Marketplace - American Public Media

Music helps define a generation -- maybe more than, but certainly just as much as anything else. Since MTV first went on the air more than 30 years ago, the channel has been the voice for the young.

Which could be a problem because consumers keep getting older. “We have to let go of each generation as they graduate out of it,” says the president of MTV, Stephen Friedman. And “that means constant reinvention.”

MTV’s original audience is pushing 50 now and the channel has stopped programming for Gen X’ers. The audience MTV’s looking at now are current 18- to 24-year-olds. Friedman says, “We have the luxury of just thinking about this audience.”

For those that claim MTV doesn’t play enough music, Friedman says it’s because they’re programming for Millennials. “Our audience understands, if they want a music video that they really want, they’re going to go online immediately.” He remembers waiting for the premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and says that’s not the way things are today. “The idea our audience is going to wait around for a video…just doesn’t exist.” We wanted to hear about your favorite MTV memories throughout the network's long history. Here's what some of you said.

[View the story "What's your favorite MTV moment?" on Storify]
Tell us yours by tweeting us @MarketplaceAPM or commenting on our Facebook page.

As many as 200,000 people have marched through the streets of Brazil's biggest cities, as protests over rising public transport costs and the expense of staging the 2014 World Cup have spread. The protests are the largest seen in the country for more than 20 years.

The biggest demonstration was in Rio de Janeiro, where 100,000 people joined a mainly peaceful march.In the capital, Brasilia, people breached security at the National Congress building and scaled its roof.

The wave of protests kicked off earlier this month when Sao Paulo residents marched against an increase in the price of a single bus fare, from 3 reals ($1.40) to 3.20. But protesters said they had come to fight for their country.

Demonstrators said they felt short changed by their government. Brazil is the 'B' in the famous BRICS group of the most important developing economies. But the country remains mired in corruption with critics claiming the country isn't putting enough money into schools and health services.

The Federal Reserve is meeting today to decide what to do about monetary policy. At issue is quantitative easing, the big bond-buying program. Through that, the Fed has been pumping tens of billions of dollars a month into the U.S. economy. It’s also been keeping interest rates low to try and stimulate home buying and borrowing. Now that the economy has been showing signs of growth, there has been a lot of pressure on the Fed to back off. That’s lead to concern over whether the Federal Reserve will ease off its aggressive policies and the markets are rampant with speculation as to whether the Fed will “taper” its quantitative easing program or “tighten” it.  

That might sound like splitting hairs, but there's a big difference, says Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation.

"Tapering is the Fed consciously reducing the amount of quantitative easing that it’s doing, tapering off its purchasing,"  he says.

In other words, the Fed’s multi-billion-dollar bond buying program would be gradually stepped down, and interest rates would stay more or less where they are.

As for tightening? "That would be a full 180," says Michael Farr, chief investment officer at Farr, Miller Wahsington and author of "Restoring Our American Dream: The Best Investment." "With tightening, the Fed would actually start to reverse the process, they could start selling bonds from their portfolio or they could raise interest rates."

Max Wolff, chief economist at Greencrest Capital, doubts that will happen. Wolff says whatever the Fed decides to call its policy, the actual changes it makes will likely be gradual. "What we’re really debating is whether the language is aggressive or moderate," he says. "The policy will be quite moderate."

Wolff says the Fed might choose to use strong language to appease critics of quantitative easing. Strong policy probably won’t fly, says Wolff, because the economy is still fragile and if the training wheels come off too soon, there could be dire effects. "We could have a shock that could be quite negative economically and could create spikes in things like credit card interest rates, auto loan rates and home mortgage rates."

Wolff says that could undo the small amount of economic growth we’ve seen, push us back into a recession and require the Fed to start....well, un-tightening or un-tapering.

Since what's basically going on here is wordplay, we went to three people whose business is words, to ask what they thought.

Authors Jeffrey Eugenides...

Mary Beth Keane...

...and Jess Walter.

Tell us your thoughts by commenting below or tweeting us @MarketplaceAPM.

