I've seen surveys showing that shockingly few people are able to answer basic questions about like inflation and interest rates. They just don't get it and they therefore make bad decisions, you know, that's real pocketbook stuff. Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? I'm your host, Mera Vosari. Think about it. What if understanding the economy could actually help you make better career decisions or money decisions? My guest today is Peter Koy, one of the clearest voices in economic and business journalism. He is written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business Week and now publishes the sub-stack, Economics for Everyone. So let's turn to Peter and find out about jobs, careers, income, journalism, AI and more. Okay, Peter, thank you so much for doing it and I was really looking forward to interview you because there's so many things with the economy that is up and down, so I want to get some answer. But before we get to that, I want to ask about you. You went from local newspaper to national publication, big ones. Tell us a little bit about your career path. I worked for my college newspaper and I became the editor-in-chief my senior year and as I was going through college, I started realizing I don't know what I want to do for a living, right? I was like, hey, maybe I could just work for a newspaper. I've been doing it for free in college. They'll pay me a salary. So that's what I did. I went to work, got a job at the Waterbury, Connecticut newspaper, Republican and American and then after a year and a half there, I was hired by the Associated Press. In all of those publications you wrote about the economy? In the early days, I was a general assignment reporter in Waterbury and Albany and by the time I got to Rochester, Rochester is the home of Kodak, of course, and Xerox had big operations there. Bauchan Lomb was there and then I was also responsible for Corning, which is in Corning, New York, Canada, a wine company and stuff. So it became sort of a business reporting job. Even though I was responsible for everything that happened there, it just happened to have a lot of business. So I was covering things like this is back in the early 80s. In 1985, the US dollar became extremely expensive compared to other currencies and this was a big burden on companies like Kodak. So the company would be looking to try to find ways to reduce the value of the dollar and the CEO, Chairman, invited me in to give an interview. And so that made news. Here I was with really no, I took one year of economics in college, but I wouldn't say I was certainly not highly trained in economics. I was having to understand things like foreign exchange, currency exchange rates and unemployment and inflation, all these things. Some of them utterly fascinating. So then the editor in New York saw that I was interested in this. He brought me down. So then I was working in Manhattan in the heart of, you know, World Finance, starting covering these topics. Then I got hired by Business Week and worked there for a long time, like almost 32 years. And then I got hired by the New York Times Opinions section and I was working there up until, you know, last February. It's a combination of what you want and what's available that's out there. I'm sure, Mirav, you talked to a lot of people, they all find their own way and unpredictable ways of career paths are winding and, you know, you can't see around the corner until you get there. Right? Totally. And a lot of it is a lot, but this is what I'd like to know. What skilled matter the most for you? Was it actually luck or was it fast reporting, curiosity, expertise? Enhanced your career like that so fast? I think what my skill is, I'm not an investigative reporter. I've done some of that here and there, but it's not my strength. I'm also not like a personality profile person. Again, I've done it here and there, but there are many people way better than I am at that. Say what I'm good at is latching on to some complicated subject, figuring it out and then trying to explain it to a general audience. Going back to what we talked about before with the dollar and Kodak, something called the J-curve effect. And once I heard about the J-curve effect, I said, I have to understand that J-curve effect and I dug into it and talked to economists and they explained it and we wrote an article about it and I just, I love stuff like that. I've been doing it all my career. Walk me through the process from the idea of writing about a subject to a printed article. What is the process like for you? Well, it all depends. I'll tell you business week because that's where I spent more years than any other place. Close date of each issue was a Wednesday. By the way, business week is now a monthly but changed like last year, but the whole time I was there, it was a weekly and so you would have a meeting on Thursday or Friday to plan out the coming week's issue and people would pitch their story ideas. Some would get approved, some not. If it's a fast-changing news story, then you've got to be constantly updating and getting new information. So there are some articles that you wouldn't even start until Monday because something would break over the weekend. There were even occasional