Make Me Smart May 8, 2023 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Hey everybody I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to make me smart where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you for joining us on this Monday, May the 8. Today we are going to do a little bit of news, then tell you about a story or two that made us smile. So let’s dive right in after you Mr. Ryssdal

Kai Ryssdal 

After me. All right. So I’ve got two. One of which is somewhat serious, and the other one of which is also serious. So we’ll pick varying degrees of seriousness. How about this? This weekend in the great state of California, a task force that we have out here working on reparations for black Americans who’ve been affected by everything, do we really need to explain? Came out with its recommendations. And it is it is, you know, you can read the specifics, because there’s some level of detail. I just think it’s significant in that, number one, this is California, the most significant economy in this larger American economy. It is, I believe, the first state to come out with state level recommendations on reparations. And I think it’s a great way to get the conversation to the next level. Because unless you’ve been living under a rock, or maybe even if you have, you understand what race has done to first of all the people in this economy who suffered because of the way we treat Black Americans. And number two, how the larger economy has suffered too. And I just wanted people to understand that, that there’s this thing out there, and it’s it’s a really big and potentially significant story. That’s what I got. That’s one of the things I got

Kimberly Adams 

Are a lot of folks talking about that out there in California like does it come up in conversation with people?

Kai Ryssdal 

No, no, no. And that’s and that’s me being a public radio listening, New York Times reading, you know, white Californian right? I don’t I don’t hear… I was at a party on Saturday night. This did not come up. You know.

Kimberly Adams 

That’s interesting.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Yeah. Item number. Yeah sorry go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

I wonder if the same conversations are happening amongst the sort of opposing groups, though. Which I imagine it is.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Yeah, I think there’s a group of people that think that this is a not a no brainer, right? Because it’s a significant step. But it’s the right thing to do. And then there’s a group of people that says, “What, no, why? I don’t understand that hasn’t been a problem.” Right? I mean, you know.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, you are gonna go to item number two, oh, sorry.

Kai Ryssdal 

Sorry, for which you can you can make no excuses other than to say shut up and just open your eyes. Okay, item number two. This one is more squarely in my wheelhouse and in the wheelhouse of Marketplace at large. But something incredibly dorky, called the SLOOS came out today from the Federal Reserve. It is the Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey. And literally what the Fed does, it goes around to senior loan officers at a bunch of big banks and says, “Hey, how are you feeling? Has your loan volume increased or decreased? Are you asking for more collateral? Are you asking for more documents? What are you expecting in the months ahead?” And the report for the first quarter came out today. And I emphasize first quarter because that is obviously January, February and March. And Silicon Valley Bank, if I’m not mistaken, went under like right at the first week of March, I want to say March the 7 but it was early in March. So most of the bank agita that has happened in the last couple of weeks and you know, two months in this economy is not in this report. And yet what you have our loan officers in big institutions, and midsize institutions actually, saying, “Yeah, we’re a little worried credit access is gonna become tough. We’re not seeing people lending. We don’t really like what’s going on out there.” And I would just suggest that if this is all before SVB, that bodes not really very good things.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

I actually saw Austan Goolsbee, the president of the Chicago Fed, said today or the other day he’s getting vibes about a credit crunch. And if if the word credit crunch, remind you of anything, it reminds you of 2007-ish, when people were saying, “Oh, yeah, there’s a credit squeeze. It’s gonna be okay though. It’s just little tightening of credit.” I literally, I did an interview, and I asked the person I was interviewing, I was like, “How long do you think this is gonna last?” And they were like, “oh, you know, six months.” And that was in 2007. And you’re like, “Oh, shut up.”

