How can we end the scourge of poverty? How we can sustain ourselves once robots eliminate the need for many jobs? Annie Lowrey offers an answer in the title of her book, Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (Crown, 2018). She makes the case for the policy called “Universal Basic Income,” ... Show More
Nov 18
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025)
1991 ushered in a new epoch of hope as Russia marched toward democracy and prosperity on the ruins of the Soviet Union. In 2025 those hopes for a thriving, democratic Russia have not panned out. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov lived it as journalists in Russia from the start of ... Show More
1h 2m
Nov 9
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (L ... Show More
1h 27m
Nov 3
AI, News, and the State: Reinstitutionalising Journalism in Global China’s Algorithmic Age: A conversation with Dr. Joanne Kuai
How is artificial intelligence transforming journalism as both a profession and an institution? In this episode, Ning Ao speaks to Dr. Joanne Kuai, exploring how AI reshapes journalistic roles, organisational structures, and governance systems through the lens of China’s media la ... Show More
34m 27s
Jan 2024
The afterlife of MLK’s call for a guaranteed income
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that “the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Decades later, while still a divisive idea, the conversation around guaranteed income is starting to simmer, and pilot programs ... Show More
21m 58s
Jun 2021
Mariana Mazzucato and Raghuram Rajan on Building Back Post-Pandemic
Behind every protest, and every election debate around the world, an underlying theme seems to be rising anger about inequality, and a sense that capitalism itself is broken. But what can be done to fix it? What can societies do to reverse some of its inherent problems? And how s ... Show More
22m 32s
May 2023
How AI could help rebuild the middle class
For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envi ... Show More
21m 22s
Mar 2023
Mark Robert Rank, "The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also have the highest rates of poverty among the industrialized nations? Based on his decades-long research and scholarship, one of the n ... Show More
32m 27s
Jul 2018
48: UBI Q&A. A Conversation with Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang
“That's really one of the most powerful things about Universal Basic Income. You start to believe in a sense of abundance and possibility.” In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and Nat speak to Andrew Yang, the author of The War on Normal People, a follow up to our previous bo ... Show More
1h 4m
Jul 2021
GR: Is Capitalism Broken? With Mariana Mazzucato & Raghuram Rajan
Behind every protest, and every election debate around the world, an underlying theme seems to be rising anger about inequality, and a sense that capitalism itself is broken. But what can be done to fix it? What can societies do to reverse some of its inherent problems? And how s ... Show More
22m 32s
Mar 2023
Mark Robert Rank, "The Poverty Paradox: Understanding Economic Hardship Amid American Prosperity" (Oxford UP, 2023)
The paradox of poverty amidst plenty has plagued the United States throughout the 21st century--why should the wealthiest country in the world also have the highest rates of poverty among the industrialized nations? Based on his decades-long research and scholarship, one of the n ... Show More
29m 42s