We all know the government uses taxes to pay for things. But what about using taxes to control behavior? This week on Summer School, Professor Darrick Hamilton of The New School, helps us explore the true power of the tax code. Can taxes help lift people out of poverty? What about saving the planet?
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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 and deep statistical analysis…
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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 centered on a powerful…
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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,…
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There Will Be Flood
Windell Curole spent decades working to protect his community in southern Louisiana from the destructive flooding caused by hurricanes. His local office in South Lafourche partnered with the federal government’s Army Corps of Engineers to…
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George Soros vs. the Bank of England
As people learn more about Donald Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, one story comes up over and over: a legendary trade that he played a small part in while he worked at George…
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How useful, really, are the steps you can take after a data breach?
The dreaded data breach notification… It tells you your personal data’s been compromised and suggests steps you can take to minimize the potential harm. On today’s episode, Kenny Malone pulls out a data breach letter…
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Why you bought your couch
You probably own a chair or a table or a sofa. And you probably think you know why you bought it. Because it was comfy. Or blue. Or the right price. But what if the…
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Title Pirates
A couple years ago, Gina Leto, a real estate developer, bought a property with her business partner. The process went like it usually did: Lots of paperwork; a virtual closing. Pretty cut-and-dry. Gina and her…
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The long view of economics and immigration (Two Indicators)
Mass deportations. What would actually happen—economically—if the President-elect follows through on promises to deport millions of people from America. We don’t have to guess. Today we have two stories from Planet Money’s daily podcast, The…
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The great German land lottery
Every ten years, a group of German farmers gather in the communal farm fields of the Osing for the Osingverlosung, a ritual dating back centuries. Osing refers to the area. And verlosung means “lottery,” as…