The Pie: An Economics Podcast

New research shows that people are strikingly bad at predicting how good it feels to connect with a stranger. In this episode of The Pie, Nick Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and author of A Little More Social, discusses what more than 120 experiments reveal about why we avoid reaching out to others, and what that avoidance may be costing us.

In the United States, regulators inspect nursing homes to ensure compliance with quality, safety, and other standards. While these inspections are not technically announced, they are easy for nursing home staff to predict because they usually occur annually. In this episode of The Pie, Maggie Shi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, discusses how this predictability affects nursing homes' effort levels, and, in turn, resident health.

At a time when forty percent of American two-year-olds have their own tablet, a new generation of AI toys and chatbots is being marketed as a better alternative to screens. On this episode, Dana Suskind, pediatric cochlear implant surgeon, co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning and Public Health, and author of the new book Human Raised, explains the importance of human interaction for children's brain development.

Voters consistently say they care most about the economy — jobs, wages, inflation, the price of gas. So why are campaigns so often fought over culture? In this episode, Konstantin Sonin, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and co-director of BFI's Political Economics Initiative, walks host Tess Vigeland through his theory of "multi-dimensional signaling." Because economic policy is too complex for voters to fully decode, they read a candidate's cultural stances as a proxy for what that candidate will do economically, and politicians exploit it.

When a child brings home good grades but low standardized test scores, which signal should parents pay attention to? In this episode, Ariel Kalil of the UChicago Harris School of Public Policy discusses new research showing that parents lean heavily on grades, and high grades often crowd out the extra help low test scores would otherwise prompt. With pandemic learning losses disguised by inflated grades, Kalil discusses how this dynamic may mean that struggling kids aren't getting the support they need.