All you need to do is look around to know that obesity is an enormous problem in this country. In fact, in the past 30 years, the percentage of American adults who are obese has doubled.

And the costs?

More than $200 billion a year for everything from related illnesses like high blood pressure and diabetes to lost work days.

Today, at its national meeting in Chicago, the American Medical Association voted to recognize obesity as a disease. The decision isn't binding, but when the AMA speaks, policy makers often listen.

Dr. Ethan Lazarus certainly hopes so. He sees about 600 patients a year at his weight loss clinic in Denver, Colorado. Don’t tell him obesity is a lifestyle choice.

“Most of my patients have tried to lose weight 12-14 times. And I’m treating cardiologists, emergency room doctors, family doctors, CEOs of companies, these are the most highly motivated people,” he says.

Lazarus says some of his patients wouldn't get to that point if they had more preventative services like time with dieticians and access to prescription drugs.

A report out of Emory University suggests spending on obesity and related conditions could reach $350 billion before the end of this decade.

Dr. Jeffrey Cain is the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. He says the AMA designating obesity as a disease could push insurers to start paying for some of the straightforward preventable services.

“If we can spend money on preventing obesity and preventing the downstream things like diabetes and high blood pressure and amputations and things, not only is that cheaper for our country, it’s better for our patients,” says Cain.

It’s also a lot better for the doctors who treat obesity, says Emory University Health Policy Prof. David Howard. “Saying that obesity is a disease will possibly open up the flood gates and make it much harder for insurers to deny payment,” he says.

Now that the AMA has endorsed the change, the lobbying of lawmakers and insurers begins. The question is whether more preventive services will drive up costs of lower them.

Howard says, if history is any guide, more services typically means more money.

Jay-Z is a pretty brilliant businessman, or business, man. “We don’t have any rules, everyone’s trying to figure it out,” he says on the video announcing the Samsung deal, “the Internet is like the Wild West, the Wild, Wild West; we need to write the new rules.”

And his reported $5 million deal with Samsung is a sweet rule re-write for him. But what’s in it for Samsung?

“By aligning themselves with Jay-Z, possibly the coolest man on the planet, Samsung hopes to have some cool shrapnel land on them,” says Max Dawson, a media consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates.

Samsung will hand out a million copies of Jay Z’s new album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” to its users via ap -- three days before the album drops.

And, we could see more of these exclusive content deals, between mobile phones and mega-stars. “Content could essentially be leveraged as a way to differentiate devices from each other,” says Philip Napoli, communications professor at Fordham School of Business.

Maybe we should call it the Jay-Z'ing of the mobile industry.

Jay-Z is a pretty brilliant businessman, or business, man. “We don’t have any rules, everyone’s trying to figure it out,” he says on the video announcing the Samsung deal, “the Internet is like the Wild West, the Wild, Wild West; we need to write the new rules.”

And his reported $5 million deal with Samsung is a sweet rule re-write for him. But what’s in it for Samsung?

“By aligning themselves with Jay-Z, possibly the coolest man on the planet, Samsung hopes to have some cool shrapnel land on them,” says Max Dawson, a media consultant with Frank N. Magid Associates.

Samsung will hand out a million copies of Jay Z’s new album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” to its users via ap -- three days before the album drops.

And, we could see more of these exclusive content deals, between mobile phones and mega-stars. “Content could essentially be leveraged as a way to differentiate devices from each other,” says Philip Napoli, communications professor at Fordham School of Business.

Maybe we should call it the Jay-Z'ing of the mobile industry.

Can you hear me? I’m Yellen!

It’s increasingly looking like Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is going to step down, and that his replacement could well be his Vice Chair Janet Yellen. Janet Yellen is a tiny lady, 66 years old with short white hair and a slight Brooklyn accent. She has a good sense of humor for an economist. She once joked that all her speeches were so depressing during the onset of the recession that she could see the faces of her audience fall when she would speak. 