Kimberly Adams 

Well I mean if you think about it, like, the worst of it did last about six months. But it was just very, very bad. And then it was, like, not so much that conditions were so tight after that, it’s that fewer people met even the base requirement, because so many people lost their jobs and had no money. So the conditions remained the same, just fewer people were eligible.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, that’s true. And that, yeah, and you’re absolutely right. Right. The Bear Stearns to to Lehman Brothers sort of span was like seven months, right? March to September. And then after, it was the fallout after that, that that just really torpedoed things. Anyway. So those are my two things. Sort of, you know, there’s, there’s significant economic elements in both actually.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, well, I’ll stay in my wheelhouse today and do some very Washington stories. The first of all… first one, related to the debt limit and obviously, the ongoing efforts in Washington to, in theory, do something before it gets much worse. I love how you. I mean, who knows? It’s been interesting listening on the weekly wrap every week, and you’re like, “when does the market start caring? When does the market start caring?” And now we’re kind of at this point where everyone’s like, “no, for really all you got to do something. This isn’t funny anymore.” So therefore, pointing to a story in the Hill today that the National Association of Government Employees has actually filed a lawsuit to block enforcement of a law that sets the nation’s debt limit, arguing it’s unconstitutional as a political divide… sorry, it’s arguing that it’s unconstitutional. So we talked a while back when we were saying how the debt limit fight could play out, that one of the things the Biden administration could do was to just ignore it, and say, it’s unconstitutional because “Congress passed a law telling me to spend this money, therefore I have to spend this money and I can’t adhere to this other law, saying I can’t surpass the debt limit,” and therefore whatever. And now there’s a lawsuit basically leaning on that. That, you know, Congress is, and the executive, is obligated to pay these government workers because that those funds have been appropriated. And, you know, this is… it’s not a small number of government workers and my mouse is frozen. I think it’s like, yeah, 75,000 federal employees represented by this group. And the statement was, unless the “unless and until the debt limit statute is amended or revised to allow Congress to determine the priority of payments among specific programs once a limit is reached, members will suffer irreparable injury from layoffs, furloughs and loss of employment that are taken without any legitimate authority by the President.” And so that argument being, that because the law doesn’t stipulate who gets to get paid first, in the event we actually do run out of spending authority, that their members are going to eat that and, you know, maybe interest on the debt gets paid first, which means government employees get kicked to the bottom; Social Security gets paid earlier on, which means government employees get kicked to the bottom. And there’s real, you know, economic pain for these people looming in this. It’s not theoretical for them. So.

Kai Ryssdal 

Is is there a… I know the Federal Reserve talked about this back in 2011, when the last real debt crisis happened. But is there a payment prioritization schedule that’s been published? Has anybody in an official capacity said, “Yes, it will be 1234567, these seven groups in that order.” Do we know? I should know but I don’t.

Kimberly Adams 

So. It’s funny, you should ask that. So the technical answer is no, not really, in terms of this round. Because the administration strategically does not release that information, even though there are all sorts of reports and rumors that these plans do exist. But they don’t want those plans public, because then that becomes leverage for, you know, the GOP to say, “Well, look, there is a plan. We could manage this. And, you know, how dare the administration prioritize this over this? You know, the administrator…” Let’s just say for argument that this magical list says that we pay interest on the national debt first, then you could get a GOP talking point that, you know, “we’re trying to come up with a deal and the Biden administration is talking about skipping payments to seniors in order to you know, pay to pay China” or something like that. Because China holds so many treasuries. So anyway. But we do know a little bit about how the government might prioritize these payments based on the last time around and some reporting that’s happened since then about sort of what they were going to do. Which again, was probably prioritizing payments on interest on the national debt to sort of not let the global economy collapse, prioritize payments, you know, social security payments and things like that, and maybe like government, military contractors in you know, active situations where people’s lives are at risk and things like that. But yeah, there’s a strategy to not releasing that information.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, gotcha. Gotcha. Thank you.

Kimberly Adams 

Okay, Washington story number two comes courtesy of the 19th News, which was falls into the category of something I thought I knew, but later found out I was wrong about. You know…

Kai Ryssdal 

I see what you did there.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s alright. It’s alright.

Kimberly Adams 

Thank you very much. I tried. I didn’t necessarily think that I knew exactly how many working mothers were serving in Congress, but I certainly thought it was more than 37. Because according to the 19th, just 37 members of Congress are mothers with minor children. And so obviously, many more women have older children. But if you’re talking about mothers that are, you know, handling a lot of high intensity caregiving of minor, small children, there’s not a lot of them, and they’re drastically underrepresented in terms of, you know, representation in the… in what supposedly is a representative democracy. “Less than 7%” according to The 19th, “less than 7% of members of Congress are mothers with minor children. That’s just 37 out of 550.” Sorry. “Just 37 out of 541 members in Congress, including non voting members, and that means Americans would need to elect at least 59 more mothers of minor children to achieve proportional representation with the general population.” Which wow. Yeah, yeah. And it’s just you know, is… We throw around representative democracy so often in like, cultural…. I’m sorry, my cat. Give me one sec.

