Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers – Details, episodes & analysis

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Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

Justin Wolfers

Education

Science

Frequency: 1 episode/21d. Total Eps: 105

From world events to everyday decisions, economics explains it all. Platypus Economics makes it clear, useful, and actually fun.

RSS

Apple

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - courses
01/09/2026
#1
🇨🇦 Canada - education
01/09/2026
#19
🇬🇧 Great Britain - courses
01/09/2026
#2
🇬🇧 Great Britain - education
01/09/2026
#94
🇩🇪 Germany - courses
01/09/2026
#65
🇺🇸 USA - courses
01/09/2026
#2
🇺🇸 USA - education
01/09/2026
#70
🇫🇷 France - courses
01/09/2026
#87
🇨🇦 Canada - courses
31/08/2026
#1
🇨🇦 Canada - education
31/08/2026
#13

Spotify

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https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
29 shares
https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics&nbsp
13 shares
https://www.youtube.com/@PlatypusEconomics
6 shares

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Score global : 27%

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How To Fake a Voting Scandal | Diving In

Wednesday, August 26, 2026 • Duration 27:27

The Census Bureau just published a report claiming 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. In this episode of Diving In, Justin Wolfers takes the report apart and shows why it reads less like statistics and more like propaganda. The document has no author, no report number, and no named reviewers — a flashing red light that career statisticians have refused to sign their names to it.

Justin also does the math: matching 128 million voter records to citizenship files without Social Security numbers means guessing who's who. Apply the Census Bureau's own historical false-match rate of 0.146% and you'd "find" about 21,000 apparent noncitizen voters — even if every single person voted legally. Add outdated naturalization records (the report itself flagged and fixed 64,000 such cases) and the whole 24,000 could vanish. It's counting smoke alarms and calling them fires.

Trusted government statistics are an essential piece of infrastructure on which American prosperity depends. If the institutions that tell you where poverty is rising or how the economy is doing get bent to serve whoever's in power, you lose the ability to hold that power to account — and that's a cost you pay whether you voted or not.

Subscribe — it's a truth-finding institution with a much smaller error rate:
on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

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America Is Reusing Cuba’s Sanctions Strategy on Iran | Diving In

Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 16:19

Do sanctions on Iran actually work? Sixty years of the Cuba embargo say probably not.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just announced what he's calling an "economic D-Day" against Iran — a threat aimed not just at Tehran but at every foreign firm, bank, trader, and shipper that does business with it: choose Iran, or choose access to the U.S. dollar. Justin Wolfers walks you through what was actually announced and then rewinds to 1963, where the Kennedy administration used almost identical language to "tighten the noose" around Cuba. Same playbook, six decades apart.

Here's the problem: the CIA studied the Cuba embargo for 20 years and concluded the sanctions "have not met any of their objectives." Castro stayed in power until 2008; the regime is still there today. Broader research is just as sobering — even optimistic studies find sanctions produce political change only about a third of the time, and almost never regime change against an entrenched authoritarian. One study of Iranian influencers found broad sanctions actually increased pro-government sentiment.

Why should you care? Because sanctions don't stop at the missile factory. There's no border checkpoint that lets in baby formula but not weapons. When you choke an economy, food, medicine, and family remittances get squeezed too — and every time America uses dollar access as an ultimatum, other countries get one more reason to build a system that doesn't need us, quietly eroding the financial leverage that makes your dollar so powerful in the first place.

Subscribe — it's the one economic lifeline we promise never to sever:
on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

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The July Jobs Report Should Worry You | Diving In

Friday, August 7, 2026 • Duration 17:11

The July jobs report just dropped, and it's time to worry. Markets expected around 80,000 new jobs — instead, the economy lost 23,000, and revisions to the prior two months erased another 100,000 we thought we had. In this video, Justin Wolfers break down what's really going on beneath the headline: the drop in government jobs might be statistical noise, essentially all private-sector job growth is coming from healthcare and social assistance, and the falling unemployment rate is actually bad news once you look at labor force participation.

Justin also digs into a wonkier puzzle — why the payroll and household surveys are telling two different stories about American employment — and compare the US to Canada, where job growth has been roughly four times faster despite a tariff war hitting them harder. Plus: what this all means for the Fed's next move, and why (despite what you may have heard) these numbers are not being faked.

Subscribe — it's one hire we'll never have to revise down:
on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

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Core Principle 4 - The Interdependence Principle - No Decision is an Island

Episode 5

Tuesday, August 18, 2020 • Duration 11:46

Buying an extra cup of coffee means less money for a cup of tea. It also means less coffee for the next person, it will change the prices of milk and sugar and effect the countries which make the coffee beans for your cup of joe. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers teach us about how our decisions are interlinked, and how this can help you to make better decisions.

Co-host: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. Editor: Alastair Elphick. A Modulated Media production.

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Why Should You Think Like an Economist?

Episode 1

Tuesday, August 4, 2020 • Duration 15:26

Want to make ‘no regrets decisions’? This podcast will teach you how! Betsey Stevenson and

Justin Wolfers are on a mission to equip everyone with key tools from economics that can

truly transform your life: from career dilemmas and financial conundrums to sorting out

complicated problems in your personal life, economics will help you. Let’s get stuck in.

