Speakers Adam Davidson: Journalist

Adam Davidson

Adam Davidson is the co-host and co-creator of "Planet Money," a weekly podcast and radio feature about the economy.

Why you should listen to him:

Adam Davidson is co-founder and co-host of Planet Money, a co-production of NPR and This American Life. He also writes the weekly "It's the Economy" column for the New York Times Magazine. In two weekly podcasts, a blog, and regular features on Morning Edition, All Things Considered and This American Life, Planet Money helps listeners understand how dramatic economic change is impacting their lives. Planet Money also proves, every day, that substantive, intelligent economic reporting can be funny, engaging, and accessible to the non-expert.

His radio documentary on the housing crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," which he co-reported and produced with Alex Blumberg, was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. It was widely recognized as the clearest and most entertaining explanation of the roots of the financial crisis in any media. Davidson and Blumberg took the lessons they learned crafting "The Giant Pool of Money" to create Planet Money.

Before Planet Money, Davidson was International Business and Economics Correspondent for NPR. He traveled around the world to cover the global economy and pitched in during crises, such as reporting from Indonesia's Banda Aceh just after the tsunami, New Orleans post-Katrina, and Paris during the youth riots. Prior to coming to NPR, Davidson was Middle East correspondent for PRI's Marketplace. He spent a year in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2003 to 2004, producing award-winning reports on corruption in the US occupation.

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Quotes by Adam Davidson

  • “Talk about [the economy] like what it is: not an existential crisis, not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views, but a math problem, a really solvable math problem.”

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  • “It's almost impossible to find Americans who are consistent ideologically, who consistently support, ‘No we mustn't tax, and we must limit the size of government,’ or, ‘No, we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism.’”

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  • “[We tend to think] if you add Democrats, you add Republicans, you've got the American people. But that is not the case at all. … The largest block, 40 percent, say they're independents.”

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  • “The American people, taken as a whole, when it comes to fiscal issues are moderate, pragmatic centrists.”

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  • “The ‘fiscal cliff’ — I was told that that's too partisan a thing to say … so I just call it the ‘self-imposed, self-destructive, arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem.’”

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More TEDQuotes…

Adam Davidson: What we learned from teetering on the fiscal cliff

Adam Davidson on the Web

Related Speakers

Conferences

  • TEDSalon NY2012