Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Pushkin. So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.
To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.
and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year. The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business.
Tractor Supply trusts 5G solutions from T-Mobile. Together, they're connecting over 2,200 stores with 5G business internet and powering AI so team members can match shoppers with the products they need faster. This is enriching customer experience. This is Tractor Supply with T-Mobile for Business. Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now.
A couple of weeks before Christmas 1799, George Washington, the first and perhaps the greatest president of the United States, was enjoying retirement at his country estate, Mount Vernon. He'd ridden around his farms and come home late, cold and in wet clothes. Guests had come for dinner and he hurried to entertain them without changing into something dry. The next day he had a sore throat and a chesty cough.
The day after that, his throat was so badly inflamed that he had trouble breathing. His family decided to take a fateful step. They summoned a doctor. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES
This is one of our cautionary conversations, and today I'm, well, I'm outnumbered. My guests are Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds, the hosts of the hugely popular comedy history podcast, The Dollar. Hello, gentlemen. How are you? Hello. Two Americans, no less. Yeah. So...
This is going to be bad. It's going to be different. It's going to be different for Cautioning Tales listeners anyway. So we are going to be talking about a couple of stories that you covered on the dollop.
And one of those is the death of George Washington. And we'll talk about whatever else comes up. So thanks for joining me. And it's easy to see why the dollop is such a successful format, because what could be more hilarious than the painful and pointless death of the father of the nation? I agreed. You'd be shocked at...
I think this all the time about how I'll take a step back and be like, we're laughing about a murder on our show. And I'll just be like, for 45 minutes straight, we've just been making jokes. But I'm like, two people are dead. But there are just so many absurd moments. And this one...
among them nobody knows how he died we're not taught it and it really is the most american thing of all that we like why wouldn't you be taught this we killed him like if you were teaching this in class i would not be like leaving school to go smoke cigarettes i'd be like i'll do it at lunch i want to see how this ends this is exciting i mean it is extraordinary i was listening to the episode episode 101 and uh
I was just crying with laughter. I should have been crying because a great man is dying needlessly. But I was just crying because it was very funny. So we should probably run through what happens when the doctors show up. So I think it's doctors cry. Yeah. Dr. Dick, Dr. Brown, Dr. Crack. I mean...
It's not great. I mean, it's just, again, there are many times where I'm like, this is low-hanging fruit, don't do it. But it's like, come on. I feel like Dave made those up. I feel like if we look back, that's not the names of them. Of course, the first thing they do is they start taking blood from him. Quite a lot of blood, right? Yeah, every guy that came in, every doctor that came in, his first thing was, well, we got to get blood out of this guy.
And so each one trained over a pint. I was trying to figure out, did they talk to each other about that? Or is that they all had to have their fingerprints on it? Yeah, I don't think they were talking to each other. I think they were just like, okay, well, now I'm here. These other guys aren't doing a good job. I'm going to take care of this. And then they train his blood. Which is also amazing to be like that three independent opinions of doctors when he was dying was we should get blood out of him.
Like if your engine won't turn over and the mechanic's like, let's get the oil out. So in Washington's lifetime, before he dies, there is, I think, a Dutch doctor or maybe a Belgian doctor, Jan-Baptiste van Helmont. I think it's kind of a bet with another doctor. He basically says, look, you will take 100 people with the plague or whatever it is, and you treat them your way, and I'll take another 100 people with the plague, and I'll treat them my way.
And we'll see who has the most funerals, which is like, it's a pretty simple idea, but it turns out it doesn't catch on. He never does it. None of these guys do it. Otherwise, they would have figured out that maybe draining, I think it's half of his blood in the end, isn't it? Yeah, most of Washington's blood. Yeah, I also like that bet. I think that's fun for people to be like, why are you cutting his throat? Like, I'm trying to win a bet. I'm really, I'm behind, so I need to swing for the fences a little bit.
But yeah, simple idea. Didn't catch on. It sounds like he just had a really bad sore throat. He went out in the rain and it was cold. Yeah, you get a sore throat. He didn't take care of himself. My aunt had COVID, so we just drained her. She didn't make it. Later, this other guy comes along and says, oh, you idiots. He was too old. If he'd been 30, then yeah, sure. Take six pints of blood. But not the old guy. No.
