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Cool Zone Media.

Welcome to Ika Dapid Here, a podcast where I try to explain economics to you and Molly.

I'm your host, Bia Wong, and thank you, Molly, for agreeing to do this, especially on extremely

short notice. I appreciate it. I am so excited to struggle to learn. So, okay, there's good news and

bad news. The good news is that the central thing that this episode is about nominally is a concept called monopsony, and it's actually really easy.

No, see, you said that. You said that in the word chat earlier. You said monopsity. And I was like, oh, man, she's so tired. That's not even a word.

Well, okay. This actually gets into the thing, because this is a word that was made up specifically for this concept.

Unfortunately, I do also have to do the bad news, which is that to actually understand the history of this, we do have to explain stuff that's legitimately very complicated.

So, I'm locked in.

Yay, but, okay, okay, medopsony, the hook of this, this is part of the reason why you get paid like shit, is because of monopsony.

So I first was interested in writing about this specifically for this show, because weirdly NPR's Planet Money, like, discovered the concept of monopsony and did it a couple of pretty

interesting pieces on the history of the concept. And the place that they go with it is they

start talking about one of my favorite economists, Joanne Robinson, who is really good, and we're going to spend

most of this episode talking about her. But one of the stories that they tell, this is a very

famous story in the circles of economists that I'm around, I guess, is about her sitting down

with like a British classicist and inventing the term monopsony.

So, okay, what is, what is monopsony?

It's one something, mono.

You know what a monopoly is.

So monopoly is when one seller, right?

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