The potato-shaped loophole in free trade
Ever since free trade opened up between the US and Mexico in the 1990s, trillions of dollars of goods have been going back and forth between the two countries, from cars to strawberries to MRI machine...
3 Jan 202527min
If AI is so good, why are there still so many jobs for translators?
If you believe the hype, translators will all soon be out of work. Luis von Ahn, CEO and co-founder of the language learning app Duolingo, doesn't think AI is quite there... yet. In this interview, Gr...
30 Dec 202417min
The Rest of the Story, 2024
After the gift exchange comes another great holiday tradition: returns season. Once again, we are joining the fun in our own Planet Money way. We are returning to stories from years past to see what's...
27 Dec 202428min
The Indicators of this year and next
This year, there was some economic good news to go around. Inflation generally ticked down. Unemployment more or less held around 4-percent. Heck, the Fed even cut interest rates three times. But for ...
25 Dec 202422min
The habitat banker
Our planet is in serious trouble. There are a million species of plants and animals in danger of extinction, and the biggest cause is companies destroying their habitats to farm food, mine minerals, a...
20 Dec 202433min
How sports gambling blew up
Sports gambling isn't exactly a financial market, but it rhymes with financial markets. What happens on Wall Street somehow eventually also happens in sports gambling. So in the 1980s, when computers ...
18 Dec 202430min
A Nobel prize for explaining why there's global inequality
Why do some nations fail and others succeed?In the late 1990s and early 2000s, three economists formed a partnership that would revolutionize how economists think about global inequality. Their work c...
14 Dec 202428min
Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (update)
The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them?Today on the show, we tell the nearly 100-year-old story of Smoot and Hawley, ...
11 Dec 202426min