That was your mistake. Well, oops, what are we going to do? Well, that's the end of him. He had a good run. Well, then there's the beetle guy, too, right? Tell me about the beetle guy. Yeah, we're not talking about Brian Epstein. Go ahead, Dave. A guy came in, I think it was the third doctor, and he was like, you know what he needs? He needs a nice thick bed of beetles on his neck. And then he poops his pants. Yeah.
So he's got no blood, a beard of beetles, and he's pooping his pants and everyone's like, I think he's going to make it. We should probably drain a little more blood just to be safe. It's so undignified. I think they took blood four times, right? I think it was four. And they were taking like the third time was like 32 ounces. Like they were really taking a lot of blood out of this guy.
Oh, I'm sure, like, yeah. Like, pee's coming out, and they're like, well, I think he's out of blood. Somebody proposed a tracheotomy, which it sounds like that might actually have worked. Like, if the guy can't breathe. Yeah, that would work. It's certainly the only procedure that made it to today.
So there's maybe something to it. Yeah, true. So I was looking into these strange kind of lotions and vegetable compounds and so on that women used to take in the 19th and early 20th centuries for period pains and premenstrual stress and all this kind of stuff. And the doctors used to think that these things were completely ridiculous.
And one of the things that the marketers of these compounds said was basically, at least we won't kill you. The doctors will kill you and we won't kill you. So the weird thing is they did notice that the patients kept dying. And this was a selling point for the alternative therapies, like non-fatal. That's all I need. I just need to know it won't kill me and I'll take it. That's the only thing I worry about. Yeah.
Well, it was also one thing we've talked, we have a lot of fun with is the simplicity of becoming a doctor was also, you know, it was like you just needed to have a sign. And then you're like, open for business, you know, like a barber. But even they needed a license. You could just simply just say you were a doctor and then you could just get blood out of George Washington.
You needed a license to be a barber, but not to be a doctor? Yeah. Like you manifested in the moment, like, I'm a doctor. And that was that. And then even when they made it, when they made licenses, they would set up
a medical school and you go to the medical school and they just go okay you're a doctor like there was no yeah no one's watching the medical school so it was just for ages it was just you just said it and that's what you were presumably they needed to teach people how to drain a couple of pints of blood though yeah yeah that was probably like one of the things they're like look in case of an emergency
Drain the blood. Get the blood. The blood is something the body doesn't want when you're sick. I mean, that was for a long time. That was very common. And each doctor had his own bloodletting device that he would bring with him to see a patient. I think they favored something called the heroic style of medicine. And I think part of the problem was that doctors charged you a lot of money.
So the idea is if you're going to show up and you're going to charge somebody a lot of money, you better do something, you know, go big or go home, right? Don't just get a little bit of medicine or an aspirin or take my temperature and say, call me in the morning. You've got to do something big. Yeah, bed rest was not, you didn't pay for bed rest. You're like, bullshit. Right, and if the doctor comes to take his blood, you're like, oh, I feel different. I feel a little woozy. Yeah.
Something's happening. That was part of the attraction of the vegetable compound as well because they had booze in. Some of them had opium, some had booze, some had chili, some had all of them. And so, you know, if it's basically as strong as sherry, you know, you will feel different and maybe different is better.
And certainly it's better than losing a pint of blood. Yeah, but he could have done himself a lot of favors by changing his clothes, obviously. But had they just simply let him be, he had a much higher chance of survival. Yeah. But he was dead two days after going out and getting his clothes wet and then having dinner in wet clothes. I mean, that's pretty quick to die of a cold, right? Yeah, definitely. I mean, let's just flat out say he didn't die of a cold. Yeah.
He died because he got a cold. What do you think got him? What do you think got him, Dave? And then a bunch of guys came in and took the stuff that was supposed to be inside of his body out of his body. And then that pretty much killed him. Yeah. You know you're a bad doctor when you're the beetle beard guy and history smiles upon you greatest.
