NPR: Planet Money
Money makes the world go around, faster and faster every day. On NPR's Planet Money, you'll meet high rollers, brainy economists and regular folks -- all trying to make sense of our rapidly changing global economy.
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#497: Love, Betrayal And The Planet Money T-Shirt
Today's show is about love and betrayal. It's about the ...
Today's show is about love and betrayal. It's about the lives of two sisters who worked on the Planet Money T-shirt. And it's about the social upheaval that has followed the rise of the garment industry in Bangladesh. We'll have much more on Bangladesh and the rest of the T-shirt story in future shows. Here are our previous stories from the series.
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#496: Where The Planet Money T-Shirt Began
After years of planning and months of production, the Planet ...
After years of planning and months of production, the Planet Money T-shirts are here. They'll be in the mail soon. We promise.The shirts were touched by people in rich countries with advanced degrees and by people working for some of the lowest wages in the world. They traveled thousands of miles across three continents.Over the next several weeks, we'll tell the story of the shirts, and of the world behind them. Today, we begin at the beginning: where the cotton in our shirt came from.
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#495: The Weird Inner Workings Of The Payday Loan Business
Payday lenders made about $49 billion in high-interest loans last ...
Payday lenders made about $49 billion in high-interest loans last year. More than forty percent of those loans were made online. On today's show, we go looking for the people making these loans and find a bizarre online marketplace where people's personal financial information is bought and sold. Plus, we talk to state regulators about why it's so hard to police high interest lending happening online.
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#494: What Happens When You Just Give Money To Poor People?
There's a charity called GiveDirectly that gives money to poor ...
There's a charity called GiveDirectly that gives money to poor people in Kenya — no strings attached. When we did a story about GiveDirectly earlier this year, they told us we needed to check back in. It turned out, they were in the middle of a big study designed to figure out what happens when people get money for nothing. Do they invest it? Waste it? Something in between? Now, the results of the study are in. On today's show: What happens when you give farmers in Kenya more money than they've ever had? Also: giving money to thieves and drug addicts in a country that's much worse off than Kenya.
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#462: When Patents Hit the Podcast
Note: This episode originally aired in May of 2013. Back ...
Note: This episode originally aired in May of 2013. Back in the nineties, Jim Logan started a company called Personal Audio. The concept was simple — people could pick out magazine articles they liked on the internet, and his company would send them a cassette tape of those articles being read out loud. The cassette tapes didn't catch on like Jim hoped, but he had bigger dreams for the idea behind them.He dreamed that one day you wouldn't need a cassette player, you would just be able to hear smart people talking about whatever subject you wanted, and that audio would be magically downloaded to a device of your choice. He says he dreamed of podcasting as we know it today.Now Jim Logan did not create the technology to podcast. He himself is not a modern-day podcaster. But he did get a patent on that big dream of downloading personalized audio, and he claims to have the patent on podcasting.On today's show, he says all the people out there podcasting today, owe him money.
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#493: What's A Bubble? (Nobel Edition)
On today's show, we talk to Eugene Fama and Robert ...
On today's show, we talk to Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller, who shared this year's economics Nobel. Shiller is a famous explainer of bubbles; Fama is a famous bubble skeptic.
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#377: Can Lincoln Be Cool Again?
Lincolns used to be the coolest cars in the world. ...
Lincolns used to be the coolest cars in the world. They used to be driven by kings, moguls and celebrities. Today, Lincolns are driven by the old, the out-of-touch, and the guys hustling you at the airport. On today's show: How Lincoln is trying to regain its former glory — and how the story of Lincoln may be the story of the U.S. auto industry, for better or for worse. Note: This episode was originally posted last year.
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#492: M. Erb's Amazon Empire
We recently became obsessed with a strange, select club:The top ...
We recently became obsessed with a strange, select club:The top rated reviewers on Amazon. These are ordinary people — not Amazon employees — who write and record hundreds of astonishingly detailed reviews on Amazon. At this moment, Amazon's number 1 reviewer is Michael Erb (Amazon screen name, M. Erb). He's has reviewed more than 850 products, ranging from telescopes to facial wipes. On today's show, we talk to Erb and another top reviewer, and we try to figure out: Why do they spend so much time and effort reviewing stuff on Amazon?
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#391: The Anti-Addiction Pill That's Big Business For Drug Dealers
There's a pill called Suboxone that treats addiction to heroin ...
There's a pill called Suboxone that treats addiction to heroin and pain pills like oxycontin. Doctors and addicts say it's amazing. "It was the best thing that ever happened," one heroin addict told us. "I was like OH. MY. LORD. This is a miracle pill." The government spent tens of millions of dollars developing Suboxone. Doctors can prescribe it in their offices. But a lot of people who want it can't get it from a doctor, so they have to buy it on the street. Today on the show: Why people have to turn to drug dealers to get a pill that fights addiction. Note: This episode was originally posted last year. For more, see this paper on the history of Suboxone. Download the Planet Money iPhone App. Music: POP ETC's "Keep It For Your Own" and Snoop Dogg's "Whistle While You Hustle." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr.
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#407: A Mathematician, The Last Supper And The Birth Of Accounting
On the show today, the story of an innovation that ...
On the show today, the story of an innovation that changed the way the world works, and of the man who made this innovation possible. Luca Pacioli was a monk, a mathematician, a magician and possibly, the boyfriend of Leonardo da Vinci.Jane Gleeson-White, author of Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, tells us the story of Pacioli and how his book on mathematics changed business across the planet.Note: This episode was originally posted last year. Download the Planet Money iPhone App. Music: Noah & The Whale's "Tonight's the Kind of Night." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr
