Program Review For this program review I listened to a podcast on www.econtalk.org. The podcast was called “Deaton on Health, Wealth, and Poverty.” I listened to it online, at my house, on November 18th. I choose this topic because it was an hour long program about the standard of living, helping poorer countries with health care, the GDP, happiness, and foreign aid. I thought this was a very good program to review because we talk about most of these topics in class and I wanted to get a better understanding of them. The podcast started out introducing the host and the interviewee, as well as the interviewee’s credentials. The first topic discussed was about life expectancy and how it is constantly growing. They said that there is now a 50/50 chance of girls born today to make it to one hundred years old; compared to 2 girls out of 5000 in 1910. This is because of many things people take for granted. Changing sheets at a hotel between guests, getting a flu shot, and having filtered water were not a norms back then. The main reason life expectancy has risen throughout the years is discovering how to decrease the infant mortality rate. Also discussed what will be improved next, and they used cancer as an example. They said they think in the next 50 years they think the war against cancer will be cheaper and almost to an end. The next question asked if there was a ceiling to life expectancy and surprisingly they said maybe not. The growth rate has been constant at about every four years the life expectancy goes up by one year. The reasoning behind that is because people want to live longer and so a lot of money goes into health. A controversial topic that was mentioned was if more money should be spent more on men’s health because they statistically don’t live as long as women. The topic on life expectancy lead to the next topic, should we help poorer countries with health care. They stated facts about how the United States has spent over five trillion dollars on poorer countries but it looks as though their standard of living has not changed. They discussed how they don’t think they should send any more money to the poorer countries’ governments and instead help set up an organization to help regulate vaccines, extend life expectancy, and stop malnutrition. When I did secondary research on the poorer countries I found a quote that I really enjoyed to help discuss why we care about helping other countries. The quote questioned, “Why is it so dangerous to be born in Africa, but not in the United States. Why is it okay for infants to die in poorer countries, but not in rich countries when the information is freely available?” I think those questions perfectly explained why American’s feel the need to help. In the podcast they next defined malnutrition as not only not having not enough to eat but also doing too much labor, having diseases, or the body not absorbing enough food. The next topic was why we care about the standard of living. It is used to help show growth and we try to measure it as accurately as possible even though some things are impossible to compare; such as a horse and a Toyota car. They bring up an idea of that the economists in the government don’t have a good understanding of economic growth, just the basics, and now that it is slowing down they don’t know what to do. The GDP has been growing at about 2% per capita for the past 50 years through high taxes, low taxes, aggressive and less aggressive monetary policy, and a lot of chances in the labor force but the GDP rate was pretty stead till now where it is going down. That is making it a lot harder for politicians, because “they are fighting over a pie that is getting smaller and smaller.” Another discussion was about inequality rising. There are a lot of reasons why including; globalization, technical change, wealth changes, and demographic changes. Some of these changes most people are okay with, for example most people are okay with Steve Jobs