And remember, these are the guys treating Washington, so these are the top doctors. The best of the best. The best of the best. These guys are... There was one doctor. They did turn away, right? Like the one guy who did actually have an idea and they went, oh no, you've gone too far.
The guy who thought maybe we'll resurrect him? Yeah, that was a thing. There's a guy who thought maybe we could do George Washington thriller. Yeah, of course. Of course, there's three guys that kill him, and then there's a guy that came in and was like, let's have a do-over. Let's bring him back. Yeah. Yeah, you get a little fire in that guy. He'll come right back. And his first words are going to be, what were you doing? What?
That was crazy when those guys got rid of all my blood. Couldn't believe the guy who wanted to bring him back from the dead actually made more sense than the first three. Because he's like, well, add some blood. We've got a lamb. Add some lamb's blood. Pump up his lungs, you know, give him the kiss of life. Warm him up. And you go, yeah. Yeah, they're right. Closer, warmer. And they're like, get out of here, you loon. Yeah.
Well, I wonder what they did with his blood because it would have been really helpful if the blood was nearby. But if that guy's pitching lamb blood, they must have just been like, all right, pour that in the garden. Have a good harvest. At that time, it just went on the floor, I would think.
Just tell me they didn't cook with it. That's all I want to know. And then they made a blood pudding. How's everyone liking the ravioli? We're really channeling the spirit of the dollop here. I've got no idea what Cautioning Tales listeners are making of all this, but the simple imposition of modern standards on the 1700s is just very funny. We have learned so much.
Over that time that, I mean, the thoughts in their head are just absolutely bananas. So from our perspective, it's just everything they do is completely insane. Like you cannot believe that.
What's happening? Most of what they think is just crazy and wrong. But then we do that with things that happen today, too. I mean, we always are going like, you know, this is... We're living in a dollop with this or that. Yeah, look, we had a president who told people to drink bleach when they got COVID. So...
Pardon me, inject it. Pardon me, sir, inject it. First of all, I will not have you mock the greatest president since George Washington, who, mind you, should go the same way in my opinion. And not a lot of people know if you drain Trump, nacho cheese comes out of his veins. I was going to ask, what was the moment in history when people stopped being completely ridiculous? But yeah. It hasn't stopped. You can't wait to find it. Can't wait to find it. Won't be in our lifetimes.
Cautionary Tales is going to be back in a moment, and when we get back, we will answer the question, if you get run over and killed by a car, can the driver sue you? AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up.
The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI.
OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has 4 to 8 times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds.
If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. oracle.com slash strategic. I love cycling, and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe.
which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it and then he was on the bike and ready to ride.
The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian Bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian Bike today. Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed.
Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look, events are unfolding quickly. But now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist,
Thank you.
Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.
We're back. I'm talking to the creators of The Dollop, namely the historic comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. We've talked about Dollop 101, which is an episode not a freshman course. Now let's talk about Dollop 193, which is all about what happened when people had the temerity to use the streets for driving cars, which was kind of a radical move, right? The idea that, oh, these streets, we could just drive cars on them.
This was, I mean, it was a ballsy move at first. The streets were for horses and carriages and mostly hanging out and for kids to play. Yeah, pigs. And for kids to play in. That was what streets were for. So all of a sudden there's things on them and people are like, no, that's not what goes here. Like in New York, you couldn't have the kids play in Central Park, right? Because Central Park is for people of quality. You can't have the neighborhood kids...
coming and playing in the park. So they play on the street. Obviously, they play on the street. That's what you do with kids. I mean, the early cars, it didn't really matter because they do about four miles an hour. But then along comes the Model T and that does 45. And that's going to sting if it just plows through your game of baseball or whatever. Yeah, that's not great. This episode, I think, more than most, really did blow my mind because you are just... When you live in the world today...
you just automatically go, yeah, well, you walk here and you, you know, you wait for the car and all that. And, but it would be like, if we were to just like have to incorporate UFOs into our society, uh,
There would be a tremendous amount of growing pains and killing. And that's what there was. I mean, it is chaos. Two-thirds of the deaths in major cities were just cars just running over kids. Yeah.
