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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
For more than a century the go to move of governments facing a financial crisis has been the implementation of austerity policies, like cutting wages, decreasing spending on social programs and public benefits as the answer to restoring fiscal health. We’re in such a period now in America where we are pursuing monetary belt tightening …
The Constitution clearly states that Congress shall write our laws. But as the federal government grew larger and more complex, executive branch agencies were given more authority to bring greater definition to Congressional intent because of their expertise in a particular area. Even more power has shifted to those agencies as Congress fails to keep …