The shocks of the pandemic economy gave us a bunch of enormous natural experiments, which helped to prove or disprove conventional economic thinking.
Take, for example, the bullwhip effect, the idea that the further away from the customer you are in the supply chain, the more volatile your orders are likely to be. This theory played out at an enormous scale, in the pandemic. Consumers and companies overreacted to the risk of shortages by ordering more products and hoarding them, causing massive shifts in the supply chain – just like the theory says.
And the pandemic gave us a lot of natural experiments like this. So, on this special live edition of Planet Money, we looked for other big economic lessons from the past three years, and we took this information and turned it into… a gameshow! It’s Two Truths and a Lie: Econ Edition. We get into questions about the workforce and labor market during the pandemic, and how it affected how economists view the world.
This episode was hosted by Mary Childs. It was produced by Dave Blanchard, and edited by Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Josh Newell with help from Robert Rodriguez. Original music by Jesse Perlstein.
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