Planet Money Live: Two Truths and a Lie

The shocks of the pandemic economy gave us a bunch of enormous natural experiments, which helped to prove or disprove conventional economic thinking.

Take, for example, the bullwhip effect, the idea that the further away from the customer you are in the supply chain, the more volatile your orders are likely to be.

This theory played out at an enormous scale, in the pandemic. Consumers and companies overreacted to the risk of shortages by ordering more products and hoarding them, causing massive shifts in the supply chain – just like the theory says.

And the pandemic gave us a lot of natural experiments like this. So, on this special live edition of Planet Money, we looked for other big economic lessons from the past three years, and we took this information and turned it into... a gameshow! It's Two Truths and a Lie: Econ Edition. We get into questions about the workforce and labor market during the pandemic, and how it affected how economists view the world.

Additional reading, from Lise Vesterlund:

• "Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability"
• "Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don't Lead to Promotions"
• The No Club   

...from Pavlina Tcherneva:

• "The Job Guarantee and Economic Democracy"
• "A Job Guarantee Costs Far Less Than Unemployment"
• The Case for a Job Guarantee

...and from Gbenga Ajilore:

• "Biden's big bet on place-based industrial policy"
• "Place-Based Policy: An Essay in Two Parts"
• "Place-conscious federal policies to reduce regional economic disparities in the United States"

This episode was hosted by Mary Childs. It was produced by Dave Blanchard, and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Josh Newell with help from Robert Rodriguez. Original music by Jesse Perlstein.

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Music: Universal Production Music - "Rubbery Bounce"