There's something strange going on in hospitals. Cheap, common drugs that nurses use every day seem to be constantly hit by shortages. These are often generic drugs that don't seem super complicated to make, things like dextrose and saline (aka sugar water and salt water). So what's going on? The answer, as with anything in healthcare, is complicated. On today's show: why hospitals keep running out of generic drugs. The story behind these shortages tells us a lot about how these drugs are made, ...
Oct 25, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast On today's show, we have two stories from The Indicator , Planet Money 's daily podcast. They just launched Love Week, a weeklong series exploring the business and economic side of romance. First, hosts Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma fire up the gas logs and pour a mug of cocoa to discuss the made-for-TV rom-com machine, and how television executives learned to mass produce seasonal romance. Then, Wailin and host Darian Woods discuss another romance medium: the romance novel. Once relegated to superm...
Oct 23, 2024•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past two decades, there's been a sort of tectonic economic shift happening under our feet. More and more companies have switched from selling goods one by one to selling services, available as a subscription. These days everything from razor blades to meal kits to car washes have become subscriptions. But all that convenience has also come with a dark side – some companies have designed their offerings to be as easy as possible to sign up for and also as difficult as possible to cancel....
Oct 18, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast (For our story on this year's Nobel in Economics, check out our daily show, The Indicator !) Let's face it. Economics is filled with terms that don't always make sense to the average person. Terms that sometimes mean what you think they mean, but sometimes not at all. Not even close. We surveyed 188 economists. And we asked them: What are the most misunderstood terms in the field of economics? On today's show, their answers! Hear stories about near recessions, a problem with insurance, econ at y...
Oct 16, 2024•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Even in our modern world with planes and jets and drones, the vast majority of goods are moved around the planet in cargo ships. Which means our ports are the backbone of our global economy. The longshoremans' strike closed the eastern ports for only three days, but those three days raised a lot of questions. Like - why is a discount furniture store the fourth largest importer on the East Coast? How come so many bananas come through Wilmington, Delaware? Why do we need live frogs delivered into ...
Oct 11, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Recently, the state of Washington embarked on an ambitious new plan to combat climate change. Taking a page from economics textbooks, the state instituted a statewide "cap and trade" system for carbon emissions. The state establishes a cap on the total amount of carbon pollution it is willing to allow each year, and then gives away or auctions off carbon emission permits that add up to that total. Companies can then trade those permits on the open market. Economists love cap and trade plans beca...
Oct 09, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The lawyer commercial is almost an art form unto itself. Learned practitioners of the law doing whatever it takes to get your attention, from impressive dirt bike stunts to running around half naked . All so when you land in trouble, you don't have to think hard to remember their name. Odds are you can name one or two right now. This world of law ads did not exist fifty years ago. Then, lawyers were not allowed to advertise. Not by law, by the exclusive organization that decides who gets to be a...
Oct 04, 2024•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast (Note: A version of this episode originally ran in 2016 .) Back in 2016, things were pretty bad in Venezuela. Grocery stores didn't have enough food. Hospitals didn't have basic supplies, like gauze. Child mortality was spiking. Businesses were shuttering. It's one of the epic economic collapses of our time. And it was totally avoidable. Venezuela used to be a relatively rich country. It has just about all the economic advantages a country could ask for: Beautiful beaches and mountains ready for...
Oct 02, 2024•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Wanna see a trick? Give us any topic and we can tie it back to the economy." That is the bold promise in Planet Money 's tagline. And we believe the show does live up to it. Over the last year, we've told stories about breakdancing , rum , pagers , buffets , colors , and heartbreak . But then one host wondered: what if we really held ourselves to that promise? What if we challenged ourselves to find economic meaning in the most esoteric and far-flung topics imaginable? That's when we turned to ...
Sep 27, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Next week, JD Vance and Tim Walz will face off in the only confirmed vice presidential debate ahead of the election. As voters look ahead to what their economic policies might be, we look back to see what they have said and done, and how it turned out. Planet Money's newsletter author Greg Rosalsky has spent some time combing through the economic records of Vance and Walz , and has some knowledge to share. Why does Walz support universal free school lunches, and why do some criticize him for it?...
Sep 25, 2024•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 
