Planet Money

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money's Summer School examines two African economic experiments: Nigeria's You Win competition, which distributed $60 million in cash grants to small businesses via randomized selection, generating 7,000 jobs at $8,500 per job, and Kenya's Busia town, where randomized controlled trials reshaped global development economics and earned researchers a Nobel Prize.

→ WHAT IT COVERS A 2025 cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms shredded lettuce — affecting 1,600+ confirmed cases across 27 states — exposes two parallel systems: the consolidation of America's $multi-billion bagged salad industry and the FDA's still-incomplete overhaul of farm-level food safety regulation. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Supply chain amplification risk:** When vegetables from multiple farms are commingled at large processing facilities, a single contamination event multiplies across...

→ WHAT IT COVERS NPR's Embedded podcast launches "We Keep Us Safe," a true crime investigative series examining the 2020 CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle, where a 16-year-old named Antonio Mays Jr. was killed during a protest occupation spanning eight city blocks. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Autonomous Zone Dynamics:** The 2020 Seattle CHOP zone covered eight city blocks after police abandoned their precinct, initially functioning as a self-organized community with mutual aid stations, free food, and...

→ WHAT IT COVERS MLS teams are deploying three distinct strategies to convert World Cup 2026 momentum into long-term domestic soccer fans and revenue, ranging from hosting local matches to staging massive watch parties to recruiting elite international players by showcasing upgraded training facilities across the United States and Canada. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Host City Leverage:** MLS teams in World Cup host cities, like the New England Revolution, spent years lobbying FIFA to secure local match...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money's Summer School examines China's "engineering state" model through two case studies: the Evergrande real estate collapse and youth unemployment hitting 21%, guided by Hoover Institution fellow Dan Wang, author of Breakneck, exploring what the US can learn from China's build-first economic philosophy and its consequences.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Chanel sued luxury reseller The RealReal in 2018 after discovering seven allegedly counterfeit bags on the platform, challenging whether third-party authentication can reliably verify luxury goods and whether the $30+ billion secondhand luxury market has the legal right to operate independently of original brands. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Authentication Four Pillars:** The RealReal's authentication framework evaluates materials (touch, smell, texture), construction quality...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money Summer School launches its international economics series, using Australia and New Zealand as case studies. University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers guides listeners through Australia's water trading market and New Zealand's invention of inflation targeting, examining how market design and central bank credibility shape economic outcomes.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money explores how game theory transforms soccer penalty shootouts, using economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta's penalty database and the 2008 Champions League final to show how mixed strategies and data analysis now determine outcomes. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Mixed Strategy Execution:** Elite penalty kickers must randomize shots between strong and weak sides to avoid predictability.

→ WHAT IT COVERS The Trump Department of Education caps federal graduate student loans at roughly $21,000 per year starting July 1, 2025, reversing the unlimited Grad PLUS program created in 2006. The policy tests the decades-old "Bennett hypothesis" — that restricting student aid forces universities to lower tuition — against $1.7 trillion in total student loan debt.

→ WHAT IT COVERS General Magic, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 1991, built a functional smartphone prototype nearly two decades before the iPhone. Despite backing from Apple, AT&T, Sony, and Motorola, the device sold fewer than 3,000 units. Journalist David Epstein and Apple/iPod engineer Tony Fadell analyze why abundant resources destroyed the project. → KEY INSIGHTS - **The Constraint Paradox:** Excess resources kill creative focus.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money shares a ThruLine history of prediction markets, tracing their origins from 19th-century New York street-corner election betting through the 1988 founding of the Iowa Electronic Markets by three University of Iowa economists, and explaining why modern platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket follow the same core trading rules established 37 years ago.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money uses the 1979 film Alien and its fictional corporation Weyland Yutani as a lens to examine real labor economics concepts — monopsony power, shrouded contract attributes, and compensating differentials — with labor economist Arindrajit Dube and Alien Romulus director Fede Alvarez explaining how these dynamics shape modern worker pay.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Cybersecurity researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS) of SentinelOne uncovers FAST 16, a mid-2000s piece of malware buried in a leaked NSA list, and uses AI-assisted reverse engineering to reveal its likely mission: sabotaging Iranian nuclear weapons calculations by corrupting high-precision physics simulations. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Cyber Paleontology as Intelligence Method:** Reverse engineering archived malware fragments from public repositories can reconstruct classified...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Urban tree protection laws across U.S. cities are redrawing property rights boundaries. Portland homeowner Sarah Bond was denied a permit to remove a 100-foot leaning Douglas fir, which later collapsed on her house. A parallel legal battle in Canton, Michigan reached the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, reshaping how permit fees can be calculated. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Urban Tree Permit Systems:** Hundreds of U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money examines two housing affordability levers: whether restricting corporate landlords actually reduces costs, and how the near-elimination of single room occupancy buildings since the 1970s removed roughly one million ultra-affordable housing units from American cities. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Corporate landlord scale:** Institutional investors account for under 1% of national home purchases, making them a minor factor in housing costs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS The $70 billion U.S. supplement industry operates under regulations so lax that companies need not prove products work or contain labeled ingredients before selling them. Planet Money explores how a 1994 law, consumer backlash, and a jellyfish memory pill expose the regulatory gaps enabling this fast-growing market. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Label language as a red flag:** When a supplement label says "supports" or "promotes" a function — such as "supports metabolism" instead of...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money and Hyperfixed investigate why three Wetzel's Pretzels locations operate within one minute's walking distance inside Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue Barclays Center Station. The episode traces the economics of impulse-purchase franchising through Wetzel's corporate strategy and franchisee Ricky Alom's 17-location pretzel business. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Impulse vs. Destination Spectrum:** Products fall on a spectrum from pure impulse to pure destination purchases.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money investigates how a Peruvian plant-based protein called Terra Flower entered the U.S. food supply without FDA knowledge, poisoned hundreds of people, caused 42 gallbladder removals, and exposed the GRAS loophole that allows companies to self-certify new chemical additives as safe without government review. → KEY INSIGHTS - **The GRAS Loophole Scale:** 99% of chemicals currently in U.S.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money traces the full lifecycle of the Malta pension loophole — how tax lawyers exploited a 2008 US-Malta tax treaty to shelter billions in capital gains, how the IRS fought to close it via the "dirty dozen" list and a proposed disclosure rule, and how the effort stalled under the Trump administration. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Loophole anatomy:** Tax loopholes often emerge from ambiguous treaty language, not deliberate fraud.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Planet Money travels to Manaus, Brazil — a 2-million-person manufacturing city built in the Amazon rainforest through 1967 government tax incentives — to examine why Brazil's industrialization strategy stalled, and what the "middle income trap" means for developing economies seeking a path to prosperity. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Middle Income Trap:** World Bank economists identified that most countries stall after reaching middle-income status.