway Planning Leaves Many on the Side of the Road

EP 651 Highway Planning Leaves Many on the Side of the Road

  The car-dominant approach to US transportation planning has led to the construction of freeways and roadways that have torn apart and devalued communities, especially affecting Black and Brown individuals.  With a boatload of new cash going into infrastructure in America, thanks to the bipartisan Infrastructure bill passed by the last Congress and signed by …

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EP 650 Do Minority Cancer Patients Receive Different Care Than White Patients?

EP 650 Do Minority Cancer Patients Receive Different Care Than White Patients?

The answer to the question posed in the title to this podcast was the basis of a substantial research project undertaken by a team at the Yale Cancer Center, led by Dr. Sajid Khan,an associate professor of surgery and section chief of hepato-pancreato-biliary and mixed tumors at Yale School of Medicine. He is our guest …

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EP 649 Do You Want or Need Pet or Dental Insurance(and other Imponderables about How Insurance Markets Really Work)

EP 649 Do You Want or Need Pet or Dental Insurance(and other Imponderables about How Insurance Markets Really Work)

From disease to long term care to natural disasters, insurance offers hope for security in an uncertain world.  But it often fails to deliver.  In this podcast we explore what makes insurance markets work and what makes them fail.  Our guest, Amy Finkelstein, an economics professor at MIT, and her co-authors Liran Einav and Ray …

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EP 648 Tight Labor Market Benefits The Poor

EP 648 Tight Labor Market Benefits The Poor

    Labor is having a moment in America.  With unemployment at its lowest rate in 50 years, even workers at the low end of the pay scale, in industries like fast food, retail and hospitality, are finding jobs that pay $15 an hour or better and come with benefits, such as medical insurance, tuition …

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EP 647 Modern Ireland Presents a Whole New Face to the World

EP 647 Modern Ireland Presents a Whole New Face to the World

Who better to explain the remarkable changes that have taken place in Ireland over the last sixty years than one of its greatest modern writers, Fintan O’Toole, author of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland?”  Designated one of the New York Times Book Review’s Top Ten Books of 2022 is now …

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EP 646 Will ChatGPT Wipe Out White Collar Jobs?

EP 646 Will ChatGPT Wipe Out White Collar Jobs?

If there is a technology story trending in America today it’s the presumed impact of ChatGPT on all manner of writing and communicating in our business lives, academic careers and every day interactions. While this description has been written by a real human being it could have been written by this enhanced form of artificial …

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EP 645 Tech Workers Benefits(And Jobs)Reset in the Changing American Landscape

EP 645 Tech Workers Benefits(And Jobs)Reset in the Changing American Landscape

From my curiosity generated by the headline of an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “The Boss Is Back in Silicon Valley” came the following wide ranging conversation with Carol Schultz, the founder and CEO of Vertical Elevation and author of “Powered By People: How Talent-Centric Organizations Master Recruitment, Retention, and Revenue(and How …

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EP 644 Children of the State: Inside the Juvenile Justice System in America

EP 644 Children of the State: Inside the Juvenile Justice System in America

Few of us can imagine the difficult life circumstances that bring teenage children into a detention facility, which to them is simply another word for a jail.  Jeff Hobbs, an author who immersed himself in different kinds of facilities to capture first hand accounts of the experience from these children describes in vivid, and painful, …

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EP 643 Wildlife Management in America Sees Federal Government and States in Conflict

EP 643 Wildlife Management in America Sees Federal Government and States in Conflict

The Constitution reserves many responsibilities to states and enumerates clearly those that the federal government can undertake.  Wildlife management was one of those state focused responsibilities until the earliest days of the 20th century and then with the Lacey Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act, responsibilities began to be shared or taken over by the …

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EP 642 Can Tech Creators Really Control the Content on Their Platforms?

EP 642 Can Tech Creators Really Control the Content on Their Platforms?

Our guest, David Auerbach has coined the term that is the title of his book, “Meganets”. The scope of various social networks and interactive platforms has grown to such a proportion because of the sophistication of the technology and the abundant use by individuals that it is creating an autonomous digital force, as uncontrollable as …

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