The New Bazaar

Economic Innovation Group
  • 4.9 (267)
  • Society & Culture
  • Weekly

Through long-form interviews with economists, policymakers, and other guests, The New Bazaar explores how the economy is constantly reshaping the way we live — and how our choices in life are reflected back into the economy. Hosted by Cardiff Garcia, The New Bazaar is a production of the Economic Innovation Group.

  1. Oct 30 ·  Video

    Is Economic Populism Cooked?

    There are different ways to define economic populism. Very broadly, you can think of it as a series of policies that defy economic fundamentals, or at least economic conventional wisdom, and instead focus on delivering immediate benefits to specific groups, like blue-collar workers, even if the policies themselves risk eroding the economy’s productive capacity in the long run. And there is often an “othering” involved, a blaming of foreign countries or immigrants or shadowy elites for the economy’s problems. Tariffs, for example, in an attempt to protect certain domestic industries and keep workers in those industries employed, can drive up the prices of the goods that people and companies in the US buy and otherwise raise the cost of doing business in the US. Other populist ideas include cracking down on legal immigration and having the government buy stakes in private companies, both of which the Trump administration has also done. But what do American workers think about these policies? After all, workers are the very people who are supposed to be benefiting from populist policies. Are they feeling those benefits? Today's guest is Kristen Soltis Anderson, co-founder of Echelon Insights, a polling firm that recently fielded a survey of American workers on behalf of the Economic Innovation Group. We discuss the survey findings, Kristen's recent New York Times column on Donald Trump's weakening political brand, the unexpected trends on how Democrats and Republicans view Socialism versus Capitalism, the public's frustrations over the cost of living and political corruption, what all of this might mean for the upcoming midterm elections, and more. Related Links Opinion | The Trump Brand Has Tanked. The G.O.P. May Pay the Price. State of the American Worker Survey: Key Findings DeckAmerican Workers, the Economy, and the 2026 MidtermsKristen’s websiteEchelon Insights website

    Is Economic Populism Cooked?

  2. Aug 7

    Adam’s Top Five Unpopular Economic Beliefs

    EIG Chief Economist Adam Ozimek joins Cardiff to share his five favorite unpopular beliefs. Adam believes these ideas are true, even if others may find them contentious, perhaps even contemptible. Adam tries to persuade Cardiff and New Bazaar listeners that… Prediction markets are going greatEconomists should ignore the efficient market hypothesis in their own livesThe United States should let Chinese cars inOne Billion Americans is absolutely a goal the country should pursueConsumers should spend less money on cars Adam and Cardiff also consider when contrarian thinking is useful and when provoking disagreement becomes a brand rather than a way of getting closer to the truth. Plus: Adam shares his most controversial non-economic belief. Related links: Myths and Lessons from a Century of American Automaking by Adam OzimekExceptional by Design: How to Fix High-Skilled Immigration to Maximize American Interests by Adam Ozimek, Connor O’Brien, and John LettieriOne Billion Americans by Matthew Yglesias

    Adam’s Top Five Unpopular Economic Beliefs

  3. Jul 24 ·  Video

    Sex, Drugs, and Death

    Economist Alvin Roth, winner of the economics Nobel in 2012 for his work on market design, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work. The book is about morally contested markets: transactions that participants would like to engage in but that others think they shouldn't be allowed to, even when it’s hard to identify measurable harms to those objectors. It's also a great way to understand how markets interact with the law, politics, social norms, income inequality, human psychology, and so much more than just monetary exchange. In this chat, Alvin and Cardiff discuss: Medical aid in dying and the economics of “repugnant” marketsSex work, trafficking, and the unintended consequences of criminalizationPlural marriage and the challenge of designing new legal protectionsSports gambling and the rise of prediction marketsKidney exchanges, the transplantation shortage, and the opposition to cross-border exchanges Throughout the conversation, they confront the trade-offs involved in both allowing controversial markets and trying to ban them. Related links: Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets WorkAlvin Roth’s website

    Sex, Drugs, and Death

  4. Jun 26 ·  Video

    Debt and Deficits: Time to Worry?

    Martha Gimbel, executive director of The Budget Lab at Yale, returns to the New Bazaar to chat with Cardiff about all things debt and deficits. Martha argues that the fiscal choices of the past decade have already led to higher costs on mortgages, car loans, and small-business debt. She and Cardiff discuss what might happen next given the frightening projections for future borrowing. They discuss: Is “we can’t leave this problem to our kids and grandkids” a misleading way to think about the national debt?Why is it so hard to know exactly what level of debt could lead to a fiscal crisis? Why such precision is often the enemy of understandingDoes she take flak from the left for arguing that the crowding out effect is a real thing?Immigration and the deficitWhich policies could actually bend the deficit curve down?A DOGE post-mortem And lots more. Related links: Lower Immigration Means Lower Productivity Growth by Abhi Gupta2026 chart book examines spending, taxes, and deficits by Jessica RiedlMartha’s The Atlantic piece on the national debtThe National Debt’s Unforgiving Math by Jared BernsteinThe Budget Lab at Yale websiteThe Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 | Congressional Budget OfficeWhere Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go? | Center on Budget and Policy PrioritiesCRS report on Foreign Holdings of Federal Debt

    Debt and Deficits: Time to Worry?

