5 reasons why the economy feels so unpredictable right now

Below, Alex Mayyasi shares five key insights from his new book, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life. Mayyasi is a journalist who writes about business, economics, and food. He hosts the new podcast Gastronomics and is a longtime contributor to NPR’s Planet Money. A former editor of Priceonomics, he launched Gastro Obscura, which won two James Beard Awards, and published the New York Times best-selling book Gastro Obscura. What’s the big idea? The economy isn’t static or centrally controlled. It’s an evolving system where information, technology, and human behavior interact to continuously reorganize opportunity. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Mayyasi himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. A price tag is a tiny newspaper. If you drive by a gas station and see that the price of gas is up, that’s like reading a front-page headline. Maybe war in the Middle East is disrupting oil exports. Maybe everyone is getting gas for summer road trips. Maybe it’s both. You don’t need to know the exact reason because the price tag on gas synthesized all that information—every single thing influencing the supply and demand for gas—into one number. The price is like a tiny newspaper about the state of the world. Prices contain information. They are also incentives. If the price of gas is high, it incentivizes people to cut down on driving while gas is scarce or in high demand. And it incentivizes businesses to refine and sell more oil to increase the supply. The information and incentives of price tags are what make the invisible hand work. They allow us to have an amazingly complicated global economy where no one person or organization is in charge. 2. Technology does not automate jobs; it automates tasks. In the 1970s, banks started installing ATMs, or automatic teller machines. They were literally machines that did the job of bank tellers. But bank tellers did not disappear. For decades, the number of bank tellers i