It's that time of year again! Our annual year-end tradition of checking in on the stories we've reported and the people we met along the way. We'll hear from a Hollywood strike captain who tried to pull off one last job, an update from the data detective trying to uncover the truth in academic research, and tribute to a very special member of the Planet Money family. Check out the original stories: Vacation, and why the U.S. takes so little of it The secret entrance that sidesteps Hollywood pick...
Dec 29, 2023•26 min•Ep. 1705
Today on the show, hosts from Planet Money and The Indicator debate the economic indicators of this year and next year. First up, we try to identify the figure that best captured the essence of 2023. The contenders: the possible soft landing, consumer sentiment, and the housing market. And looking ahead to 2024, what will the economic indicator of next year be? Interest rates, Bidenomics, or junk fees? Listen to our hosts make their case, and then tell us who won by submitting your vote via Plan...
Dec 27, 2023•16 min•Ep. 1704
*Note: This episode originally ran in 2020* 'Tis the season for Americans to head out in droves and bring home a freshly-cut Christmas tree. But decorative evergreens don't just magically show up on corner lots, waiting to find a home in your living room. There are a bunch of fascinating steps that determine exactly how many Christmas trees get sold, and how expensive they are. Today on the show, we visit the world's largest auction of Christmas trees — and then see how much green New Yorkers ar...
Dec 22, 2023•32 min•Ep. 1703
Argentina has been on a decades-long search for economic stability, but it always seems to be out of reach. High inflation has been plaguing the country and just surpassed 160% a year. Over the past couple of years, the local currency has collapsed. One U.S. dollar used to be worth 20 Argentinean pesos in 2018. Today, one U.S. dollar is worth 1,000 pesos on the black market. And that means for Argentineans, the real prices of everything — from groceries to gas — have spiked. In a country where t...
Dec 21, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1702
The research keeps coming in on remote work. New evidence suggests working from home, at least full-time, may not be as productive as we once thought. Economist Jose Maria Barrero and his co-authors have reviewed this and other studies for a recent paper. In this episode, we hear about the challenges that come with working fully remote and some best practices for hybrid work. This episode was first published as a bonus episode for our Planet Money+ listeners. Today, we're making it available for...
Dec 19, 2023•15 min
Economics Job Market Rumors is a website that's half a job information Wiki, where people post about what's going on inside economics departments, and half a discussion forum, where anyone with an internet connection can ask the economics hive mind whatever they want. All anonymously. People can talk about finding work, share rumors, and just blow off steam. And that steam can get scaldingly hot. The forum has become notorious for racist and sexist posts , often attacking specific women and peop...
Dec 16, 2023•26 min•Ep. 1701
Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's __________. The best part of waking up, is _______ in your cup! Got ____? If you can identify these brands based on tagline alone, it's possible you... are a 90s kid. The '90s were arguably the peak moment of advertisers trying to make an impression on us that could last for decades. They got us to sing their jingles and say their slogans. These kinds of ads are called brand or image marketing. And it became a lot harder to pull off in the 21st century. On to...
Dec 14, 2023•27 min•Ep. 1700
What if you could borrow money on the cheap and use it to pay for just about anything? The U.S. government can, and does, with U.S. Treasuries. But the market for Treasuries might be more fragile than we know. In this episode, Yesha Yadav of Vanderbilt Law School explains why. This episode was first published as a bonus episode for our Planet Money+ listeners. Today we're making it available for everyone. To hear more episodes like this, and to hear Planet Money and The Indicator without sponsor...
Dec 11, 2023•14 min
Remember pagers? They were huge in the 80s — these little devices that could receive short messages. Sir Mix-A-Lot even had a song about them! But then cell phones came along, and pagers more or less became obsolete. Except there's one group of people who still carry pagers: medical doctors. At a surprisingly large number of hospitals, the pager remains the backbone of communication. Need to ask a doctor a question? Page them. Need to summon a doctor to an emergency? Page them. And then... wait ...
Dec 08, 2023•27 min•Ep. 1699
Today on the show, we have two episodes from our daily podcast, The Indicator , about things we spend a lot of time thinking about this time of year: food and drink. First up, we explore how changes in economic conditions led to one of the U.K.'s iconic (and affordable) staple foods becoming a luxury. Then, the story of one Indigenous woman whose small business went head-to-head with Coca-Cola over a trademark dispute. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Mon...