times where something would happen on a Wednesday morning and you would have to write a whole article and get it into publication by Wednesday afternoon evening. That was when the adrenaline was really pumping. But you said something in the pitch. Do you pitch an idea? Yeah. Well, there's a certain number of editors who pitch. So like I would pitch to my editor and then the editor would pitch to the... So how do you find the subject you want to write about? What's the process there? Well, if you're a good reporter, then you're kind of soaking in your topic. You're in it all the time. You're talking to people about it and you're marinating. It's like it's your life. And so you always have story ideas. It's a matter of which story idea, not whether there are any story ideas. And so you're always thinking that other reporters are doing the same thing and you want to be ahead of them ideally. So then it becomes a matter of who can execute first. Do you have any context with your readers? You get any feedback? Yeah. Yeah. The most feedback I ever got was when I was at the New York Times. So I worked in the opinion section. I had a newsletter. It originally came out three days a week and then it went down to two. But people would have to subscribe to it to see it. A lot of my readers were people who'd deliberately signed up because they wanted to see what I had to say and that was fun. Sometimes I would get story ideas from them. I would read the comments and they would... I had a lot of smart readers and they would say, you know, I disagree with you on this or I agree with you but here's something you left out, that kind of thing. I know people read headlines only. Yes. And Tensionspan is shrunk to like a few seconds. How do you deal with that? Well, headlines are really important. So you got to find a headline that accurately represents what you're going to say but also hooks people. And actually the... Trying to come up with a good headline can help influence what you end up saying because you think, well, yeah, that's a grabby headline but now how do I justify it? How do I make sure that I deliver on what I said in the headline? You try to avoid clickbait which is where it's pure, you know, catchy and there's no substance because people will... They might click the first few times but after a while they get tired of this. They'll feel that being misled. At the same time, don't be boring because then in general we're going to click in the first place. So that's... There's a real art to doing that. And then pass the headline, your first paragraph is also super important. Super. You usually don't want to just flatly deliver the bottom line of your story in the first sentence but you also don't want to take too long to get to your main point. Exactly. So it's an interesting balancing act. You worked for like where you mentioned, Business Week, the New York Times. What is the pay structure? Is it different from publication to publication? Yeah. And Business Week paid pretty well. The opinion section of the Times pays well. I was happy there. But is it equal pay for all times? Well the Times basically lured me away by offering me more money than I was getting at Bloomberg so that was nice. Overall, if people are listening to this and they're thinking, oh I'm going to go into a journal that's going to make a lot of money, it's like no, no, no. Overall a journal that is not a highly paid profession. People don't go into it for the money. They go into it because they love it. It's a passion job. Yeah. More true now than when I started. When I started, there were a lot of jobs. When I was in college and I went around to all these newspapers in New England, Worcester Mass and Hartford, Connecticut and New Haven and so on. They all had pretty substantial newsrooms. Those newspapers now have drastically shrunk to their newsrooms so it's really hard to get a job with one of them. Now there are new outlets of course. We all know about them. Some of them are more nationed. Some of them just rely on freelancer. They just don't pay that well. Not to say there aren't still good paying jobs in journalism. There are but I would say a smart person who would be a successful journalist would probably also be successful in other fields because they could be good lawyers. They could be good business people. They're curious. They're good at expressing themselves. They may be good diggers. If they're just looking to make a comfortable living, journalism is probably not their best choice but as you said, it's a passion job. I don't know if I were starting out today, if I would go on that track. As much as I've loved it and I continue to love it and I'm still doing it, it might not be the right point for somebody today. The most important thing is to, if you want to be a writer, is to write. That means find a job where people need you to produce a lot of copy. We call it copy. Write like hell and you get better as you do it. You don't want to do just what your editors ask you for because their job is to produce the sausage every day and you'll end up doing a lot of acceptable stuff but it won't be brilliant because you're rushed to just get it done. Try to carve out some time in your working day or after work in your evening