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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# 454 The Lollipop War
Sugar costs more in the U.S. than in the rest ...
Sugar costs more in the U.S. than in the rest of the world. If you're in the candy business — if, say, you make 10 lollipops a day — that's a big deal.On today's show, we visit a candy factory in Ohio (where they want U.S. sugar to be cheaper) and a sugar-beet field in Minnesota (where they don't). And, perhaps inevitably, we hear from Washington, where the fight over sugar has been playing out for years.For more, read our post from earlier today. Subscribe to the podcast. Find us Twitter/Facebook/Flickr.
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#453: What Causes What?
What causes what? The human brain is programmed to answer ...
What causes what? The human brain is programmed to answer this question constantly. This how we survive. What made that noise? Bear made that noise. What caused my hand to hurt? Fire caused my hand to hurt.We are so eager to figure what causes what — that we often get it wrong. I wore my lucky hat to the game. My team won. Therefore, my lucky hat caused my team to win.On today's show we dive deep into the world of correlation and causation with Charles Wheelan, author of the new book, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data. Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;mso-style-noshow:yes;mso-style-parent:"";mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-para-margin:0in;mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:#0400;mso-fareast-language:#0400;mso-bidi-language:#0400;}
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#357: How Much Should We Trust Economics?
Three years ago, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a ...
Three years ago, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a study that quickly became one of the most famous, most talked about economics papers since the financial crisis. It got so much attention because it answered a basic question everybody was asking: How much debt is too much? Reinhart and Rogoff looked at what had happened in many different countries over many years. And they found a what looked like a clear debt threshold: 90 percent. Average growth was much, much slower in countries with debt-to-gdp ratios over 90 percent. The paper got a lot of coverage in the press. Politicians cited it in the U.S. and Europe. Then, this week, a 28-year-old grad student and his professors published a startling finding: Reinhart and Rogoff had made a simple Excel error in one part of their study. The authors of the new critique also questioned other elements of the study and argued that, in fact, there is no debt threshold. On today's show, we hear from the grad student who found the error. And we ask: How much should we trust economics?
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#356: The Surprisingly Entertaining History of The Income Tax
The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income ...
The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income tax. For most of American history, there was no income tax at all. At one point it was ruled unconstitutional. Today, income tax is the federal government's main source of revenue. That raises a question: How did something that was once so strange to us become so central? The answer includes a few wars, a Supreme Court justice on his deathbed, and Donald Duck. For More: Read our post, "From Abe Lincoln To Donald Duck: History Of The Income Tax."And see War and Taxes, the book Joe Thorndike co-wrote. Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Nero's "The Promise" and Danny Kaye's "I Paid My Income Tax Today." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Note: This podcast was originally published last year.
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#451: Why Some People Love Tax Day
Last year, a federal program took about $60 billion from ...
Last year, a federal program took about $60 billion from wealthier Americans and gave it to the working poor. This program — a massive redistribution of wealth --has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.On today's show, we look at a huge, often overlooked, surprisingly interesting corner of the tax code: The Earned Income Tax Credit.For more, see our story A Surprisingly Uncontroversial Program That Gives Money To Poor People.
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#450: Bitcoin Goes To The Moon
Since the start of the year, the Japanese yen has ...
Since the start of the year, the Japanese yen has risen by about 12 percent against the dollar. The euro has fallen by about 1 percent. Then there's bitcoin, a virtual currency that doesn't even exist in the physical world. In the past few months, the value of bitcoin has risen by more than 1,000 percent — from less than $20 per bitcoin a few months ago to more than $200 today. On today's show, we ask: Is a skyrocketing value a good thing or a bad thing for bitcoin?
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#449: The Hidden Digital Wealth In Your Pocket
We have secondary markets for almost everything. If you no ...
We have secondary markets for almost everything. If you no longer want that old record or CD, you can sell it to a thrift store, used record store, or on Craigslist or eBay. But what about songs from your iTunes library you no longer want? Today on the show, the story of a company that tried to set up an online marketplace where people can buy and sell old mp3s, and what happened to them. It involves a law from 1976, a phonorecord, and a judge that quotes Star Trek. For more on the legal arguments around selling used digital media: Is It Legal To Sell Your Old MP3s? Update: Is It Legal To Sell Your Old MP3s? Judge Says No.* Lawyer Rick Sander blog. Bill Rosenblatt's blog, "Copyright and Technology."
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#448: Coney Island Back In Business
When Hurricane Sandy struck, it devastated businesses all over New ...
When Hurricane Sandy struck, it devastated businesses all over New York City. One area hit particularly hard was Coney Island, an iconic New York beach at the tip of South Brooklyn. At the time, we reported on the damage to a family-owned amusement park, Deno's Wonderwheel Amusement Park, home to the Wonder Wheel, bumper cars, and the Spook-A-Rama. We reported that the place was basically doomed. But it turns out, our report was a kind of premature obituary for the business. We return to the amusement park, about 5 months after the storm, and find things shockingly normal. Businesses like Deno's are back and some of them are thriving. On today's show, an economic case study. What brought Coney Island back so quickly?
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#290: North Korea's Illegal Economy
Note: This podcast was originally published in 2011. With North ...
Note: This podcast was originally published in 2011. With North Korea in the news again this week, we're re-running it today. North Korea relies on charity to feed its starving people. But the country's elites like their luxuries — imported wine, fine china, dancing shoes. To buy those things, they need foreign currency. (North Korean currency is worthless outside of North Korea.) To get foreign currency, they need to sell things to the outside world. But North Korea's industrial base is a disaster, and the country doesn't grow enough food to feed itself. On today's Planet Money, we look at the ways North Korea's leaders have managed to keep foreign currency flowing into the country. Their strategies include manufacturing drugs, counterfeiting U.S. dollars, and selling gigantic statues to foreign leaders. For more at www.npr.org/money.
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#447: The Con Man Who Took Down His Own Country (Then Ran For Office)
A few years back, the Kenyan government wanted to encourage ...
A few years back, the Kenyan government wanted to encourage exports. So the government said to local businesses: For every $100 of stuff you sell to someone outside Kenya, we'll give you Kenyan shillings worth another $20. A con artist saw an opportunity. He launched a company that exported nonexistent gold for nonexistent dollars, and collected a real government bonus. Then, when he was about to get caught, he started his own bank. That's when the scam really took off. On today's show: How one guy pulled off one of the largest financial scams in Kenyan history, avoided prison, re-branded himself as a man of God, and ran for a seat in parliament.
