This American Life: Getting and Spending

I spent some time over the weekend perusing the archives of This American Life, and stumbled on an old episode that focuses on money: "Getting and Spending". It's a free listen, and I recommend you check it out. A trader gets rich off the Chernobyl disaster, a suburban dad turns to robbing local stores to pay his son's medical bills, and John Hodgman "goes rogue" in the Mall of America.

Best of all, though, is the segment about "that guy" syndrome—the ways in which our purchases or conscious non-purchases group us. Is this exclusively a contemporary phenomenon? Sometimes it really does seem to have overrun the way we define ourselves.