And for like, it was like 15 years, no one was like, slow down. It just went, like you just drove as fast as you could, wherever you could. Your cars rolled over all the time. It was called turtling. Yeah, I mean, people just didn't, they didn't know what to do about cars. They didn't know how to drive cars. I've got this driver training bulletin, sportsman-like driving.
Which is a great title for like how to drive sportsmanlike driving, which aims to explain to drivers why if they go around a corner really fast, they're going to flip and it may not be a good idea. And they just didn't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think we even get into it in the episode of like, well, how did they not know that too fast was...
and turning, like they had other things, but they couldn't process that connection. Surely they'd seen a carriage overturn or other things flip, or even a person. But to them, they were like, no, no, that should be fine. But you really can't put yourself in their headspace before...
was something you had to really pay attention to. Yeah, and I guess you don't have this whole infrastructure, like driving licenses and driving instructors. You just bought a car and you're rich because you must be because you've got a car, and you go for it. You find out the hard way. Or more likely, just like 11 street urchins find out the hard way, whereas you just drive through. Yeah, that's right. You go home at the end of your drive and you just hose off the children's blood and put your car in the garage. Yeah.
It always comes down to blood, Tim. It's all about blood with our show. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's quite a lot of that in Cautionary Tales as well, I have to say. But this turn, though, this moment where society is trying to wrestle with this, and it's partly just an argument over, well, who deserves to be in the streets? Like, who do the streets belong to? And whose fault is it if a car drives into a
kid or into any pedestrian for a while it's obviously the driver's fault and then there's this kind of amazing piece of public relations jujitsu that the auto lobby managed to achieve and and managed to make it seem like oh no no it's actually it's you get hit by a car that's your fault the car's not to blame yeah yeah well there's no it turns out it turns out there's no profit in having children play in the street but there is profit in selling cars and tires and gas
And so they did it really fast. They like this battle. I mean, this battle was going on for years, years. I mean, like 20 years or something or more. I can't remember exactly how many, but it's like 20 years of kids getting killed and people getting killed in the streets. And they're having parades of like.
you know, women with a little star on their shirt walking on the street that signified their child had died. In the street. In the street, my dear. Yes, and they're towing cars that have been in car accidents. So they're just showing all this stuff. It's going on for years, this publicity. And then the car companies and the tire companies, gas companies get together, and they immediately just flip the narrative. And I believe, if I'm correct, the biggest thing that flipped it
was jaywalking they came up with the term jaywalking because jay meant like you country bumpkin you you dumb hick and so they started calling people who walked in the street jaywalkers and it was highly offensive and they started basically shaming people who were in the street
It's an incredible move. So it's like only somebody who'd never seen a car before would... Only somebody from a really rural area, only used to horses, only an idiot like that would get themselves killed by a car. And if you get killed by a car, you should just be embarrassed. Yeah, all those little kiddie bumpkins. This five-year-old hayseed. It's...
It is amazing. It is amazing. Also, there's that phase where Jay Walkers, then the people just went with like Jay Drivers and they were trying to call people Jay Drivers for a while. And that was just sort of like...
Yeah, it wasn't as good. You know, people like, Dad, come on. Come up with something better. You J driver. Come on, everybody. He's a J driver. Get out of here. My family's been killed. To me, this is the greatest example of any dollop we've done about how stubborn we are. Kids getting mowed down for 20 years in the street. Like after two years, you should have been like, okay, let's just get off the street. It's not working. But I need to do something about the demand thing. But no. Yeah. Yeah.
They just demanded to be on the street. And, you know, at some point you go, this is a we're losing this battle because they're those are cars and we're people. So we should get off the street. But they just hung in there for years getting killed. I was really struck by a recent episode of the podcast 99% Invisible about traffic in Japan. You're not allowed to drive your children to school.
And I mean, I think this maybe just is in Tokyo, but you can't drive your children to school. And it's like, well, why can't you drive your children to school? And the answer is, well, because lots of children are walking to school. And if you drive your children to school, that's a hazard. And it's just a, oh yeah, that makes sense. But it's just a totally different way of looking at things.