hours, whenever lights, weekends, to do some special stuff that will, and you'll make your editors happy because they didn't ask for it but when they see it, they're saying, this is great. I love it more. Give me more of that and it'll be useful to you because you'll be able to show those clips to other publications. You might want to work some day as you try to climb the ladder. Do editors ask you to write stories that are the same subject, that are the hardest subject in the economy? The editors, ideally you should know more about your topic than the editor. So the editor should be asking you for ideas. If you're in a situation where you're just taking ideas from the editor, meh, that's not good. It means that you haven't been creative enough or you don't know you're beat well enough. How long do you have to spend researching the subject on average? Yeah, so the research takes longer than the writing. That's something people don't always understand. The writing is almost like the final stage. It kind of comes together quickly. Most of the work goes into studying the subject, reading widely, gathering new information and so on. When I was doing my New York Times opinion newsletter, as I was doing three a week, I was basically working all the time. I wasn't eating or exercising or something. I was probably researching or writing. I would be in a car and my wife would be driving and I'd be on my Wi-Fi hotspot doing work. You mentioned before that journalism is changing. And you have your sub-stack, which is fantastic. Let's talk about that. I want to talk about your sub-stack because I know a lot of writers now go through sub-stack. Yes. Can you make money on sub-stack? Yes. Really? How? I'm not yet making money on sub-stack because I'm keeping my sub-stack free for now. PeterCoy.substack.com, little pitch there. Paul Krugman, the famous Nobel Prize winning economist who spent 25 years as an economist columnist at the New York Times. So we worked together at the Times. We were the two people who were on staff who covered economics. Although he was kind of way above me, he was a columnist and I was an opinion writer, which is not technically columnist. But we collaborated on some projects. It was totally cool. Great admirer Paul Krugman. But when he left the Times, he started a sub-stack and he and his wife put it together and it's been hugely successful. He's up over 400,000 readers. I don't even know what the current number is. This keeps going up. So he started charging even though he didn't need the money. He has a successful textbook and speaking fees and years of salary at the time. I think he was kind of just like to see if people would sign up, people would pay. So sub-stack, you can either have it free or you can have a subscription or you can have a hybrid. A lot of people have a hybrid. Some of their stuff is free, but some of the stuff is behind a paywall. The concept there is if you have everything behind a paywall, it's hard to get new people because you don't have any welcome mat. You don't have anything out there for them to see if they would ever want to read it. So you have some stuff free and you get people to like what you're doing and then they want more and more and more. So he's like, okay, if you want this extra special thing, you're going to have to get a subscription. What other personalities did you meet throughout your career? I've been lucky enough to have interviewed almost every top head of the Federal Reserve, for example. I've interviewed Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell. Basically the whole string of them back to the early 80s. Who impressed you the most? Oh, that's a great question. Probably Janet Yellen. So Janet Yellen, I just came back from Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and she was there and she is like a rock star now because she's a very strong woman. She's petite, she's soft spoken, but she has a spine of steel and she's still so sharp and she knows what she wants and she knows what she believes in. So one of the big issues for her is that there's been, economics has been an unfriendly profession for women and she's working hard to turn that around, to get more women to study economics and to go into it at a PhD level, be protected from harassment and mistreatment in their careers. Her other big issue is preserving the independence of the Federal Reserve. She spoke about that in Philadelphia and I'm planning to write something about this. To me she's like the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They even have tote bags that they were handing out in Philadelphia saying, never stop Yellen. That's great. It's cute with a picture of her with sunglasses and stuff. I want to go back a little bit about career. If somebody wants to start a career today, what's your advice as far as the economy, what segment or industry should they avoid? Where do you see the trend going? This is a specialty. I know people always say that it's harder than ever to see the future, but I really think that's true these days and it's mostly because of AI. I am sure that you've been talking to people about AI. Totally. I think there's a good reason for that because it really is world changing. It's a threat to your profession