Job retraining and the brain, DC dining, and Robinhood's sports bet

NPR.

This is the Indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Waylon Wong here with the amazing Adrian Ma.

Hello.

And the delightful Darien Woods.

A pleasure as always.

The Indicator Triumvirate has gathered here on this fantastic Friday because it is the most helloed day.

Indicators of the week.

On today's episode, we've got new evidence on job retraining, diner numbers going down in DC, and the trading platform Robinhood is offering you a whole new way to lose money.

Where do I sign up?

We'll explain after the break.

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Indicators of the week up first, Darian Woods.

My indicator is one in three.

One in three injured workers who avoided depression because they went through retraining.

That's according to this working paper out this week through the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Okay, so that sounds like a pretty hopeful result.

It's very good.

This paper looked at people who had been injured badly in Denmark, enough to make them lose earnings.

And, you know, injuring yourself this way is terrible both for your physical health, but also your mental health.

The authors find that these people are more likely to take antidepressants.

That all tracks.

And the authors wanted to quantify what exactly reskilling did for mental health.

So the way things work in Denmark is that some diplomas or vocational degrees allow you to then later go to higher education for a university degree.

Others don't.

So a carpenter can later enroll in a construction architecture bachelor's, but a landscape gardener might have to make sure they have minimum high school requirements and it would just take them a lot longer.

So in this case, you've you've got one group eligible for reskilling and another not.

Hmm.

Okay.

So, a sort of natural experiment?

Yeah.

And they found there wasn't an increase in depression for the retraining workers.

To me, this seems kind of significant that an economist would even look at something like mental health and try to measure it as it relates to, you know, like the labor market.

And also, this result seems significant to me.

It's a holistic approach,

not just dollars and cents.

They have a heart too.

And I know this because I called one of the co-authors, economist Anders Humlum, nice guy.

And he said he was really surprised by the findings too.

He added, you know, this is about injured workers in the study, but he reckons you can apply the findings to all kinds of situations where you've got workers getting laid off.

Maybe it's in a recession or because their job was taken over by AI.

So this really seems to make a decent case for the emotional benefits of this kind of retraining.

Yeah, and it goes broader than that.

The paper also finds a reduction in depression in these workers' spouses.

Oh, because there's, I guess, less of a burden on the spouse.

Yeah, and look, it's not all champagne and roses.

Interestingly, these couples were actually more likely to separate when the injured worker reskilled.

So they're happy individually, and I guess they feel freer to leave.

They're like, I'm married to my job now, my new job that I love, that I just trained for.

Something like that.

Don't know how to think about that, but I guess they're happy.

Okay, so thank you, Darian.

Waylon, why don't you go next?

Okay, my indicator is negative 18%.

That is the average decrease in restaurant diners in Washington, D.C.

last week compared with the same week in 2024.

Now, this data comes from Open Table, you know, the restaurant reservation website, and the company measures how many diners who make online reservations get seated.

I'm sure we've all seen the headlines coming out of DC over the last week.

And Adrian, you've actually been living it.

Yeah, it's been about a week since President Trump took over DC's police force and deployed the National Guard here.

And interestingly, I was talking with a guy who actually tends bar in DC in this past week.

And he said it was the emptiest he had ever seen it.

And he thinks it's because a lot of people were just kind of scared to show up because of the increased presence of law enforcement.

Yeah.

And I mean, that is certainly one explanation for the numbers we're seeing from Open Table.

National and local news outlets have quoted restaurant owners talking about the slowdown in business, you know, like this bartender you talked to, Adrian, but it might not be that simple.

So do you guys know about Restaurant Week?

Yeah, this is when, you know, a bunch of restaurants in the city offer kind of special menus to try and get diners in the door.

Exactly.

And so last year, restaurant week in DC ran from August 12th through 18th.

So a decrease in 2025 might be expected.

You know, this is noisy data.

Right.

So no restaurant week that time now.

And so it looks pretty bad year on year.

And then plus, you've got this idea of fewer people wanting to eat out just in general in 2025.

Yeah.

So you really have to look at the numbers kind of closely.

But if restaurant week started this past Monday, I mean, wouldn't that help offset the drop in diners?

It is possible.

So, if you look at open table data for the week so far, the volume of diners was actually up on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday compared with last year.

So, we might need to wait a couple of weeks to see how this all really shakes out.

Well, we're hungry to see when New York Restaurant Week is.

Yeah, get yourself a prefix menu.

It's a bargain.

Well, now I'm hungry for some good data.

Speaking of

succulent numbers,

Adrian, tell me what your indicator is.

My indicator is 2 billion.

2 billion is the reported number of contracts traded on Robin Hood's prediction market since it launched last fall.

I didn't even know Robin Hood had a predictions market.

So this is where you can bet on the future of current events and stuff, right?

Yeah, although Robin Hood would not call it betting, although basically that's what it is.

So basically, it launched this prediction market.

Schmidt betting.

Schmetting, yeah, they would call it schmetting.

And so they launched this prediction market last fall to allow people to bet on the outcome of the presidential election.

And this week, it announced a new thing, which is it's going to let users start betting on college football and pro football games.

Okay, Robin Hood getting in on that sports betting craze.

Yes, and kind of no.

Yes, in that football is a sport and this new feature will allow people to bet on it.

But there are a couple key ways in which a sports prediction market is different from typical sports betting.

So in regular sports betting, the odds are set by the sports book or bookie,

and that could be a casino or a company like FanDuel or DraftKings.

What's different with a prediction market is that the odds are actually determined by the market participants based on how much they bet on one outcome or the other.

And another difference is that the participants can also buy and sell their stake before the actual results of the event are known.

Oh, this seems kind of complicated.

Just to illustrate with an example, let's say you're betting on a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Chicago Bears.

That's my team.

I can't name a single player on it, though.

It's a kind of a lopsided matchup.

Yeah.

So in a prediction market, you don't actually have to wait until the end of the game to see who wins or loses and therefore to find out whether you're going to cash in or whether you've just, you know, lost your bet.

Instead, you could actually just sell off your position before the game is over.

Ah, okay.

Honestly, this sounds really fun for a certain personality type, but also maybe really dangerous.

Yes, and it's still, you know, a lot of money out there for companies that want to make money from sports wagering.

And I think a really interesting thing to watch going forward is this sort of brewing turf war between the traditional sports books and companies like Robin Hood or Kalshi, these prediction markets that are making it possible to bet on sports.

But interestingly, they're very careful not to call it betting, otherwise they might be taxed under state gambling laws.

And there are a bunch of lawsuits over this right now.

Are we going to be in legal trouble if we've been calling it betting this whole segment?

Can you schmet on the outcome of these lawsuits, these prediction models?

I would not be surprised if somebody out there is like making that bet right now.

Well, I'm going to go read up on the Chicago Bears.

This episode was produced by Angel Carreris with engineering by Jimmy Keely.

It was fact-to-knocked by Kubikatz McKim and Corey Bridges.

Kate Kinkanen edits the show, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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