When you look back at the United States in the early 1900s, you realize, oh, it could have gone this way, but it didn't. Yeah. I mean, we built our entire society around cars, essentially, starting at that point, which I don't know how many other countries have done to the extent that we have, the urban sprawl and the highway system and all that. So we definitely did that. The other thing that I think goes to your point of how much things could have gone differently is,
Ford was building electric cars. Yeah. But he was in business with Edison. Edison was kind of bad at inventions and he was cranking out really crappy batteries. So all the batteries he sent to Ford were terrible and didn't work.
And so Ford, instead of trying to find new battery companies, he was in business with Edison. He said, okay, we won't do the electric cars. And was this because all batteries were bad then or it was specifically Edison's batteries were bad? No, specifically Edison's batteries were bad. And so that's why – He called them batteries. Yeah.
The fact that there could have been electric cars, well, that there were electric cars 120 years ago, and that maybe that whole thing could have taken a different turn is, I think, mind-blowing. One of our most popular episodes of Cautionary Tales was called The False Dawn of the Electric Car, and it was about this guy called Clive Sinclair, who was a British, very successful inventor, slightly odd guy, and he was a bit of a
having made a load of money in calculators and then a load of money in personal computers in the 1980s, he then lost most of his money trying to make this electric car. But his vision for the electric car is, I won't start with a car. I'll start with something smaller. So he made this thing that was kind of like, it was like riding around in a giant white stiletto. That's the kind of vibe it had. And it did about 15 miles an hour. I like to show up to parties like that.
He later became a professional poker player and married a stripper. So, I mean, or was it a pole dancer, not a stripper? I don't want to get it wrong. But he was a, you know, he was an interesting guy. He was not a conventional geek. When I looked at this, I couldn't help but think, did he just get the timing wrong? Because Elon Musk tweeted after he died about how much he loved Clive Sinclair's first computer and how like Elon Musk had grown up
using this computer that Clive Sinclair had created. And you think, well, Elon Musk is like one of the richest guys on the planet because of his investment in Tesla, the electric car company. Clive Sinclair lost all his money trying to make this electric car. Did he just get the timing wrong or was it something else? Could it have worked if only he'd kind of made something that didn't look like a goofy shoe? I don't know.
Well, I think the biggest problem for the electric car in Edison's and Ford's time and probably St. Clair's time is the infrastructure of not being able to plug in everywhere and charge your car. That's always the biggest thing holding it back. I think if Ford had wanted to, if Ford had gone into the electric car and kept going with it, even moving away from Edison's batteries, he would have been the guy saying,
because of his power and wealth who would have created a system of you know stations to plug in your car because that that's what musk did immediately he knew immediately well there needs to be infrastructure out there to plug in your car that always seemed to me to be the big thing holding it back and you and you still think edison was was particularly bad at inventions
I mean, you know, if you put Tesla against Edison, yeah, Edison was a real bad dude. He was more about, you know, crushing other people and, you know, taking what they had than anything else. He'd have thrived today. Send your Tesla Edison fanboy mail to David Garris. No, no, just Dave. I didn't say anything.
Guys, it's been an absolute pleasure having you be part of Cautionary Tales. Thank you so much. Where can people find The Dollop, as if they haven't already found The Dollop? Yeah, you can listen to The Dollop. We're on All Things Comedy Network, or really, like we always say, wherever you listen to podcasts. So in The Dollop feed, we have started a new podcast, which you were on, called The Pastimes, which is similar to The Dollop, in which I pick a newspaper and we just read through it with a guest.
from any time from like the 1600s up to now. So we also have that. Equally insane. Old newspapers of every year. Material and subject matter. I discovered. It's super weird every time somehow. Yeah, they're very weird. Gareth, Dave, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. A pleasure. And Viva George Washington. If only. If only.
Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Vital Moulad, John Schnarz, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. MUSIC PLAYS
So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.
To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Same great taste, plant-based. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft. And not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you.
LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.
The news isn't always good news, but when you're getting quality journalism and in-depth expert analysis that's held up for more than 180 years, that is definitely good news. So if you haven't already, save 20% with The Economist's summer sale today and stay on top of the stories that matter to you. You'll instantly gain unlimited digital access to daily articles, special reports, award-winning podcasts, subscriber-only events, and so much more. Now that's
Good news. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.