Tag Archives: economy project

Top posts of '09

Leave a reply

Over at EconomyBeat, Jon’s put together a list of underperforming posts for the year. I’m a little tired of this whole ‘glass half empty’ thing, so while the top performing posts aren’t all good news (how could they be?), here’s a quick glimpse at some popular economy stories and projects from public media in 2009.

1. One Sixth of What? The health care debate was the story of the year in Washington, so it’s no surprise that it hit a nerve with EconomyStory readers as well. While progress has been made since we looked at what healthcare costs really mean, in the new year, the bill will reach President Obama’s desk. Here are some recent thoughts from NPR listeners about the current health care bill. Health care also took center stage in a game from American Public Media, where you decide how tax dollars get spent.

2. Water, Water Everywhere The close ties between water, the economy, and politics brought a number of investigative stories from California, which faced a huge drought in 2009.

3. Men Men Suits vs. Corduroy Patches One of the most successful shows on TV this year lent itself to a popular EconomyStory post. The series Mad Men on AMC had everyone throwing back to classic 60s looks and highball drinks on Sunday nights, prompting NPR to do a piece on a new Brooks Brothers suit, styled in the Mad Men tradition. The price tag, however, was something not everyone could hang their fedora on this year.

4. One House One Town One Lecture You can’t talk about the economy of 2009 without mentioning the real estate bust. In Missouri, The Economy Project looked at one filmmaker’s take on the housing bubble, and NewsHour’s Patchwork Nation examined how the crisis played out around the country.

5. Watch and Learn When PBS launched it’s new video widget this fall, the web responded and now the video player is on dozens of station and program sites, featuring stories from shows like NewsHour, Frontline, and Nightly Business Report. You can add it to your personal site as well. Check out some of the best videos of the year that are up now:

One house, one town, one lecture

Leave a reply

A new film about the real estate crash, the story of a farm town in Montana, and a lecture about the cultures of the Great Depression all give very different but very clear pictures of the economy and how we got here — then and now.

The new feature-length documentary from filmmaker Leslie Cockburn was recently discussed on the Economy Project blog at the University of Missouri. But the film doesn’t focus on casinos like the ones in Las Vegas. Instead, this film looks at the entire economy as one American casino – the idea that the finance industry was gambling with peoples’ homes and bank accounts as you might put money in the slots.

One of the places that’s fallen short after all this gambling is Ronan, Montana, a farming town in rural Montana. Patchwork Nation blogger Carly Flando writes about how the town is having to explore other means of survival, now that the farming industry is suffering.

But for all the talk of new businesses and hospitals, David Sagmiller, the owner of Westland Feed, still sees the farms and ranches that surround Ronan as the foundation of the entire Mission Valley’s economy. The valley, which stretches north from Missoula, Mont., toward Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park, is known as one of the best seed potato areas in the state, and eight potato seed farmers live near Ronan.
“The community relies on agriculture,” he says. “The hospital would never get the community to survive. You can’t live off that.”
Rich Janssen, sitting sideways in a booth at the Ronan Café, agrees that agriculture is an important part of the community. However, the dynamics have changed.
“There’s a lot of government and school workers here, too,” he says. “It’s a blue-collar town with a little white collar mixed in.”

For more perspective on how we got here, a new lecture on WGBH’s Forum project from CUNY Professor Morris Dickstein recalls the Great Depression and its effect on culture. Will there be a similar impact 60 years from now?

video platform
video management
video solutions
free video player