The Luddites

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The MX Business Gold card offers benefits such as four times points on eligible spending categories and annual statement credits on eligible purchases at Select Business Merchants.
The speaker challenged writers and researchers to do something they had written about but never experienced.
The speaker invited LA Times tech columnist Brian Merchant to a repair shop in Brooklyn.
The repair shop visit was connected to Brian's new book about the Luddites, a group of English textile workers during the industrial revolution.

The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries, high up in their ivory towers. On the other, there's the messy world we're all living in, where those economics are actually playing out.

Sometimes, researchers will write about something that they themselves have never actually experienced. Sure, they've thought about it, theorized, come up with smart analyses...but that's not the same as getting out of that armchair and into the real world.

So, in this episode, we play our own version of Never Have I Ever. We dare two researchers to go places and do things they have never done before, in hopes of learning something new about the economic world around us.

(Okay, fine, it's maybe more like Truth or Dare...but go with us here.)

Today's episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and produced by Emma Peaslee with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Sally Helm, fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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