Find all the episodes from this season here . And past seasons here . And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . When we last left the United States of America in our economic telling of history, it was the early 1900s and the country's leaders were starting to feel like they had the economic situation all figured out. Flash forward a decade or so, and the financial picture was still looking pretty good as America emerged from the first World War. But then, everything came crashin...
Aug 21, 2024•35 min
You might have seen ads for online banking services that seem to offer a lot of great stuff — accounts you can open in minutes and without a minimum balance or monthly fees. The ads seem to say: "These aren't your parents' boring old banks." But the truth is: Even though they might resemble banks, they aren't. These "bank-like" companies are a type of "fintech" or financial technology company. And this is a story about the potential risks of putting your money into these apps. Banks go through a...
Aug 16, 2024•21 min
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here . And past seasons here . And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . In the middle of the twentieth century, China and its neighbors in East Asia were poor, mostly rural economies. China had been wrecked by a brutal civil war. Taiwan became the home of people fleeing from that conflict. Japan and Korea were rebuilding after their own wars. And then in the later half of the twentieth century, the...
Aug 14, 2024•36 min
For some sports, picking the winner is simple: It's the athlete who crosses the finish line first, or the side that scores the most goals. But for the new Olympic sport of breaking (if you want to be cool, don't call it breakdancing), the criteria aren't quite that straightforward. How do you judge an event whose core values are dopeness, freshness, and breaking the rules? That was the challenge for Storm and Renegade, two legendary b-boys who set out to create a fair and objective scoring syste...
Aug 09, 2024•26 min
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here . And past seasons here . And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . Trade has come up in all of the episodes of Summer School so far. An early use of money was to make trade easier. Trade was responsible for the birth of companies and the stock market. And trade was the lifeblood of the early United States. Today's episode covers 250 years of trade history in three chapters. We start with one o...
Aug 07, 2024•37 min
Maybe you got a boring slip of paper in the mail. Maybe you got a spammy-looking email promising you money. Surprise! You're in a class action. If you've done any commerce in the last decade, there's a good chance that someone somewhere was suing on your behalf and you have real money coming your way... if you know what to do. Class action settlements are on the rise. And, on today's show, we're helping decipher the class action from the perspective of the average class member. How do class acti...
Aug 02, 2024•26 min
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here . And past seasons here . And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . Planet Money Summer School has arrived at the birth of the United States and the chance to set up a whole new economy from scratch. Should there be a centralized bank? Should there be a single currency? We'll travel to two moments in the country's early history when the founders said "nope" to these questions and see what happe...
Jul 31, 2024•37 min•Season 5Ep. 35
Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here . And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . Once upon a time, every business was a small business. It was run by the owner, maybe the spouse and the kids. Maybe they borrowed money from friends and relatives, but there was only so big it could get. Then came what can only be described as the big bang of economics. Over the span of a few decades, people figured out a way f...
Jul 26, 2024•34 min
Last weekend we were all thrown for a loop when President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris for the nomination. Just like everyone else, we are trying to quickly wrap our heads around what it means now that Harris is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee for president. We expect to see the Harris campaign come out with some official policy proposals in the coming weeks and months. But for now, all we've got are clues, little breadcrumbs that ...
Jul 24, 2024•18 min
In 2022, artist Stuart Semple opened up his laptop to find that all his designs had turned black overnight. All the colors, across files on Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, were gone. Who had taken the colors away? The story of what happened begins with one company, Pantone. Pantone is known for their Color of the Year forecasts, but they actually make the bulk of their money from selling color reference guides. These guides are the standard for how designers pretty much anywhere t...
Jul 20, 2024•22 min
Who has the power? Workers or bosses? It changes through the ages, though it's usually the bosses. Today, we look at two key moments when the power of labor shifted, for better and worse, and we ask why then? What does history have to say about labor power right now? We travel to Sicily, Italy in the year 1347, where the bubonic plague is about to strike. The horror known as the Black Death will remake European society in countless ways, but we'll focus on one silver lining: how economic conditi...