Dec 06, 2023•19 min•Ep. 1698
Would you say that you and your family are better off or worse off, financially, than you were a year ago? Do you think in 12 months we'll have good times, financially, or bad? Generally speaking, do you think now is a good time or a bad time to buy a house? These are the kinds of questions baked into the Consumer Sentiment Index. And while the economy has been humming along surprisingly well lately, sentiment has stayed surprisingly low. Today on the show: We are really bummed about the economy...
Dec 01, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1697
In the state of Oregon, there is a glut of grass. A wealth of weed. A crisis of chronic. And, jokes aside, it's a real problem for people who work in the cannabis industry like Matt Ochoa. Ochoa runs the Jefferson Packing House in Medford, Oregon, which provides marijuana growers with services like drying, trimming and packing their product. He has seen literal tons of usable weed being left in marijuana fields all over the state of Oregon. Because, Ochoa says, there aren't enough buyers. There ...
Nov 29, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1696
Here at Planet Money, Thanksgiving is not just a time to feast on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casseroles and pie(s). It's also a time to feast on economics. Today, we host a very Planet Money Thanksgiving feast, and solve a few economic questions along the way. First: a turkey mystery. Around the holidays, demand for turkey at grocery stores goes up by as much as 750%. And when turkey demand is so high, you might think that the price of turkey would also go up. But data shows ,...
Nov 22, 2023•27 min•Ep. 1695
Some of the most influential and beloved novels of the last few years have been about money, finance, and the global economy. Some overtly so, others more subtly. It got to the point where we just had to call up the authors to find out more: What brought them into this world? What did they learn? How were they thinking about economics when they wrote these beautiful books? Today on the show: we get to the bottom of it. We talk to three bestselling contemporary novelists — Min Jin Lee ( Pachinko ...
Nov 18, 2023•26 min•Ep. 1694
China's economic growth for the past few decades has been extraordinary. And much of that growth was fueled by real estate – it was like this miraculous economic engine for the country. But recently, that engine seems to have stopped working. And that has raised all kinds of questions not just for China but also for the global economy. Today on the show, we look at what's happening inside China's real estate market. And we try to answer the question: how did we get here? Help support Planet Mone...
Nov 15, 2023•20 min•Ep. 1693
When best-selling thriller writer Douglas Preston began playing around with OpenAI's new chatbot, ChatGPT, he was, at first, impressed. But then he realized how much in-depth knowledge GPT had of the books he had written. When prompted, it supplied detailed plot summaries and descriptions of even minor characters. He was convinced it could only pull that off if it had read his books. Large language models, the kind of artificial intelligence underlying programs like ChatGPT, do not come into the...
Nov 10, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1692
The world of economics has these two different sides. One one side, there are the economists in their cozy armchairs and dusty libraries, high up in their ivory towers. On the other, there's the messy world we're all living in, where those economics are actually playing out. Sometimes, researchers will write about something that they themselves have never actually experienced. Sure, they've thought about it, theorized, come up with smart analyses...but that's not the same as getting out of that ...
Nov 08, 2023•29 min•Ep. 1691
When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in policy circles. In it, she argued that antitrust enforcement in the U.S. was behind the times. For decades, regulators had focused narrowly on consumer welfare, and they'd bring companies to court only when they thought consumers were being harmed by things like rising prices. But in the age of digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook, Khan argued in the a...
Nov 03, 2023•30 min•Ep. 1690
Earlier this fall, the Federal Trade Commission filed a high-stakes lawsuit against Amazon. In that suit, the FTC claims Amazon is a monopoly, and it accuses the company of using anti-competitive tactics to hold onto its market power. It's a big case, with implications for consumers and businesses and digital marketplaces, and for antitrust law itself. That is the highly important but somewhat obscure body of law that deals with competition and big business. And so, this week on Planet Money, we...
Nov 01, 2023•40 min•Ep. 1689
You might expect to find economic concepts in the pages of an economics textbook. But you know where you can really see a lot of economic concepts in action? Buffets. Here at Planet Money we believe there's a lot of economics going on at the all-you-eat buffet, tucked in between the mountains of brisket and troughs of mashed potatoes. From classic concepts like adverse selection, sunk costs, diminishing marginal returns, to more exotic economic mysteries, like the flat rate pricing bias. Today o...
