This is Planet Money from NPR.

Jacob, last week we went to the big American Economic Association conference.

A.E.A.

This year was in San Diego and boy did it deliver.

It was so economic.

It was so conference.

There were thousands of economists and grad students, Nobel Prize winners, former Fed

chairs and they took over not just these two big hotels in downtown San Diego, but they

took over like all of downtown San Diego.

You would be, you know, just walking around some neighborhood and you'd hear people

talking about difference in differences and about maximizing utility and then you would

realize like this is just the way these people talk when they're whatever ordering tacos.

It's at a conference like this that you realize that economists are not normal people.

They think in this very particular way not just about, you know, the world, but also about

their daily life.

So, we're there in this econ nerd topia, the Coachella of econ.

We got our mics and, you know, our job is making a show about the economy.

And so we figured, okay, here is what we're going to do.

We're going to ask a bunch of economists a really simple question.

What is the most useful idea in economics?

And the idea is the hope is this will get them to talk about ideas that are yes, that are

really useful in thinking about the economy, but also that are useful in just thinking about

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