Kimberly Adams 

I can’t even yell at him because he’s deaf and he won’t hear me when he’s on the other side of the room. So he’s just gonna keep making noise, I guess, because I can’t do anything about it. Yeah. All right. But, you know, we throw around representative democracy all the time. But how representative is our democracy actually if we look at Congress. You know, it under represents younger represented…. younger generations. It under represents people of color. It under represents religious minorities. And it under represents working mothers. And it’s just worthwhile keeping that in mind every so often.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, especially when you think about you will, especially when you think about how important public policy is about working mothers and working parents, right? Child care, transportation, all of those things. And if you’ve got, let’s see, 30, 541, minus 37 is, you know, 500 plus people whose key issue is not that or have, don’t have first hand experience with that. Come on man. What do we even do?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, would we have left the Child Tax Credit expire if we had more working mothers in Congress? That would be interesting. Okay, we got the serious stuff done, let’s do some fun stuff.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright you go first.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, you know, we are gonna keep covering everything with generative AI and ChatGPT and all these things, because it keeps inserting itself into more and more aspects of our lives and economy. And because so much of that coverage is kind of scary, and oh God what’s going to happen next, I always love the stories that are a little bit lighter about it. And so the New York Times has a fun story with I love this headline, “ChatFished: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With A.I.”. And the premise is that the author Emma Goldberg, decided to see if ChatGPT could really replace her just in terms of inner office communication. Not even writing her articles, not doing her research, but just sort of dealing with her chit chat with colleagues and emails with, you know, fellow New York Times reporters and her bosses, and things like that. And can it manage the office banter? And in some cases it did, but not really. To the point that some people thought that she was mad at them, or some people thought she wasn’t taking something seriously enough, or her boss was like, “that doesn’t sound like you.” And, you know, it’s nice to know that there are some things that are uniquely ours, which is even if it’s just our Slack version of communication. Like will chat GPT know when to properly insert the dancing penguin?

Kai Ryssdal 

Which I don’t understand, by the way. I don’t understand what the dancing penguin is all about, just for the record. And yes, there’s a certain amount of “hey you kids get off my lawn” in that. But anyway, whatever. Alright, so here’s more mine.. Yes Yes. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

So I have to tell you why. The dancing penguin is my favorite Slack emoji. And it is my general response for anything. It doesn’t mean anything to me. It is that I think it’s cute and so when I want to give a just neutral positive, “I think this is a good thing reaction to something” rather than a smiley face, I will put the dancing penguin. Because I think it’s adorable.

Kai Ryssdal 

Okay, but how are we on the receiving end supposed to know that that is your intent with that emoji? As opposed to like a smiley face which we get.

Kimberly Adams 

How could you not be happy with the dancing penguin? How how would you interpret that as a bad thing?

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I just don’t know what it means.

Kimberly Adams 

It’s a vibe!

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s a vibe. Hang on. Let me yell at my dog. You get your cat I’ll yell at my dog. Hey Bonz! Bonz come here. There we go. And here comes Willow too. All right. All right. I will now take that with the with the intent with which it is intended. And now I know.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. Okay good.

Kai Ryssdal 

So mine is a piece in Bloomberg, that’s it’s a little bit of a fluffy, fluffy piece on this company called Spin Launch. It goes back to the thing that that Kimberly and I talked about all the time, which is that space is cool. But anyway, I’ve been following this company for a while. And basically, their deal is they want to launch rockets into space, not with rockets rockets, but by spinning them around really fast. And then letting go. And you might think that I’m oversimplifying, but not really.

Kimberly Adams 

This photo is amazing. This photo is amazing.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s absolutely wild. It’s a California startup that wants to spin things inside a vacuum chamber at the end of an arm that rotates at crazy, crazy speeds, and getting up to orbital velocity and letting it go. I kid you not. I don’t know if it’s gonna work.

Kimberly Adams 

If it works that’s much more efficient.

Kai Ryssdal 

I know. I know. And it just last September got $71 million or had raised $71 million from a bunch of really like brand name investment companies and and VC companies like Kleiner Perkins and Alphabet. I don’t know. In 2026, it says it’s going to have a thing to be able to fling something 40 miles up into the atmosphere. It could be super cool. Or it could be nothing. But I just think it’s amazingly cool. SpinLaunch look it up.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah I think that’s really cool. Yeah. That’s a lot of fun. That’s a good one. All right. That is it for today. Go ahead.

Kai Ryssdal 

I was going to say. Can you imagine standing there as this thing goes flying out of the chute. Just goes (makes shooting sound). Come on.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, at 5000 miles per hour, would you see it really?

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know. If it’s big enough? I guess.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. All right. That is all for today. Tomorrow you can join us for our weekly deep dive this week we’re going to be talking to sociologists Matthew Desmond about his new book “Poverty, by America” which digs into why poverty persists in the United States you know, like we were talking about with the child tax credit which helped to eliminate, reduced by half childhood poverty while it was enacted. But whevs.

Kai Ryssdal 

Totally. Sorry, I was just looking at orbital velocity. I don’t I don’t think 5000 miles an hour is gonna get you to orbit orbital velocity but anyway, it’s a step. But if you got questions, comment, if you know what orbital velocity is for Earth gravity let us know. Voicemail is 508-UB-SMART. You can also email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. Either one of those will work to get in touch with us. And otherwise, that’s what we got for today.

Kimberly Adams 

All right. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras. What are you over there mumbling?

Kai Ryssdal 

Me too. I’m having a tough day. Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts …  And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.

Kimberly Adams 

Happy Monday.

Kai Ryssdal 

Happy Monday, everybody. It’s in the can.