NPR.

This is the Indicated for Planet Money.

I'm Adrian Ma.

And I'm Whalen Wong.

A few months ago, some of us on the team were talking about Netflix and how it's cracking

down on password sharing.

I ended up on the Netflix Help section of their website looking at the rules for who's

allowed to be on one account.

And here's what the website says.

A Netflix account is for people who live together in a single household.

Then we thought about it some more, and then we realized the definition of a household

is not at all simple.

There are all kinds of complex human relationships and living arrangements that stretch the notion

of what a household is.

And here on the Indicator, we'd like to dig into these nuances.

We know that the household is like this atomic unit of measurement for economists and

demographers and statisticians.

And the way it's defined can have big implications for economic policy.

So on today's show, we're going to tease out some of the different definitions of households.

And why companies like Netflix are paying attention to it now.

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