  5. Jun 18

    AI Shock vs the China Shock

    The China Shock of the 1990s and 2000s remains, even now, the subject of much debate. American consumers benefited from the cheaper goods that were imported from China. Some American businesses also benefited from importing cheaper equipment that was made in China. But other American businesses suffered from the competition, shuttering factories throughout the Rest Belt and South. How bad was it? What was the overall effect on workers? How did workers and communities adjust? Today’s episode is about the lessons of that shock for what might end up being a brand new shock: the AI Shock. Economists and many others are trying to figure out what it’s going to mean if AI itself ends up becoming a new source of competition for American businesses and American workers. One such economist is Adam Ozimek, Chief Economist at the Economic Innovation Group. Adam is the co-author of a new analysis about the right and wrong lessons to take from the China shock for the strange world that we now find ourselves in. (You can find that post at agglomerations.eig.org, EIG’s newsletter.) Adam speaks with Cardiff about the similarities and differences between the workers and towns affected by the two shocks, which characteristics matter most for people and places to become resilient to large shocks, how to think about automation and the collection of tasks that make up a job, and much more. Related links: Agglomerations Messy Jobs, by Luis Garicano

    AI Shock vs the China Shock

  6. Jun 5 ·  Video

    A City From Scratch

    This episode is about an ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco. The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It has bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County, starting in 2017. That’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one-and-a-half Miamis. What California Forever wants the city to be is two things. First: an urbanist, walkable city of about 400,000-500,000 people; zoned for density instead of suburban sprawl, with housing to rent or buy that’s affordable to middle income families; cool amenities; and located in a place where you would not expect to find it. Second: a tech manufacturing center, with new factories making actual physical stuff, and a big shipbuilding operation. A place that creates new jobs and businesses and tax revenues for the people that move there and the surrounding communities. Any project like this is immensely complicated, having to figure out transportation, engineering and logistical problems, waste disposal, how to attract people and businesses to the city, navigate local politics and how city governance is gonna work. Above all, California Forever has to figure out how to build something new and urban in California — a state with lots of wonderful stuff but also a place that’s known for its NIMBY dynamics, high taxes, zoned for suburban sprawl and single-family homes, endless regulatory or environmental reviews, water issues, union negotiations. The country needs more experiments like this. And many states, not just California, need to discover, or rediscover, the virtues of making it easier to create new housing and businesses, build factories, attract people, and just do stuff generally. And even if this project doesn’t work out, at least the rest of us get to learn the valuable economic and social lessons of what works and what doesn’t. Although Cardiff is rooting for the project to succeed, he also has quite a few questions about it. And it just so happens that this episode’s guest is exactly the person who can answer those questions. Jan Sramek is the Founder and CEO of California Forever. He started the company with the backing of tech investors and founders including John and Patrick Collison, Laurene Powell, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and a few others. Related links: California Forever websiteCalifornia Forever project overview deckClear a path for sweeping urban experiments such as California Forever (LAT)A City Is Broke. Can Billionaires’ Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance? (NYT)

    A City From Scratch

  7. Mar 25

    Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing Future

    Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU who has made important contributions on a startingly high number of topics, speaks with Cardiff about his latest contributions to the study of housing affordability, remote work, artificial intelligence, and finance.  Arpit is on board with the basic YIMBY project of undoing the oppressive zoning codes that limit housing construction in so many parts of the country, but he doesn’t think the housing story ends there. Other obstacles will remain even in the case of further YIMBY progress, and in the meantime he has offered a variety of reform ideas that both complement YIMBY ideas and also prepare for a future after a YIMBY victory. Among them are re-thinking property taxes, accelerating depreciation schedules, and making it easier for factory housing to get to market.  Arpit and Cardiff end with a chat about the ways that AI can help us understand housing regulations, what AI means for the future of finance, and what he is both optimistic and pessimistic about.  Related links:  Remote Work's Impact on ProductivityWork from Home and the Office Real Estate ApocalypseOffice to Residential ConversionsUnlock a Housing Boom through Depreciation BonusesThree Rules for AI in FinanceIndustrial Policy for Housing Construction

    Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing Future

  8. Mar 9

    The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment

    Stefanie Stantcheva is an economist at Harvard and the head of the Social Economics Lab, where her team has done extraordinary work investigating how people form their opinions about economic and political topics. That work was the subject of an earlier New Bazaar episode.  In this episode, Stefanie chats with Cardiff about the findings in her paper (with co-authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, and Sandra Sequeira), “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences,” which was just published in the American Economic Review.  From the paper’s abstract:  “We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.”  Stefanie and Cardiff also discuss: Rising anger in American societyThe subtle ways that the two major political parties are similar and different when it comes to zero-sum thinkingThe economic geography of zero-sum thoughtThe finding that surprised her the mostThe generational gap in zero-sum thinking between young and oldThe policy implications of her research Finally, Stefanie previews her upcoming work on zero-sum thinking and concerns about AI.  Related links: “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences”“To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset” (Stefanie’s guest essay in The Economist)  “Emotions and Policy Views” (Stefanie’s working paper with Yann Algan, Eva Davoine, and Thomas Renault)“Dancing with the Stars” (Stefanie’s paper with Ufuk Akcigit, Santiago Caicedo, Ernest Miguelez, and Valerio Sterzi)

    The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment
See All (91)

Trailer

Hosts & Guests

4.9
out of 5
267 Ratings

About

Through long-form interviews with economists, policymakers, and other guests, The New Bazaar explores how the economy is constantly reshaping the way we live — and how our choices in life are reflected back into the economy. Hosted by Cardiff Garcia, The New Bazaar is a production of the Economic Innovation Group.

Information

  • Creator
    Economic Innovation Group
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    91
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Economic Innovation Group
  • Show Website
    The New Bazaar

You Might Also Like