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Scott Halleran/Getty Images

This is what it's like to host the Super Bowl: For one weekend, your city is the focus of the sporting universe. Fans flock in droves. They eat at your restaurants and sleep in your hotels. They buy the "I ♥ [your city]" t-shirts.

The NFL estimates that hosting the country's premier sporting event will give the local economy a $300-500 million jolt.

Economist Victor Matheson of the College of Holy Cross doesn't buy it.

In today's podcast, co-hosted from Indianapolis by NPR's Mike Pesca, Matheson presents the case against hosting the Super Bowl.

He argues hosting the Super Bowl pushes out the economic activities that occur on normal, non-Super Bowl hosting weekends. No conventions are held. Museums are closed. Local residents do not come downtown simply because it's too crowded.

What's more, Matheson says, the majority of the money that's being shelled out by out-of-towners does not even stay in the city. It flows to the big, national hotel companies and restaurant chains.

"More money than average is being spent in hotels and restaurants, but is then immediately leaving town...you have lots of dollars changing hands but it's really money being sucked out of people's hands and disappearing, rather than money that goes to build the local economy or repay a big stadium subsidy."

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Johnny Pearson's "Heavy Action" and Faith Hill's "Waiting For Sunday Night." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

Steve Snodgrass/Flickr

Old school.

Ron Silver, the owner of Bubby's restaurant in Brooklyn, recently put a word on his menu you don't often see anymore: lard. The white, creamy, processed fat from a pig. And he didn't use the word just once.

For a one-night-only "Lard Exoneration Dinner", Silver served up lard fried potatoes. And root vegetables, baked in lard. Fried chicken, fried in lard. Roasted fennel glazed with lard sugar and sea salt. Pies, with lard inside and out. All from lard he made himself in the kitchen.

"It seems funny," Silver says, "but for thousands of years this was the thing that people cooked with.

A century ago, lard was in every American pantry and fryer. These days, lard is an insult.

"The word lard has become this generally derogatory term associated with fat and disgustingness," says Dan Pashman who hosts a food podcast called The Sporkful. "Think about Lard-ass, the character from the movie Stand By Me. I mean, he didn't want to be called Lard-ass."

How did this delicious, all-natural fat from a pig become an insult? Who killed lard?

Lard didn't just fall out of favor. It was pushed. It was a casualty of a battle between giant business and corporate interests.

Today's big jobs report is full of good news. A few key details:

* The U.S. added 243,000 jobs last month. Manufacturing, the sector that got hit hardest during the recession, added 50,000 jobs. Construction, which also got walloped, added 21,000 jobs.

* The unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent — the lowest since February, 2009.

* A broader measure of unemployment fell to 15.1 percent. This measure includes those who have given up looking for work over the past year as well as those working part time because they can't find a full-time job.

In absolute terms, the job market is still in bad shape: Before the recession, an unemployment rate of 8.3 percent would have been viewed as a disaster. There are five million fewer U.S. jobs today than there were five years ago.

But the trend over the past few months is very promising. Not only is the economy adding jobs; the rate of job growth is accelerating. The job market is getting better, faster.

Bonus Graphic:

As of the end of last year, unemployment rate for college-educated people in their 30s and 40s was just 3 percent. For people in their early 20s without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate was 20 percent.

Which is to say that the single number usually used to describe the U.S. labor market — the unemployment rate — obscures multitudes.

You can use the chart above to see how the unemployment rate has changed over time for people of all ages and all levels of educational attainment. The chart shows annual averages through 2011. Seasonally-adjusted monthly data aren't available at this level of detail.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

American Airlines filed for bankruptcy in November. The company needs $18.5 billion to cover its pension promises to current and former employees, but it has only set aside $8.3 billion.

Taxpayers could wind up on the hook for billions. Here's why.

Enlarge Amy Sussman/Getty Images

Nouriel Roubini, alias, "Dr. Doom."

Amy Sussman/Getty Images

Nouriel Roubini, alias, "Dr. Doom."

Below is an excerpt from Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, "It Is Safe To Resume Ignoring The Prophets Of Doom...Right?" Read all of Davidson's Times Magazine columns here.

I remember the first time I interviewed a relatively unknown economist named Nouriel Roubini. It was 2005, and as we sat in his New York University office, he laid out his scary vision of the future. Roubini is a specialist in the flow of money around the world and the crises that (sometimes) result. But on that day he wanted to talk about the U.S. housing market.

Homeowners, he said, had become too used to financing their lifestyles with money siphoned from overvalued homes. This housing bubble would pop, he warned, and send the world into a vicious recession, possibly even a depression. I remember leaving his office both stunned and confused. Only after calling a few leading economists was I reassured that this Roubini guy was expressing a fringe view that merited little attention. Like a lot of reporters that year, I turned around a tongue-in-cheek story about Dr. Doom and his scary (but probably best ignored) world view. Oops...

NPR

On today's show, we hear how a hobby turns into a lucrative one-man business — and how Apple's App Store is transforming the Internet economy.

The gist is super simple. In fact, it's something that's been going on in the physical world for thousands of years: Giving people a convenient way to buy cheap products.

Enlarge Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In his New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson cited David Boaz of the Cato Institute as an economist who believes that easy money from China exacerbated the housing bubble in the U.S. In fact, Boaz places the blame much closer to home. His clarification is below.

Adam Davidson's citation of me as someone who believes "that all that easy money from China helped make the housing bubble much bigger and last longer, which created a far bigger crisis when the bubble finally burst" took me by surprise. It would be fine without that little prepositional phrase "from China." Easy money, yes. Housing bubble, yes. Pain when bubbles burst, absolutely. But is China to blame? I'd be inclined to point the finger closer to home.

