Planet Money

In the early 90s, when a young economist named Michael Kremer finished his PhD, there had been a few economic studies based on randomized trials. But they were rare. In part because randomized trials –…

(Note: This episode originally ran back in 2022.) This past weekend, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had the second largest domestic opening of 2023, netting (or should we say webbing?) over $120 million in its opening…

It’s the thrilling conclusion to our three-part series on AI — the world premiere of the first episode of Planet Money written by AI. In Part 1 of this series, we taught AI how to…

In Part 1 of this series, AI proved that it could use real research and real interviews to write an original script for an episode of Planet Money. Our next task was to teach the…

We used to think some jobs were safe from automation. Though machines have transformed industries like agriculture and manufacturing, the conventional wisdom was that they could never perform what’s called “knowledge work.” That the robots…

Lyle Jack wants to build a wind farm on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. But to make the project work, he has to connect that wind farm to the electric grid. Which is…

It’s time for another installment of … Planet Money Predictions! *air horn* Last year, we invited two economic forecasters to tell us what they saw coming for jobs, the housing market, and inflation. And now…

For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to…

Economists say that inflation is just too much money chasing too few goods. But something else can make inflation stick around. If you think of the 1970s, the last time the U.S. had really high…

(Note: this episode originally ran in 2019.) In the 1800s, catching your train on time was no easy feat. Every town had its own “local time,” based on the position of the sun in the…