“In contrast to many people in positions of importance,” says Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, “she has a humility and down to earthiness.” Stiglitz has known Yellen for four decades. She studied under him at Yale in the '70s. She also studied under Keynesian scholar and Nobel Prize winner James Tobin. As a grad student, her notes with Tobin were so good they were used as study guides by legions of grad students, and she was asked to turn them into a book. 

Yellen’s background was “micro-based macro economics,” says Stiglitz. Translation: That's a very complex view of the macro economy as opposed to a simplistic one. Yellen’s academic work (she’s gone back and forth between government and teaching at Berkeley) has focused on unemployment. In one well known paper, she (co-writing with her nobel prize winning husband George Akerlof) made the then new argument that people’s sense of fairness was an important factor in labor productivity. 

As a fed governor, she was known as an impressive debater, once arguing Alan Greenspan into agreeing that a little bit of inflation was a good thing. As a person, she’s often described as disarming. Kevin Hassett, now at the American Enterprise Institute, was a staffer at the Fed when Yellen was a governor there in the early '90s. “She was unique among the governors,” he says, “in that she would come hang out in the lunchroom with the staff. She wasn’t one to put on airs.”

It was at that lunchroom, incidentally, where she met her future husband. One thing about Yellen that sticks out for Hassett is that Yellen required her staffers to calculate what Fed policy would be if it followed the advice of critics -- including conservative economist John Taylor, who, though disagreeing with him, Yellen showered with praise. 

“Now, that’s a regular practice at the Fed, that people are always checking to see what the other guys would be doing," Hassett says. The Federal Reserve is charged by Congress with controlling both unemployment and inflation, and Fed officials are often  accused of having a bias towards one or the other.   

“I think it’s a fair reading of a typical Janet Yellen speech that she’s more concerned about high unemployment,”  says Hassett.  “I think that there are folks that have a genuine concern that unless you have a real inflation hawk at the fed, inflation could spin out of control as it did say in the '70s.”

It’s the most frequent criticism of Yellen, but it’s also a contentious one. “That’s not really fair,” says FTN Financial chief economist Chris Low. “The reason she’s been dovish more often than not isn’t because of a bias I don’t think, I think its because that’s been the appropriate policy more often than not.”

Inflation has averaged 2 percent since Yellen began at the Fed, and she’s presided over two rounds of interest rate hikes both as a governor and a Fed president. She’s said she would do it again if needed. Yellen does differ with other economists -- even with other Fed governors -- over whether inflation is likely to become a risk, even if it isn’t one now. And those predictions will be put to the test in the next year or two.   

Steve Oliner worked at the Department of Commerce and reported regularly to Yellen, whom he calls a very demanding boss. He says she was a good listener, but you could “expect a thousand questions” if you weren’t making a compelling or well thought out argument.   

One of the highlights of her tenure at the Fed was her early recognition that the Housing Sector was in trouble in 2007, says Oliner. At the time, Yellen called the housing market the 600-pound gorilla in the room. She advocated for a half-point interest rate cut. Unconvinced, and soon to be proven wrong, the Fed would go with a quarter-point reduction.

It's happened to all of us. Your phone loses its charge in that one place you can't plug it in. Now, New York City is about to get solar chargers in many of those places. The Street Charge project will provide 25 new solar charging stations across all five city boroughs. AT&T, design firm Pensa, and solar tech company Goal Zero partnered on the project.

Joe Atkin, CEO of Goal Zero, joins Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson to discuss. Click on the audio player above to hear more.

 

The weather has felt a little extreme recently -- and it's been making headlines. Colorado residents are battling massive forrest fires. Oklahoma has suffered devastating tornadoes. And there's been severe flooding in Iowa to say nothing of what's been happening in central Europe. There is some good news though, we are getting better at predicting the weather. Still, if prediction is half the battle, presentation is the other half. You can be right all you want, but if nobody's listening, it doesn't matter.

