What This Podcast Actually Is
The Economics Of Everyday Things Podcast is produced by The New Yorker and hosted by Kevin Rinzler with economist Jonathan Rothwell. Each episode takes a mundane object or situation — bottled water, tipping, parking meters, rent control — and runs it through standard microeconomic analysis to show what the data actually says about incentives, scarcity, and market behavior. It is not a business podcast in the sense of teaching you to invest or start companies. It is a long-form journalism piece that uses economics as a lens. The episodes typically run between 15 and 30 minutes. They are interview-based with Rothwell explaining concepts while Rinzler drives the conversation toward concrete examples.
How to Access the Economics Of Everyday Things Podcast
You can listen through any major podcast app — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast. The show is also available directly through The New Yorker website, and each episode has a companion article with additional context and links. There is no subscription fee. The audio is free across all platforms. I started with the companion articles because the audio alone sometimes skips over the technical footnotes. Rothwell will say "the data suggests" and leave it at that, but the article usually links the actual study or dataset. That distinction matters if you are trying to fact-check or go deeper. One specific edge case I ran into: some episodes reference FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) series or BLS tables by name but never paste the exact series codes. I spent about twenty minutes tracking down which exact FRED series they were citing for a episode on home heating costs. The workaround was straightforward — search the episode transcript for the specific metric they mentioned, then cross-reference with the year of publication. The BLS search function is decent once you know the exact category name. It saved me from having to email the show, which I was about to do.
What You Will Actually Learn
The podcast covers concepts like price elasticity, externalities, moral hazard, rent control effects, and Nash equilibrium using everyday scenarios. The value is not in learning the definitions — you can get those from any intro textbook — but in seeing how economists actually think through real problems with imperfect information. Here is something beginners miss. Most people think economics is about predicting the future. It is not. Economics is about understanding tradeoffs under constraints. When Rothwell talks about minimum wage, he is not forecasting employment numbers with confidence. He is mapping out the conditions under which different models predict different outcomes and explaining why smart economists still disagree. That is a much more honest framing than most other finance or business content out there. Another thing that does not get enough attention: the podcast consistently shows where the economic consensus is stronger and where it is weak. Episodes on cigarette taxes and smoking behavior have fairly tight consensus. Episodes on immigration's effect on wages show genuine disagreement among researchers, and Rothwell will tell you that plainly. That honesty is unusual for content aimed at general audiences.
Who This Is Actually For
This works well if you already have some familiarity with basic economics and want to see it applied to situations you encounter daily. It is less useful if you have zero background, because Rothwell assumes you understand terms like "opportunity cost" and "marginal benefit" without stopping to define them every time. The companion articles help bridge that gap somewhat, but they move quickly. If you are new to the subject, I would pair this with something more foundational first — an intro microeconomics course or a book like Freakonomics or The Undercover Economist — and then come back here.
Where It Falls Short
The podcast has real limitations. It is firmly rooted in mainstream neoclassical economics. Behavioral economics, institutional economics, and heterodox approaches get very little presence. If your interest leans toward those areas, you will find the coverage thin. The show also tends to focus on United States data and policy, so the applicability drops if you are outside that context. Another issue: the episodes are released infrequently. There is no weekly cadence. If you consume this type of content regularly, you will go periods of several months without new material. That is just how The New Yorker operates, but it is worth knowing before you subscribe expecting daily or weekly drops. If you want something that covers more ground faster, The Economist's podcasts or Planet Money might be better primary sources, though neither digs as deeply into a single topic the way this show does. The Economics Of Everyday Things Podcast is narrow by design. That is its strength and its weakness at the same time.
You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and directly at nymag.com/sections/economics-of-everyday-things. Each episode page includes the full article, transcripts when available, and links to the sources Rothwell references. Reading along while listening cuts the confusion significantly, especially on episodes dealing with statistical claims or policy analysis.