by the way. It is. Yeah. There are people who are using it. I saw one woman on Substack complaining that there are a bunch of people who are basically using bots, using AI to generate their posts on Substack and getting a lot of followers and making money. They're laughing all the way to the bank. They're saying, don't talk to me about purity. Don't talk to me. If it's working, it's working. Look, readers are reading it. What's who's to complain? The human beings are like, you feel like you're the person with a shovel while somebody else has a steam shovel. Why am I still doing it the old fashioned way by hand? I'm using my own pitiful brain when I could just hire a computer to do my journalism for me. It really does sometimes feel like when I was a kid, there was a short story that they would put on the TV about this guy. I forget what his name was, but he was competing against a steam shovel to dig the foundation for a building. Of course, he couldn't keep up. Sometimes it feels like that way with journals of what are we trying to do here? There are some things that computers still can't do. For example, a computer can't call up an economist and do an interview with him or her for a piece. They can only reprocess stuff that's already been written by others. That's why investigative reporting continues to be valuable because you're finding out stuff. Subsequently, sure, AI can pick it up and reprocess it, but you're the one who's creating the original value. That's what I would say. Whatever profession you're going in, try to make sure that you are generating something genuinely new because that is immune to AI. Are there any industries that you think are future proof as far as AI goes? I don't think so. Unfortunately, it's hard to imagine anything that is future proof because as long as automation was simply replacing stuff that we did physically like the steam shovel, I think, okay, fine, I'm not going to dig ditches anymore. I'll do something like I'll work in a factory. Then the robots came along and I replace that. Okay, fine. Okay, I'll do something that's brainwork. The problem is because now the AI is taking over what makes us, we always thought of, makes us unique as human beings is that we have brains. But if it can replicate our brainwork, it's hard to see what the refuge is. So it's hard not to be pessimistic. The optimistic side, of course, is that, hey, if AI can produce new drugs and new materials and make the world a better place while we watch the Yankees on TV, hey, what's wrong with that? Right? I know. Oh, before I get to your book, because I found it very interesting. Oh, yeah. But before I get to your book, I want to know when people learn about the economy, do you think that they make better choices about career and money or they just feel better about themselves? That's a good question because it gets to the question of why should you bother learning about the economy? Exactly, right. You know, one reason is what you said is just that you should learn about the economy for the same reason you should learn about music or art or history just because to be a well-rounded human being, you should understand a little bit about all kinds of things. And I just should, but it's wonderful. It's totally cool. And so there's that value to it. There's also a practical value, I would say. It could help you make smarter decisions with your personal finances, for example. I've seen surveys showing that shockingly few people are able to answer basic questions about inflation and interest rates. Right. I don't think people understand it. They just don't get it and they therefore make bad decisions that hurt them financially. You know, that's real pocketbook stuff. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about your book. It is called Economic Without Numbers. That's the 10th title, yeah. Tentative. What does it do, by the way? Early 27. This is supposedly dealing with economics without math. Is that correct? Is it possible? Well, it is possible. It's without math. It's without graphs, without formulas. The concept is that you can tell a lot of important economic ideas through metaphors. So one of the most famous is from the great Scottish economist, Adam Smith, wrote a book called The Wealth of Nations in 1776, coincidentally, same year as the Declaration of Independence, 250 years ago. And he talked about the invisible hand. And he said, it is not through their benevolence that the butcher and the baker provide us with the food that we need. It's through their pursuit of their own self-interest. And that's the way a market system works. You have certain people supplying stuff and other people consuming stuff. And just through the working of the price mechanism and you coordinate supply and demand and wonderful things happen. It's one of the core metaphors of economics. And it's in my book. But I have accumulated like more than 500. Wow. Yeah. They all kind of illuminate one aspect or another of important stuff. And the reason I thought metaphors would be useful is first, they're fun. They're just stuff that you don't have to be an economist to get it. Once I explain it to you like this, it's like, oh, yeah, I see. That makes sense. How did the book come about? So years ago, I