This was a crisis caused by regulation, subsidization, and cheap money. Christopher Hitchens had a point when he wrote, "There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait."

Enlarge MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson argues that the U.S. should take a stronger stance against China's currency. To continue the discussion, we asked two economists on different sides of the debate to weigh in on the following question:

Should the U.S. take a harder stance on China's currency policy?

Steve Hanke of the Cato Institute responds below. To read the response from Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute, click here.

The United States has a long history of waging currency wars in Asia. We all know the sad case of Japan. The U.S. claimed that unfair Japanese trading practices were behind the ballooning U.S. bilateral trade deficit.

To correct the so-called problem, the U.S. demanded that Japan adopt an ever-appreciating yen policy. The Japanese complied and the yen appreciated against the greenback, from 360 in 1971 to 80 in 1995 (and 77, today). But this didn't close the U.S. trade deficit with Japan. Indeed, Japan's contribution to the U.S. trade deficit reached almost 60 percent in 1991. And, if that wasn't enough, the yen's appreciation pushed Japan's economy into a deflationary quagmire.

In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson argues that the U.S. should take a stronger stance against China's currency. To continue the discussion, we asked two economists on different sides of the debate to weigh in on the following question:

Should the U.S. take a harder stance on China's currency policy?

Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute responds below. To read the response from Steve Hanke of the Cato Institute, click here.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently said that Chinese currency manipulation "is blocking what might be a more normal recovery process." In fact, the problem goes beyond China to include many other emerging economies and even a few advanced economies. All together, governments in these economies are spending about $1.5 trillion per year on currency manipulation.

Currency manipulation occurs when governments purchase foreign currency in order to hold up its value relative to their own currency. Manipulation makes a country's exports cheaper and imports more expensive, artificially raising the trade balance. The evidence suggests that currency manipulators jointly have increased their trade balances by about $1 trillion relative to where they would have been in the absence of manipulation. Europe and the United States have suffered the corresponding decline in trade balances.

Courtesy of Jimmy Williams

On the podcast today, we get a glimpse from inside the room where money changes hands. Jimmy Williams used to lobby for the powerful National Association of Realtors.

Williams tells us about some of the ridiculous issues he's lobbied for, the steady flow of money that congresspeople need, and how he wants to take down the crazy campaign finance system.

For More:

See Williams's proposed Constitutional amendment, and listen to our previous podcasts on lobbying: Jack Abramoff On Lobbying and Inside Washington's Money Machine.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: The Decemberists's "E. Watson." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify.

Enlarge Kraft Foods

Kraft Foods has reinvented the Oreo for Chinese consumers. Its latest offering in China: straw-shaped wafers with vanilla-flavored cream filling.

Kraft Foods

Kraft Foods has reinvented the Oreo for Chinese consumers. Its latest offering in China: straw-shaped wafers with vanilla-flavored cream filling.

Everyone knows what an Oreo cookie is supposed to be like. It's round, black and white, and intensely sweet. Has been for 100 years. But sometimes, in order to succeed in the world, even the most iconic product has to adapt.

In China, that meant totally reconsidering what gives an Oreo its Oreoness.

At first, though, Kraft Foods thought that the Chinese would love the Oreo. Who doesn't? The company launched the product there in 1996 as a clone of the American version.

Lorna Davis, who is in charge of the global biscuit division at Kraft, says the Oreo did OK. But it wasn't a hit. It was almost pulled out of China.

But before the cookie was declared a failure, Kraft thought that maybe a little research was in order. And so a decade after it was introduced, Kraft finally asked the right question of Chinese consumers. A question unthinkable in the United States:

What's the problem with an Oreo cookie?

The answer was surprising. Chinese consumers liked the contrast between the bitter cookie and the sugary cream, but, "they said it was a little bit too sweet and a little bit too bitter," Davis explained.

It turns out that if you didn't grow up with Oreos and develop an emotional attachment to the cookie, it can be a weird-tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo really is.

Dennis Cook/AP

Jack Abramoff in 2004. He's the one on the right.

Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been making the rounds lately. He's out of prison. He has a new book. He's in a talkative mood. So I figured it was a good time to ask him about the business of lobbying — not about what he did that was illegal, but about the ordinary, legal stuff.

The firm he worked for was called Greenberg Traurig. I chose a year at random when Abramoff was working there, and picked a client I hoped would be fairly typical. I chose Tyco International, a multinational corporation that in 2003 gave Abramoff's firm $1.3 million.

"They were fighting to stay out of the tax bill that year, which would have retroactively taxed them to the tune of about $4 billion," Abramoff says.

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images

Greece is broke. But there's no blueprint for a country to declare bankruptcy, so Greece's creditors are sort of making things up as they go along.

"You're taking some sort of loss," Hans Humes of Greylock Capital Management told me. "But it's like, how much of a loss do you take? There's this thing called sovereign immunity. You can't go in and take the Acropolis."

Greylock Capital Management is a hedge fund company that holds Greek bonds. So Humes is sitting across the table from Greece. There are lots of other creditors — people sitting alongside Humes — and they all want different things.

The United States is facing three more years of high unemployment.

This is the key takeaway from the statement the Federal Reserve just released. Of course, the Fed being the Fed, they don't come right out and say that. They say this instead:

In particular, the Committee decided today to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions—including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run—are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through late 2014.

Here's what that means: