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Economists On Screen, Episode 1: Crazy Rich Asians

Sanja Bucko
/
Warner Bros

All this week, we'll be looking at the ways in which economists are portrayed in television series and in the movies, in a series we're calling Economists on Screen.

Today, we are looking at Crazy Rich Asians, the big hit movie released earlier this year, in which a Chinese-American economist from New York named Rachel Chu visits Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young.

In the movie, Rachel went to graduate school at Northwestern and now teaches game theory at New York University. Her boyfriend, Nick, is a history professor. Well, guess what — we found an economist who went to graduate school at Northwestern, taught game theory at NYU, and married a history professor! We talk with him about the game theory in the plot of the movie.

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Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts , PocketCasts and NPR One .

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.