‘Tis the season — wait, that’s not the real thing!
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Remember those Christmastime Coca-Cola ads from the ’90s and early aughts? A caravan of red trucks snakes through picturesque towns, delivering holiday cheer in the form of good old-fashioned Coke. The company just released a new version, meant to invoke nostalgia for the Yule of yesteryear. And in the true spirit of 2024, it’s AI-generated. Will all our ads be AI-made soon? Or is human creativity still key? Also in this episode: A dogecoin influencer weighs his options, a startup wants to put EV chargers in lampposts and unit labor costs may tell us where inflation is headed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Givewell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. |
| 0:09.4 | Over 125,000 donors have used Givewell to donate more than $2 billion. |
| 0:15.8 | Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives. |
| 0:23.3 | Givewell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all of their research and |
| 0:27.7 | recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax-deductible donations to their |
| 0:32.4 | recommended funds or charities, and Givewell doesn't take a cut. To find out more or make a donation, go to |
| 0:38.2 | givewell.org slash UK. Givewell, UK can claim gift aid for eligible donations. Again, that's |
| 0:44.0 | givewell.org slash UK to donate or find out more. On the program today, inflation and the labor |
| 0:53.2 | market and a cryptocurrency cautionary tale. |
| 0:57.7 | From American public media, this is Marketplace. |
| 1:06.3 | In Los Angeles, I'm Kai. |
| 1:12.1 | It is Tuesday today, the 10th of December. |
| 1:15.1 | Good as always to have you along, everybody. |
| 1:17.4 | If you are curious about where inflation in this economy stands and who among us is not, |
| 1:23.6 | well, then this is the week for you. |
| 1:25.7 | The Labor Department will be out with a new Consumer Price Index tomorrow. The producer price index, that is wholesale inflation, comes Thursday, and the import price index is Friday. Meanwhile, the Labor Department also released some revised productivity numbers this morning, how much stuff we made compared to how much time we spent making it. Productivity increased 2.2% in the third quarter, pretty strong by historical standards. |
| 1:50.1 | But another data point in there, something called unit labor costs was revised lower. |
| 1:56.5 | As Marketplace's Justin Hoare reports to get us going, those unit labor costs can tell us a whole |
| 2:00.6 | lot about where inflation might be headed. |
| 2:03.1 | Think about unit labor costs as a ratio of how workers' compensation compares to how productive they are. |
| 2:09.5 | Put more simply, it's just a straightforward way to compare how much we're producing relative to how much it costs to produce that in labor terms. |
| 2:18.4 | That's George Perks, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group. |
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