ABSTRACT
Martijn Konings identifies a "distinctively American tradition of pragmatist thought, which was pervaded by optimism regarding the politically progressive potential of America's trajectory of economic modernization." This chapter focuses on this mode of thought in two podcasts, Planet Money and Serial, two of the most successful in the new digital aural medium. It analyzes Gimlet Media's Start Up and Reply All, the books of Michael Lewis even before his book about behavioral economics, the film based on his work The Big Short, and apps that formed a behavioral economics cultural narrative like Hello Alfred, Task Rabbit, and Uber. It argues that behavioral economics provided a template for a new genre of narrative in popular culture, which in some ways filled the space left by The Fountainhead. The architect of behavioral economics is like a detective, out to find a quantified base on which to ground the remembering self's reality.