"There's huge room for improvement in communicating [the weather] and helping people access and understand [it] to make the decisions they want to make," says Jeff Lazo, an economist who works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Lazo's research suggests U.S. adults get an estimated 300 billion weather forecasts each year. And with new technology, that information comes relatively cheap -- and open source.

"The world is filled with raw weather data," says Adam Grossman, who created the weather mobile app Dark Sky with a few of his friends. "We're not meteorologists, we're just computer nerds."

The app uses radar data from the National Weather Service to tell users what's happening, where they are, up to the minute. Grossman thinks a big part of his app's success has been its design.

"Most people don't care about humidity or wind speed or things like that," Grossman says. "If you have an interface that always gives you that data, a lot of times you can just end up with a big cluttered mess."

Click on the audio player above to hear more. And tell us, do you think simple is better when it comes to checking the weather?

In a country where wages adjusted for inflation have been stuck in place for almost a decade, some scholars think the economy needs a more complete renovation.

Investors around the world are paying close attention to what is happening in Washington this week. The Federal Reserve committee responsible for setting monetary policy kicks off a two-day meeting today. The big question: Is the Fed going to scale back its bond-buying program?

Delivering ultra high-speed Internet to users around the country is a challenge, but it's one that cable providers say they are ready and able to tackle. Here's CNET with the details:

"Comcast CEO Brian Roberts last week showed off a 3Gbps cable broadband connection at the industry's annual trade show in Washington, D.C... 'The more customers crave speed, the more the kids in the garage and the geniuses around the world can invent applications that require speed. That's the best thing that can happen to our industry,' [he said.]"

But CNET's Lindsey Turrentine says Robert's words don't jive with his industry's actions.

"This [3 Gigabit Per Second] service isn't available at affordable amounts," she says. "This is a classic situation of private industry versus the public need."

To hear more about how U.S. Internet infrastructre and speeds compare to other nations, click on the audio player above.

Netflix is teaming up with DreamWorks Animation to create original content. But their partnership isn't for grown-ups; it's for kids. Here's Mashable with the details:

"Dubbed as the "largest deal for original first-run content in Netflix history," the new deal includes more than 300 hours of new programming inspired by DreamWorks characters... No specifics were provided, but the shows will include familiar faces such as Archie, Dudley Do-Right, Felix the Cat and Mr. Magoo, and titles like Where's Waldo? and Voltron."

Mashable's Brian Anthony Hernandez says kids are an important demographic for the streaming video provider.

"Of [Netflix's] more than 29 million streaming subscribers, many of them have families," he says. "That's why they are continuing to sign licensing deals with entertainment companies who specialize in kids shows and movies."

Over the last year, Netflix has signed on to deals with Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros. to stream content from the Cartoon Network and Disney.

 

Federal Reserve policymakers have generally relied on tweaking interest rates as a strategy for jump staring the economy. But in a country where wages adjusted for inflation have been stuck in place for almost a decade, some scholars think the economy needs a more aggressive overhaul.

Gar Alperovitz is a political economist and historian. His new book, called "What Then Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution", details systemic changes for the economy. He says co-ops are key to the nation's recovery.

"Most people don't realize that changing the ownership of wealth means one person, one vote. That's what a co-op is. 130 million Americans are already members of co-ops -- they are all over the country and people just don't notice them," he says. "It's a different very American, down-home way to begin looking at democratizing ownership, starting at the bottom and working up from the grassroots."

To hear our full interview with Alperovitz, click on the audio player above.

Investors around the world are paying close attention to what is happening in Washington this week. The Federal Reserve committee responsible for setting monetary policy kicks off a two-day meeting today. The big question: Is the Fed going to scale back its bond-buying program? 

This is a chance for the Fed to take stock. Policymakers will pore over data. They’ll focus on key indicators, such as housing numbers and gross domestic product. And maybe most importantly?

“They’ll be looking at the rate of job creation, which has been reasonable, but by no means gangbusters,” says Randy Kroszner, the professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

The Fed buys $85 billion worth of bonds every month. That’s pushed interest rates down to where they are now: almost zero.