Jul 17, 2024•33 min
4.5 million households in the U.S. have solar panels on their homes. Most of those customers are happy with it - their electricity bills have just about disappeared, and it's great for the planet. But thousands and thousands of people are really disappointed with what they've been sold. Their panels are more expensive than they should be, and they say it is hard to get someone to come fix them when they break. It turns out this sometimes crummy customer experience is no accident. It ties back to...
Jul 12, 2024•27 min
Planet Money Summer School is back for eight weeks. Join as we travel back in time to find the origins of our economic way of life. Today we ask surprisingly hard question: What is money? And where did it come from? We travel to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean for the answer. Then we'll visit France in the year 1714, where a man on the lam tries to revolutionize the country's entire monetary system, and comes impressively close to the modern economy we have today, before it all falls apart....
Jul 10, 2024•34 min
We often hear that air travel is worse than it's ever been. Gone are the days when airplanes touted piano bars and meat carving stations — or even free meals. Instead we're crammed into tiny seats and fighting for overhead space. How did we get here? Most of the inconveniences we think about when we fly can be traced back to the period of time just after the federal government deregulated the airlines. When commercial air travel took off in the 1940s, the government regulated how many national a...
Jul 05, 2024•25 min
At the core of most of the electronics we use today are some very tiny, very powerful chips. Semiconductor chips. And they are mighty: they help power our phones, laptops, and cars. They enable advances in healthcare, military systems, transportation, and clean energy. And they're also critical for artificial intelligence, providing the hardware needed to train complex machine learning. On today's episode, we're bringing you two stories from our daily show The Indicator , diving into the two mos...
Jul 03, 2024•20 min
We wade into the heated debate over immigrants' impact on the labor market. When the number of workers in a city increases, does that take away jobs from the people who already live and work there? Does a surge of immigration hurt their wages? The debate within the field of economics often centers on Nobel-prize winner David Card's ground-breaking paper, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market." Today on the show: the fight over that paper, and what it tells us about the deb...
Jun 29, 2024•26 min
(Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2019 .) In 1794, George Washington decided to raise money for the federal government by taxing the rich. He did it by putting a tax on horse-drawn carriages. The carriage tax could be considered the first federal wealth tax of the United States. It led to a huge fight over the power to tax in the U.S. Constitution, a fight that continues today. Listen back to our 2019 episode: "Could A Wealth Tax Work?" Listen to The Indicator's 2023 episode: "C...
Jun 26, 2024•19 min
When the vape brand Juul first hit the market back in 2015, e-cigarettes were in a kind of regulatory limbo. At the time, the rules that governed tobacco cigarettes did not explicitly apply to e-cigarettes. Then Juul blew up, fueled a public health crisis over teen vaping, and inspired a regulatory crackdown. But when the government finally stepped in to solve the problem of youth vaping, it may have actually made things worse. Today's episode is a collaboration with the new podcast series "Back...
Jun 21, 2024•27 min
We've lived amongst Elon Musk headlines for so long now that it's easy to forget just how much he sounds like a sci-fi character. He runs a space company and wants to colonize mars. He also runs a company that just implanted a computer chip into a human brain. And he believes there's a pretty high probability everything is a simulation and we are living inside of it. But the latest Elon Musk headline-grabbing drama is less something out of sci-fi, and more something pulled from HBO's "Succession...
Jun 19, 2024•28 min
There's a behind the scenes industry that helps big brands decide questions like: How big should a bag of chips be? What's the right size for a bottle of shampoo? And yes, also: When should a company do a little shrinkflation? From Cookie Monster to President Biden, everybody is complaining about shrinkflation these days. But when we asked the packaging and pricing experts, they told us that shrinkflation is just one move in a much larger, much weirder 4-D chess game. The name of that game is "p...
