Planet Money

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...

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 ove...

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 late...

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 ma...

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 t...

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 ge...

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...

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 languag...

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 though...

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 li...

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 obs...

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, dimin...

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...

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...

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 hav...

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 f...

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 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...

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...

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 s...

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 researc...

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 p...

When a group of amateur investors rallied around the stock for GameStop back in 2021, the story blew up the internet. News outlets around the world, including us here at Planet Money , rushed in to explain why the stock for this retail video game company was suddenly skyrocketing, at times by as much as 1700% in value, and what that meant for the rest of us. When movie producer Aaron Ryder saw the...

Erin Plante is a private detective who specializes in chasing down stolen cryptocurrency. In March of 2022, she got the biggest assignment of her career: Hackers had broken into an online game called Axie Infinity and made off with over $600 million worth of digital money. It was the largest crypto heist in history. And now it was Erin's job to find that money and get it back. Erin's investigation...

In China, data on the economy is sometimes difficult to come by. The Chinese government has put a pause on releasing some of its official economic data. But many of the stories emerging from the country paint a clear picture: the second largest economy in the world is struggling. Today, our friends at The Indicator share some of their recent reporting on China. First up, it's a special edition of...