Keith Cooper via Flickr
To get from Santa Cruz to the south bay, you have to take Highway 17 across a mountain range. I was making that trip when I first heard “The Giant Pool of Money.” A little bit before the summit my radio lost the signal. When I got home I went and looked up these things called ‘podcasts.’ A mere seven and a half years later I’m a three-ish posts into a really important blogging project.
I’d been managing the American Apparel in town for a few months and the Lehman Brothers collapse came months before I took the job. It was May 2008, and at that point the recession hadn’t shown up in our sales—it wouldn’t until the end of that year. But in the wider community there was a vague uneasiness. Friends who lost jobs had more and more trouble finding new ones. People murmured about distant relations or acquaintances underwater on their mortgage or otherwise deep in the red. The Washington Mutual I banked with to avoid ATM fees was now decked out as Chase. But I had no idea why or how things had fallen apart. That’s where Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson come in.
"The Giant Pool Of Money" depicts the financial collapse as a chain—stretching from the borrower, to the lender, to the bundler, to the investor. There are a lot of takeaways in an hour-long show, but I leave with this: the recession was the result of imperfect people making self-interested (although not necessarily rational) decisions based on imperfect information. With demand for safe and lucrative investments driving riskier loans—only to create more money looking for more safe, lucrative places to park—fundamental assumptions about the mortgage market went out the window. The story uses brilliant portraits of different people along that chain to show how each link pulls on every other one and in both directions. You get the sense of how tightly bound they are even if they have no ‘real’ interactions with one another.
Nearly 600 episodes on, This American Life continues to be one of the best radio productions in the country. The only other shows in the same category are Radiolab and Serial—which in terms of spinoffs, makes Frasier look like a failure. And speaking of spinoffs, “The Giant Pool of Money” helped Blumberg and Davidson launch NPR’s economics show, Planet Money. It’s kind of astounding how regularly episodes confront the country’s most important issues. It’s even more amazing how regularly that work illuminates and changes how I think about the topic. This year they took on school segregation and police violence. Even when the show falters, they use it do more good work.
Just as a heads up: you’ll be hearing more from me about This American Life further down the road. I put it in here early because it will almost certainly be one of the shows I come back to when I run out of new episodes to gush about (spoiler alert: it’ll probably be their insane show about redlining). If somehow you are listening to podcasts but aren’t already listening to TAL, keep in mind they only host a handful of episodes at a time on iTunes. That limit has actually prompted me to bank four or five at a time so I can binge when there’s a lull with other shows. Whatever the case, it should definitely be set for auto-download.