Jun 14, 2024•24 min
Graphite is sort of the one-hit wonder of minerals. And that hit? Pencils. Everyone loves to talk about pencils when it comes to graphite. If graphite were to perform a concert, they'd close out the show with "pencils," and everyone would clap and cheer. But true fans of graphite would be shouting out "batteries!" Because graphite is a key ingredient in another important thing that we all use in our everyday lives: lithium ion batteries. Almost all of the battery-ready graphite in the world come...
Jun 12, 2024•26 min
Most economic textbooks will tell you that there can be real dangers in running up a big national debt. A major concern is how the debt you add now could slow down economic growth in the future. Economists have not been able to nail down how much debt a country can safely take on. But they have tried. Back in 2010, two economists took a look at 20 countries over the course of decades, and sometimes centuries, and came back with a number. Their analysis suggested that economic growth slowed signi...
Jun 07, 2024•27 min
For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise the cow, feed the cow, kill the cow, get the fat out of the cow, cook the fat, dip wicks into the fat. All that--for not very much light. Now, if we want to light a whole room, we just flip a switch. The history of light explains why the world today is the way it is. It explains why we aren't all subsistence farmers, and why we can affor...
Jun 05, 2024•21 min
There is a constant arms race between law enforcement and criminals, especially when it comes to technology. For years, law enforcement has been frustrated with encrypted messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram. And law enforcement has been even more frustrated by encrypted phones, specifically designed to thwart authorities from snooping. But in 2018, in a story that seems like it's straight out of a spy novel, the FBI was approached with an offer: Would they like to get into the encrypted cel...
May 31, 2024•24 min
We are living in a kind of golden age for online fraudsters. As the number of apps and services for storing and sending money has exploded – so too have the schemes that bad actors have cooked up to steal that money. Every year, we hear more and more stories of financial heartbreak. What you don't often hear about is what happens after the scam? On today's show, we follow one woman who was scammed out of over $800,000 on her quest to get her money back. That journey takes her from the halls of t...
May 29, 2024•27 min
On today's episode, we ride through the streets of San Francisco with a long-time junkman, Jon Rolston. Jon has spent the last two decades clearing out houses and offices of their junk. He's found all sorts of items: a life-time supply of toilet paper, gold rings, $20,000 in cash. Over the years, he's developed a keen eye for what has value and what might sell. He's become a kind of trash savant. As we ride with Jon, he shows us the whole ecosystem of how our reusable trash gets dealt with — fro...
May 24, 2024•26 min
By one estimate, 40 percent of American workers get laid off at least once in their careers. And when that happens, companies will often say, "It's not personal. It has nothing to do with you or your performance. We're just changing priorities, making a strategic shift." It's like the business version of: "It's not you, it's me." And just like a breakup, it feels terrible. This happened to a man we're calling V, who was working at the same company as his husband when he got laid off. And for V, ...
May 22, 2024•28 min
Last month, the world narrowly avoided a cyberattack of stunning ambition. The targets were some of the most important computers on the planet. Computers that power the internet. Computers used by banks and airlines and even the military. What these computers had in common was that they all relied on open source software. A strange fact about modern life is that most of the computers responsible for it are running open source software. That is, software mostly written by unpaid, sometimes even a...
May 17, 2024•25 min
In the past few months, the price of gold has gone way up – even hitting a new high last month at just over $2,400 per troy ounce. Gold has long had a shiny quality to it, literally and in the marketplace. And we wondered, why is that? Today on the show, we revisit a Planet Money classic episode: Why Gold? Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum will peruse the periodic table of the elements with one goal in mind: to learn which element would really make the best money. This classic Planet Money ep...
May 15, 2024•19 min
Karen McDonough of Quincy, Mass., was enjoying her tea one morning in the dining room when she saw something odd outside her window: a group of people gathering on her lawn. A man with a clipboard told her that her home no longer belonged to her. It didn't matter that she'd been paying her mortgage for 17 years and was current on it. She was a nurse with a good job and had raised her kids there. But this was a foreclosure sale, and she was going to lose her house. McDonough had fallen victim to ...
May 10, 2024•31 min
