Table saws are extremely dangerous. The government estimates that injuries from table saws send something like 30,000 people to the emergency room every year. 3,000 of those end in amputations. The costs of those injuries are enormous. Are they also avoidable? In 1999, inventor Steve Gass had a realization: Humans conduct electricity pretty well; Wood does not. Could he develop a saw that could tell the difference between the two? Steve invented a saw that can detect a finger and stop the blade ...
Sep 20, 2024•24 min
People often say that money can't buy you happiness. Sometimes, if you ask them to tell you more about it, they'll mention a famous 2010 study by Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. That study found that higher household income correlates with greater emotional well-being, but only up to around $75,000 a year. After that, more money didn't seem to matter. This was a famous study by two famous academics. The result stood for over a decade. And it feels good, right? Maybe the ric...
Sep 18, 2024•29 min
Today we have a guest episode from 99 Percent Invisible . It is about White Castle, the burger chain. Even if you haven't visited, you have tasted its influence because, as we will learn in this episode, White Castle is really the proto-burger chain. Our friends at the excellent podcast 99 Percent Invisible bring us the origin story of White Castle and trace its influence on the business of fast food, and on American eating habits. The story is about one man who had an idea for a world where you...
Sep 16, 2024•33 min
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates to get inflation under control. One side effect is that taking out a mortgage to buy a home has gotten very expensive. That's especially a problem for some homeowners who managed to get a lower mortgage rate years ago. They have a sort of... champagne problem. Or, "golden handcuffs" as it's called. These homeowners may find they are "locked in" to their current home. In order to move to a new home, they have to take out a new mortgage at a much higher ra...
Sep 13, 2024•23 min
Are the promises made by AI boosters all hype, or are we actually under-appreciating the transformative potential of AI? Can artificial intelligence make humans more productive, unlock hidden potential and remake work as we know it? Or, should it not even be called intelligence at all, artificial or otherwise. On today's episode, we take sides. Two reporters flip a coin to see who argues which point: is AI overrated or underrated? They bring research, real world examples, expert opinions and war...
Sep 11, 2024•19 min
Summer camp is a classic rite of passage in the U.S. It's a place of self-discovery, where kids come to make new friends and take on new challenges. But what if it were ALSO a place where children came to learn how to survive in a free market economy? That's part of the idea behind a summer camp at JA BizTown, in Portland, Oregon. Kids at the camp run tiny fake businesses in a tiny fake town. There are retail stores and restaurants, insurance companies and power utilities. As camp begins, a gagg...
Sep 06, 2024•34 min
Campaigns can be a jargony slog. And this year, we are seeing a lot of economic terms being thrown around, many of which... aren't entirely straightforward. In this episode, we try to make the mess of words that accompany a presidential campaign into something a little less exhausting: A game of bingo. Follow along as we dig into five terms that we expect to hear in the upcoming presidential debate, along with some others we hope to hear. You can play along, too, at npr.org/bingo . Play online o...
Sep 04, 2024•29 min
When Cody Fischer decided to get into real estate development, he had a vision. He wanted to build affordable, energy efficient apartments in Minneapolis, not far from where he grew up. His vision was well-timed because, in 2019, Minneapolis's city council passed one of the most ambitious housing plans in the nation. One aim of that plan was to alleviate the city's housing shortage by encouraging developers like Cody to build, build, build. But when Cody tried to build, he ran into problems. The...
Aug 30, 2024•23 min
Take the 2024 Planet Money Summer School Quiz here to earn your personalized diploma! Find all the episodes from this season of Summer School here . And past seasons here . And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School . We are assembled here on the lawn of Planet Money University for the greatest graduation in history – because it features the greatest economic minds in history. We'll hear from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and some surprising guests as they teach us a l...
Aug 28, 2024•33 min
When David Rashid took over US autoparts maker Plews and Edelmann, the company was losing business to its Chinese rival, Qingdao Sunsong. Both companies make power steering hoses, but Sunsong was offering its hoses to retailers at a much lower price. Then, in 2018, the Trump administration threw companies like Rashid's a lifeline, by announcing tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, including some autoparts. Rashid thought the tariffs would finally force Sunsong to raise its prices, but, somehow, ...
Aug 23, 2024•27 min
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
