Planet Money

  • Cutting school… by 20%

    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…

  • How unions are stopped before they start

    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…

  • Indicator exploder: jobs and inflation

    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?…

  • Maria Bamford gets personal (about) finance

    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…

  • Why the price of Coke didn’t change for 70 years (classic)

    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…

  • A man, a plan, wind power, Uruguay

    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…

  • The flight attendants of CHAOS

    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…

  • A trucker hat mystery, the curse of September and other listener questions

    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…

  • The natural disaster economist

    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 black market, a currency crisis, and a tango competition in Argentina

    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…

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