was on public radio talking about some economic thing, no matter what it was. And a literary agent called up and said, hey, Peter, you're really good at explaining things. You should do a book explaining how the economy works. I took a couple of cracks at it and straight ahead, like the gross domestic product is the amount of goods and services. And I was boring myself. I said, I cannot just do that. No, I got to have a gimmick. The gimmick was the metaphor idea. And once I hit upon that, it became fun for me. I think if it's fun for me, it'll be fun for readers too. If I can manage to get across a better understanding of economics for a broad group of people in American other countries, because I'm supposed to be publishing in other countries as well, I feel like I've done a real service. And provided some fun too, because it's a kind of book. It's supposed to be browsable. There may be people who will never finish the book, but they'll pick it up. They'll flip pages, look at the illustrations. Read reviews, get some ideas. Yeah, a little bit here and there. Do you explain the whole Fed's idea in your book? Because I don't really understand that so much. Why they're important. Do you explain this in your book? I have a lot of... The Federal Reserve comes up many times. I don't know if I have an exact metaphor specifically about the Federal Reserve, but I should be thinking about that. Maybe you'll inspire me to add something to the book. It will be good if I can get everything in one book. That's my laziness, instead of doing my own research. Thank you, Maravozari. I appreciate that. Now I have to ask you, do you think tariffs are good for America or bad for America? I hear arguments on both sides. I think there is a role for strategic, temporary, targeted tariffs. For example, if there's another country that is subsidizing a product, you might want to put a tariff on to get them to lower their subsidy. If there's some good that you feel is really important to be produced in America, let's say something very sensitive for national defense, you might put a tariff on that to encourage domestic production of it. What I think is a mistake is relying on tariffs as a form of revenue raising, where you put them broadly on many products from many countries. Another problem with broad tariffs is that right now our foremost economic challenger is China. China has in some ways played on fairly, but it's hard to form a coalition to get China to behave better if we're putting tariffs on Canada and the UK and France and Germany who should be our allies in confronting China. Lastly, I want to hear from you. Where do you see the economy going from here? That's a great question. I am not the world's best prognosticator. For a long while, I predicted that the Fed was going to cause a recession by raising interest rates too much after the big jump in inflation. We had the COVID jump in inflation and it never happened. A lot of people made that same prediction. They backed off from their prediction and I did not back off from the prediction. I stuck with it too long. Finally, like a year or so ago, I said, okay, I was wrong. I wouldn't take anything I say to the bank. But again, this past year, the economy has done surprisingly well. I know. The economy is like an ocean liner where it has a lot of momentum and takes a lot of tugboats to slow it down or you have to put the engines in reverse for a long time to really throw it off course. So we may avoid recession again in 2026. Right now, it's really not in the forecast. I think that more important question is what's the long-term outlook. So for that, the most important thing is our productivity growth, which is the managed amount of output we can achieve per hour of labor or inputs of machines and so on. And there's been some good news about that lately. Seems like productivity is growing, which is good for our living standards. And we talked about the downside of AI taking all our jobs upside is that it could make the economy much more productive and create wealth that could be distributed to all of us, including the people who get thrown out of work. Yeah. Well, right now we see the wealth going only to the billionaires that are making insider trading. Right. So that's what you want to do. You want to have use the government to make sure that doesn't happen to redistribute so that everybody enjoys the benefits. Yeah. It also depends on different administrations. For sure. For sure. Are you happy as a journalist? I'm very happy with the way things turned out for me. Okay. And I'm glad I made the choice I made. That's different from saying I would do it today because the world has changed. To do it all over today, maybe I become a teacher or a cross-country coach or something like that. Or maybe I grow vegetables. All right. Okay. Thank you so much on that note, the vegetables note. Yeah. I'll say thank you very much. Thank you. Nice to have you here talking to me about this. Enjoyed it. Thank you. For anyone listening who wants to better understand the forces shaping their work life or career, I highly recommend Peter's Hubstack Economics for Everyone. Peter, a new author listening to us. Thank you for joining me. I will see you next week on How Much Can I Make?
