Money Won't Get You to the Gym

Guest: Quinn Mecham, PhD, Professor of Political Science, Brigham Young University  Why sanctions won't work against North Korea; the roots of ethnic cleansing in Myanmar; referenda on independence in Kurdish Iraq and in Catalonia, Spain.

Guest: Amy Schmitz, JD, Professor of Law, University of Missouri School of Law Has this ever happened to you? You spend $15 on a bottle of hair product online that turns out to be a knock off of the real thing. You can't find any contact info on the website to log your complaint, so after about 20 minutes of angry searching for a way to reach someone at the company, you drop it and vow to be smarter about buying stuff from random websites. Maybe you worked harder to get a refund because your purchase was worth more than $15. Still, it's a huge hassle. Where customer service is concerned, the web is still pretty much the Wild West and sellers count on you not having the time or resources to follow through on a complaint. But we may be at a tipping point. Online purchasing is so ubiquitous that customers and regulators are beginning to call for dispute resolution standards.

Guest: Lant Pritchett, PhD, Professor of International Development, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University One of the great international development success stories of the last century is the fact that today practically every child in the world enrolls in school, and most attend at least to the end of primary school. Getting to this place has taken a consistent, global effort. But, for all that schooling, kids are not learning. There are some 250 million children around the world unable to read, write or do basic math and more than half of them are in school.  We have a learning crisis.

Guest: Arthur Sakamoto, PhD, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University In your grandmother's time, women might have claimed to go to college just to pursue a "MRS" degree. But that's a byegone era and women now earn more bachelor's degrees than men do. Turns out, in a marriage, husbands are benefitting more from their wives' education than the women themselves are. New research out of Texas A&M reveals that there's an unexpected consequence of women's success in the workplace.