Adam Davidson
Adam Davidson is a contributor to Planet Money, a co-production of NPR and This American Life. He also writes the weekly "It's the Economy" column for the New York Times Magazine.
His work has won several major awards including the Peabody, DuPont-Columbia, and the Polk. His radio documentary on the housing crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," which he co-reported and produced with Alex Blumberg, was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by the Arthur L. Carter of Journalism Institute at New York University. It was widely recognized as the clearest and most entertaining explanation of the roots of the financial crisis in any media.
Davidson and Blumberg took the lessons they learned crafting "The Giant Pool of Money" to create Planet Money. In two weekly podcasts, a blog, and regular features on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and This American Life, Planet Money helps listeners understand how dramatic economic change is impacting their lives. Planet Money also proves, every day, that substantive, intelligent economic reporting can be funny, engaging, and accessible to the non-expert.
Before Planet Money, Davidson was International Business and Economics Correspondent for NPR. He traveled around the world to cover the global economy and pitched in during crises, such as reporting from Indonesia's Banda Aceh just after the tsunami, New Orleans post-Katrina, and Paris during the youth riots.
Prior to coming to NPR, Davidson was Middle East correspondent for PRI's Marketplace. He spent a year in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003 to 2004, producing award-winning reports on corruption in the US occupation.
Davidson has also written for The Atlantic, Harper's, GQ, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines. He has a degree in the history of religion from the University of Chicago.
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The face of manufacturing has changed. In the future, the pool of workers is expected to be smaller. And if workers want to succeed, they'll need continuous improvement with on-the-job education.
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More than 330,000 people filed new claims for unemployment insurance benefits last week. That sounds like a big number — and is a slight increase over the previous week — but it's being taken as some very good news. For a month, now, fewer new people are asking for unemployment insurance than at any time since November, 2007. That's before the Great Recession.
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The local food movement has received a lot of attention both for changing diets and buying habits. But has the movement has become a significant economic force?
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We examine how the exchange rate between the Euro and the U.S. dollar reflects the health of the global economy.
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Melissa Block talks to Adam Davidson about growing income inequality at every level of our economy. Davidson has been pouring over data recently released from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Robert Siegel talks with Adam Davidson from Planet Money team about this week's cluster of positive data on the health of the U.S. housing market. Davidson says the strength of the housing sector is now irrefutable, even though a broader economic recovery is still years away.
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Audie Cornish talks with Adam Davidson about the Labor Department's release of the import and export price indexes on Tuesday. The data underscore the difficulty of managing the U.S. economic recovery in the interconnected global economy.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee is beginning work Thursday on a proposal to overhaul the nation's immigration laws. Audie Cornish talks with Adam Davidson of the Planet Money team about what academic research says about the economic impact of immigration.
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Melissa Block talks with Adam Davidson about Friday's unemployment report for April and the methodology that underlies it.
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Every week, the Department of Labor issues data detailing the number of people who filed for unemployment benefits in the previous week. According to Thursday's report, 385,000 people filed last week, the third weekly increase in a row, and a higher figure than expected. Robert Siegel talks with Adam Davidson about this week's initial claims report. Davidson says the report can help illuminate the vital question of whether the United States has a cyclical or a structural unemployment problem.