“Figuring out how to do it was hard,” says Karen Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics. “Figuring out how to undo it will be even harder.”

Petrou says there’s a reason economists call this kind of monetary policy “innovative.” Because no one’s done it before. And she urges the Fed to be cautious:

“We need to quiet things down a bit, and get back to normal.”

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made some cryptic comments last month, about how soon the Fed could change course. That didn’t calm the markets, Petrou says. Maybe the best thing the Fed could give investors this week is clarity.

Audio Extra: Phillip Swagel, University of Maryland professor and former Treasury Department official, shares his take on Federal Reserve stimulus policy.

 

The National Council on Teacher Quality released a big report on the state of teacher prep in June. It’s verdict? Less than 10 percent of the programs it rated earn three stars or more when it comes to training teachers. And future teachers are spending an average of $116,000 to obtain their degrees.

The study is a 113-page report card of failure. One example -- fewer than one in nine programs are preparing elementary teachers for the newest state standards.

Kate Walsh, president of The National Council of Teacher Quality, says one of the biggest problems is programs instructing would-be teachers to base their future curriculum on personal philosophy. These programs do not emphasize teaching methonds based on known research and best practices.

“It’s almost like we were asking doctors to enter the operating room and come up with their own methods for the best appendectomy,” she says.

Steve Rivkin, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says the results of the report are not surprising. There is a long running debate over whether traditional teaching degrees make better teachers.

“There’s not rigorous evidence that those who’ve taken the traditional route, out perform those who don’t,” he says.

Rivkin notes, there’s nothing like being in a classroom to learn to teach. He says working teachers who get feedback on the job are known to improve.

It's international quiz time on the Marketplace Morning Report. Stephan Richter, editor-in-chief of the online international affairs magazine, The Globalist, brings us the question below.

How much gold has ever been produced in history?

Scroll down to see the answer and click on the audio player above to hear more about the world's gold supply.

























Answer: D. Two Olympic-size pools, according to the London-based World Gold Council.

Today, China launches a new pilot carbon market in the southern city of Shenzhen. Carbon cap and trade schemes have had a hard time getting off the ground in other countries. Can China make it succeed?

China is requiring 635 companies to purchase carbon permits for trade in the new market. Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, hopes it will succeed though it hasn’t worked well in other countries.

“There’s been cheating, there’s been bogus credits created and sold in different European markets," Zaelke says.

Anyone who’s operated in China knows that cheating and bogus-anything is synonymous with doing business there. So, Zaelke has a question for China:

“Is China able to learn how to do compliance?" he asks. "Because if you don’t have strict compliance when you’re doing a trading system, it will not work.”

If China is able to make its first carbon market thrive, Beijing has promised to launch a national carbon market in 2015.

Demonstrations have flared across Brazil in the last 24 hours amid widespread dissatisfaction with government services. Here's the AP with the details:

"More than 100,000 people were in the streets Monday for largely peaceful protests in at least eight big cities... In Sao Paulo, Brazil's economic hub, at least 65,000 protesters gathered Monday at a small, treeless plaza then broke into three directions in a Carnival atmosphere, with drummers beating out samba rhythms as people chanted anti-corruption jingles. They also railed against the matter that sparked the first protests last week - a 10-cent hike in bus and subway fares."

Up until last year, Brazil's economy was surging. But growth has slowed, just as the government is preparing to host soccer’s World Cup next year.

Bruno Garcez, analyst with the BBC's Brazil Service, says the protests were initially sparked by anger over public transit fares, but they've since spawned into something much bigger.

"Now it’s about corruption, it's against the World Cup," Garcez says. "Over the last decade or so, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, so you have now an emerging middle class seeking its voice."

Click on the audio player above to hear more.

The saga of Edward Snowden and the NSA’s data collecting program, PRISM continues. Snowden did a live chat today with the Guardian newspaper in which he defended his leaking of those NSA documents a week or so ago.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, author of "Who Owns the Future?" and a researcher at Microsoft though he’s quick to say he does not represent the company. “The details are tremendously surprising to me,” he says. “On the other hand, what we have heard has not been entirely consistent and it’s very hard for people to articulate what software does so it might be that the impression we’re getting about what’s been leaked is not quite accurate.”