Oct 27, 2023•25 min•Ep. 1688
Right now, a lot of school districts across the country are making a pretty giant change to the way public education usually works. Facing teacher shortages and struggling to fill vacant spots, they are finding a new recruitment tool: the four-day school week. Those districts are saying to teachers, "You can have three-day weekends all the time, and we won't cut your pay." As of this fall, around 900 school districts – that's about 7% of all districts in the U.S. – now have school weeks that are...
Oct 26, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1687
Union membership in the U.S. has been declining for decades. But, in 2022, support for unions among Americans was the highest it's been in decades. This dissonance is due, in part, to the difficulties of one important phase in the life cycle of a union: setting up a union in the first place. One place where that has been particularly clear is at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Back in 2008, Volkswagen announced that they would be setting up production in the United States after a...
Oct 20, 2023•28 min•Ep. 1686
When someone says "the economy is doing well"—what does that even mean? Like, for workers, for employers, for the country as a whole? According to what calculation? How do you put a number on it? The world of economics is filled with all sorts of "measuring sticks." GDP. Inflation. Unemployment. Consumer sentiment. Over time, all kinds of government agencies, universities and private companies have come up with different ways to measure facets of the economy. These measures factor into all kinds...
Oct 18, 2023•18 min•Ep. 1685
Note: There is swearing in this episode . In 2017, The University of Minnesota asked comedian Maria Bamford to give their commencement speech. But the University may not have known what it was in for. In her speech, Bamford told the crowd of graduates how much the university offered to pay her (nothing), her counteroffer ($20,000), and the amount they settled on ($10,000), which (after taxes and fees, etc.) she gave away to students in the audience to pay down their student loans. Maria Bamford ...
Oct 13, 2023•27 min•Ep. 1684
Prices go up. Occasionally, prices go down. But for 70 years, the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola didn't change. From 1886 until the late 1950s, a bottle of coke cost just a nickel. On today's show, we find out why. The answer includes a half a million vending machines, a 7.5 cent coin, and a company president who just wanted to get a couple of lawyers out of his office. This episode originally ran in 2012 . This episode was hosted by David Kestenbaum. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive pr...
Oct 11, 2023•19 min•Ep. 1683
In 2007, Uruguay had a massive problem with no obvious fix. The economy of this country of 3.5 million people was growing, but there wasn't enough energy to power all that growth. Ramón Méndez Galain was, at the time, a particle physicist, but he wanted to apply his scientific mind to this issue. He started researching different energy sources and eventually wrote up a plan for how Uruguay's power grid could transition to renewable energy. It would be better for the climate, and, he thought, in ...
Oct 06, 2023•23 min•Ep. 1682
When contract negotiations between Alaska Airlines and their flight attendants' union broke down in 1993, the union had a choice to make. The union — The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA — knew that if they chose to strike, Alaska Airlines could use a plan. While Alaska Airlines technically couldn't fire someone on strike, they could permanently replace the striking flight attendants with new workers. Essentially, if the union went on strike, they could risk thousands of people's jobs. The f...
Oct 04, 2023•29 min•Ep. 1681
Ba-dee-yah! Say do you remember? Ba-dee-yah! Questions in September! That's right - it's time for Listener Questions! Every so often, we like to hear from listeners about what's on their minds, and we try to get to the bottom of their economic mysteries. On today's show, we have questions like: Why is September historically the worst month for the stock market? How did the Bass Pro Shops hat get so popular in Ecuador? Are casinos banks? What is the Federal Reserve's new plan to make bank transfe...
Sep 29, 2023•27 min•Ep. 1680
There seems to be headlines about floods, wildfires, or hurricanes every week. Scientists say this might be the new normal — that climate change is making natural disasters more and more common. Tatyana Deryugina is a leading expert on the economics of natural disasters — how we respond to them, how they affect the economy, and how they change our lives. And back when Tatyana first started researching natural disasters she realized that there's a lot we don't know about their long-term economic ...
Sep 27, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1679
The Nobel-prize winning economist Simon Kuznets once analyzed the world's economies this way — he said there are four kinds of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan... and Argentina. If you want to understand what happens when inflation really goes off the rails, go to Argentina. Annual inflation there, over the past year, was 124 percent. Argentina's currency, the peso, is collapsing, its poverty rate is above 40 percent, and the country may be on the verge of electing a far right Liberta...
Sep 23, 2023•24 min•Ep. 1678