Co-host: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. Editor: Alastair Elphick. A Modulated Media production.

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Introducing: Think Like An Economist

Thursday, July 16, 2020 • Duration 01:58

Think Like an Economist and you’ll see the world more clearly, empowering you to make better decisions at work, at home, and in your community. Leading economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers will take you on a joyous romp through their field as they introduce you to the big ideas in economics, and show how you can apply them to live in your own life. Their signature approach reveals that every decision is an economic decision and this podcast uncovers the economic forces that shape the world around you. Betsey and Justin believe that economics is a superpower, and they want to teach you to fly.

Co-host: Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. Editor: Alastair Elphick. A Modulated Media production.

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How Early Access to Trump’s Truths Will Drain Ordinary Investors | Diving In

Thursday, August 6, 2026 • Duration 10:58

Justin unpacks the new $100,000-a-year Truth Social API—a special "pipe" that will allow the president's posts to hit Wall Street computers a second or so before the rest of us see them. In this episode of Diving In, he explains why one second is an eternity for a high-frequency trading computer: it can read a post announcing a strike on Iran, figure out what it means for markets, and sell before the news reaches your phone.

Justin lays out three problems. It's bad for democracy — a decision your taxes paid for gets sold to whoever writes a six-figure check, to a company in which President Trump is a major shareholder. It's corrupt on its face — the president is monetizing information he holds only because he works for you. And it's bad economics: once you know some traders have paid for an edge (remember teleprompter guy?), you stop wanting to trade at all, and markets that run on trust start to wither.

At the end of the day, those Wall Street firms will get rich, and that money has to come from somewhere. And if you're not the one with the early feed, it's probably coming from your retirement account.

(A confession: I think that I said that users pay the President's company $100,000 per year. I've subsequently read the price is $100,000 per month. So it's still a problem, but 12 times larger.)

Subscribe on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

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What Victorian Bootmakers Can Teach Us About The Future of Work | Diving In

Wednesday, August 5, 2026 • Duration 13:23

When the CEO of Anthropic warns AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, it's easy to picture the destruction. Justin Wolfers wants you to picture the other half of the story. In this episode of Diving In, he uses a carefully researched study of Victorian bootmaking — where a labor-saving sewing machine let each worker make four times as many boots — to show how a technology can completely remake an industry while total employment barely moves.

The numbers are almost eerie: about 220,000 bootmakers in 1851, and 213,000 in 1911. Yet beneath that calm surface, nearly everything changed. Cheaper boots meant more boots (that's Jevons paradox), old craft occupations vanished, and an almost identical number of new factory jobs appeared — in new places, done by the next generation. The incumbents mostly got to retire in their old trade.

None of this predicts what AI will do to your job. But it widens the range of outcomes you should take seriously, and it flags the one thing that may matter most: the pace of change. If AI moves slowly, the creative side of creative destruction has time to arrive. If it moves fast, that gentler adjustment gets much harder. Either way, it’s important to also ask what gets created, not just what gets destroyed.

Link to Hillary Vipond's original research: https://github.com/HillaryVipond/JMP/blob/main/Technological_Unemployment_in_Victorian_Britain_VipondH.pdf

Subscribe on YouTube 👉 https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

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Economics Is Not a Subject — It's a Toolkit | Economics Matters

Tuesday, August 4, 2026 • Duration 01:10:42

This is a conversation between Justin and Larry Kotlikoff, fellow economist and host of the Economics Matters podcast. And it was a fun one, in which Larry encouraged Justin to look both backwards and forwards. Backward at some of the work he's most proud of, and forward at the growing challenges we face as an economy and a nation.

In the process, Justin and Larry philosophized over the role of economics and the duty of economists in helping tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time. This was the kind of conversation that reminded Justin why he fell in love with economics: it’s not the models or the math, but the chance to make sense of the lives we actually live.

Subscribe on YouTube https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers

Larry's Substack: https://larrykotlikoff.substack.com/

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Tariffs, Take Three: The Dumbest Round Yet | Off the Clock

Sunday, August 2, 2026 • Duration 50:24

Justin and Stacey are back for Off the Clock — helping you figure out what economic news to actually worry about, what you can safely ignore, and where to find some silver linings.

This week was a big one for economic news and data. Justin starts by explaining to Stacey why this latest round of tariffs is the dumbest one yet. And Stacey brings in some reporting to highlight how small businesses are struggling under the weight of constant chaos and confusion.

Then they dig into the Fed and why markets reacted so poorly to Handsome Kevin’s press conference. Finally, Justin and Stacey discuss the latest, lackluster GDP numbers and compete in a “Chart vs. Chart” contest that you get to be the judge of.

02:42 More tariff chaos and confusion
23:53 The Fed vs The Market
34:16 A disappointing GDP report
41:05 Chart vs Chart — A Friendly Competition

Subscribe on YouTube https://youtube.com/platypuseconomics
Subscribe on Substack 👉 https://newsletter.platypuseconomics.com

Follow on Social Media @PlatypusEconomics and @JustinWolfers
Follow Stacey @svankesmith

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Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other14

Youtube3

New York Times2

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other14

Youtube3

New York Times2

Apple Podcasts

Spotify