He has a suggestion for those worried the U.S. government has gone a step too far. If “information costs money,” the government might be more judicious.

“We should have a market for information where prices are set by market forces and the government has to pay the market rate,” Lanier explains.  So for example, you make a phone call and the NSA listens in. The NSA will send you a check for that information they gathered.

The wealthy become those who create more useful data. Take for example, someone who likes walking -- the government could track their movement to study the safety of sidewalks. “It’s information that wouldn’t exist if the people didn’t exist.”

And this solution -- turning data generated by the technology people use every day and the personal information it generates -- also helps solve another problem, that of technological inequality.

Lanier points out how the wealthy can profit because they have access to better and faster computers. But under his solution, it’s not about speed but the quality of data you produce.

The National Football League announced a controversial rule change starting this upcoming season -- a limit on the size and type of bags that can be brought into a stadium.

Starting this preaseason: no camera bags, no fanny packs, no backpacks, no seat cushions. The NFL says the policy is meant to provide a safer environment for the public, speed up security checks, and expedite fan entry into stadiums.

"The public deserves to be in a safe, secure environment. This is about both safety and improving the overall fan experience," states the NFL's website. "We had been discussing a new approach to bag restrictions before the Boston Marathon incident. We have come up with a way to do it that will actually make access more convenient for fans than it has been. We think the fans will embrace and appreciate it."

Small clutches the size of a person's hand, NFL-branded clear plastic or vinyl totes, as well as one-gallon clear plastic freezer bags will be OK to bring into stadiums. An exception will be made for medically necessary items. Of course, the ban has sparked controversy among football fans. Women, in particular, are upset about the purse restriction.

Melissa Jacobs of TheFootballGirl.com writes, "By asking women to leave their purses at home – and based on the restrictions, I mean asking every woman to leave her purse at home – the league is disconnecting from a fan base they are supposedly working so hard to expand."

In recent years, the NFL has targeted women in marketing efforts meant to boost its audience and revenue -- finding success through sales of league merchandise. Scarborough Research data from 2009 shows that women make up 42 percent of NFL fans compared to 58 percent for men.

The NFL's new policy got us wondering how it compares to other places where bag restrictions are in place. Here's a list of famous monuments and places and their bag policies.

• Acropolis Museum, Greece
  Visitors are asked to avoid carrying large bags and luggage into the museum to avoid entrance delays.
• Machu Picchu train, Peru
  Passengers are allowed to carry on one bag or backpack weighing less than 11 lbs. and smaller than 62 linear inches.
• Major League Baseball stadiums
  Guests can bring any bag that is soft-sided (e.g., diaper bags, small purses, etc.) and whose dimensions do not exceed 16" x 16" x 8" as stipulated by Major League Baseball security regulations. Briefcases, coolers and other hard-sided bags or containers are not permitted.
• Staples Center, Los Angeles
  All bags larger than 14" x 14" (i.e. backpacks, suitcases, beach bags, etc.) will be prohibited from entry into the arena.
• Statue of Liberty, New York
  Large packages, suitcases, carry-on luggage and other large parcels are not permitted on the ferry systems or at Liberty and Ellis Islands.
• Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb, Australia
  Climbers are not permitted to take any items onto the bridge, including handbags.
• Taj Mahal, India
  The website discourages visitors from carrying big bags and books inside the monument as it may increase security check time.
• U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, Hawaii
  No purses, handbags, fanny packs, backpacks, camera bags, diaper bags, luggage and/or other items that offer concealment.
• Vatican museums and Sistine Chapel, Vatican City
  You may not enter with any bags, backpacks or luggage measuring more than 40 x 35 x 15 centimeters. Any bag or backpack smaller than that is OK as long as it's not overly cumbersome and doesn't "jut out" by 15 centimeters from the body's shape in its highest point.