Beneath the Surface: An Infrastructure Podcast Stripe Press

In this wrap-up episode, host Tamara Winter and producer Everett Katigbak reflect on the first season of Beneath the Surface, featuring highlights from our favorite episodes, and musings about future areas of exploration.

In this conversation, Shruti Rajagopalan, Head of India Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and host Tamara Winter discuss Shruti's research on how population growth can accelerate economic development, the unintended consequences of fertility policy, and why 1991 was a pivotal year for India.

We explore the effects of declining birth rates and what, if anything, could be done to reverse them. Along the way, we’ll dig into one of the thorniest questions about population growth: what happens when governments try to influence it through policy?

In this conversation, host Tamara Winter and Alex Forrest, transit planner for the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission in Springfield, Massachusetts, discuss the history of transit in the US, the relationship between transit and housing prices, and the formative years Forrest spent in Japan—and how they’ve shaped his current work in Springfield.

We examine how officials in post WWII-Japan created one of the most efficient examples of scaled infrastructure in the modern world — and what cities around the world can learn from them.

In this conversation, host Tamara Winter and Ronan Lyons, Associate Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, discuss Ireland’s economic development, the current challenges facing would-be homeowners and renters in Dublin, and the time the biggest concern in the Irish housing market was too much supply.