Play
April 14, 2016, 2016

Can capitalism (as we know it) survive in a time of crisis?

This year’s American electoral shakeup sends us looking for deeper economic tremors. Unemployment is down to 4.9%, even as discouraged workers are reentering the market and the average hourly wage...
Play
September 24, 2015, 2015

Millions of working people need economic help. What would work?

To close out our series on work, produced in partnership with The Nation, we’re looking ahead to the big proposals and spiritual realignments that might spell a major change for...
Play
September 17, 2015, 2015

What should hard work get you in the richest country in the world?

We continue a three-part series — produced in partnership with The Nation — on work in America. This is Part Two: what we do all day, and how we feel about it. Last...
Play
September 10, 2015, 2015

What happened to the workers' fight for fairness in America?

When it comes to the politics of work in America, the times, they are a-changing. Scott Walker overtook Wisconsin, the one-time capital of organized labor, with a divide-and-conquer strategy — now he’s chasing votes on...
Play
July 9, 2015, 2015

"I'm worried that they're going to get another Versailles Treaty."

On Sunday, 62% of Greek votes, encouraged by their radical-left prime minister, Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza party, registered a desperation “no” vote to a swap of further fiscal tightening at home...
Play
, 2015

"We view markets as embodying freedom... the freedom of the consumer."

It’s graduation time in Boston, and the Class of 2015 is asking “Now what?” If our young ones need help choosing, the market is back and ready to nudge them toward a...
Play
, 2015

After the latest crisis, "dissatisfaction is homeless."

Michael Lewis is the great tale-spinner in the Second Gilded Age in America. He’s part muckraker, but part Mark Twain, too, for finding classic characters as good as the King...
Play
March 26, 2015, 2015

Are you afraid of what happens in the dark corners of Wall Street?

Michael Lewis has become the great teller of modern morality tales around money: from the story of how high finance bubbled up, then popped, in Ireland and Iceland to the story of...
Play
January 29, 2015, 2015

Can a free-trading, capitalist world cope with climate change?

We’re continuing our “money machine” series on the cost of carbon capitalism. Gas gets cheaper, the weather gets warmer, and for our guests the environmental activists Naomi Klein and Bill...
Play
, 2015

"The global story of cotton is a story of great change, great tragedy, and great courage."

For the Delta to become the chief grower of the industrial world’s most important commodity – a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early 19th century – its land had...
November 20, 2014, 2014

Can America come to terms with its history of slavery?

We’re continuing our series on capitalism by going back to its unspeakable origins. A new wave of  historians say that the  “peculiar institution” of slavery explains more about the present than...
, 2014

Are we finally facing the fact of global slowdown?

Casey Stengel raised the question about baseball’s miserable Mets long ago: anybody here know how to play this game? It’s the question more and more of us ask about economists...
Play
, 2014

Jeremy Grantham is a Boston financier who has found himself in the thick of the fight over climate change for more than twenty years. He’s the founder and chief strategist of Grantham Mayo van...
Play
, 2014

In 1916, two years into the war, Americans reelected the president who’d kept us out of the battle. But by the summer of 1917, the same Woodrow Wilson had committed...