Chasing the American Dream at Outback Steakhouse

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How often do you hang out with people in a different socioeconomic bracket than you? And where do you meet and congregate? Economist Maxim Massenkoff, and his co-author Nathan Wilmers, looked at cell phone location data to figure out where people with vastly different incomes commune together. Today on the show, Maxim discusses his research, and Darian and Alexi head to a restaurant to try and witness some of this class mixing in action.

Related Episode: The Secret to Upward Mobility: Friends

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	N-P-R.
0:05.0	Darian Woods, Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.
0:14.2	It's good to see you here.
0:15.2	Fancy seeing you here, that's not a gigantic strip mall.
0:18.6	Like decently fancy strip mall, out in Bayside Queens.
0:22.7	We've got some meme stock in the distance.
0:25.4	I see an AMC theater.
0:27.0	We have five guys.
0:28.0	We have eye-hop.
0:29.0	We have home goods.
0:29.9	We have Jacob.
0:30.9	We have Starbucks.
0:31.9	We have Panera Bread.
0:33.4	We are here with a higher cause in mind.
0:36.9	We have a goal to look for America.
0:40.4	We're in search of America.
0:41.4	We're on kind of a socio-economic safari this evening.
0:45.6	This is the Antiguaite Affirmative Money I'm Darian Woods.
0:48.0	And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi from Over at Planet Money.
0:50.9	You hear a lot these days about this super important ingredient for helping people move
0:55.7	up the economic ladder.
0:57.3	And that idea is economic mixing, when the rich and the poor and the middle come together
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.