Search

To work in many occupations, people need to get a license. Licenses are issued by states and usually require some kind of education or training, test, and/or fee. Licensing exists to protect consumers from untrained, unqualified workers. But there’s another side to licensing. Listen to learn about how licensing also offers economic benefits to people in licensed professions as it keeps others out of the job market.

In the early 2000s, housing prices in the U.S. rose quickly, and many people paid high prices to buy houses. In 2008, the housing market collapsed and prices fell fast. Many of the folks who had bought homes couldn’t make their monthly mortgage payments and couldn’t sell the houses for anywhere near what they paid for them. Many lost their homes to foreclosure. In 2012, an enterprising 14-year-old girl in Florida saw a business opportunity from the housing crisis. She started selling things that people had left in their foreclosed homes, eventually saving enough money to buy a house herself, which she rents out. Listen to learn how a 14-year-old became a real estate entrepreneur.

This story explores an important economic question: When a kid loses a tooth, how much should the tooth fairy pay? That may sound like a joke, but the tooth fairy’s payoff provides an example of inflation—the amount the price of goods increases each year—and of the economic principle called “income elasticity of demand.” Listen to the story to find out what teeth are going for these days, and what economists have to say about it.

How people have made artificial light over the past 4,000 years reflects the history of economic growth in the world. One economist has explored the cost of light, starting in ancient Babylonian times and ending in the 1990s. He discovered that for most of the past four millennia, light was very expensive. Then, in the past 200 years, scientific advances caused the cost of light to drop precipitously, and economies grew with a speed and intensity unknown before. Listen to hear how light became cheap and how its cost helps show how economic growth happens.

Some basic economic norms shape how most retail stores operate. These include: attract as many potential shoppers as possible; make it easy for them to find what they need; and make it appealing for them to return often so that they will spend money at the store. But some members-only warehouse stores break all those rules--and succeed anyway. Listen to find out why these stores do it differently, and why, despite breaking the rules of retail, they thrive.

Chances are, you’re wearing something made from cotton. You can check the label on most garments to find out where they were made. But where was the cotton grown that was the starting point? This story tracks down the source of the cotton that went into a T-shirt. A spinning mill in Indonesia is where the fabric may have been made, and the cotton fields of Mississippi is where the cotton may have been grown. But cotton is grown all over the world. Why would a textile mill in Indonesia buy cotton from the U.S. when they can get it from much closer? Listen to this story to find out how technology and subsidies give American cotton farmers an advantage in international trade.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in which he predicted that by the time his children were grown up, people would be working just 15 hours a week. Today, in some countries, people do work a bit less than they did fifty years ago, but Keynes’s prediction was essentially wrong. There is a counter-intuitive response to incentives, and that is one factor that keeps people working long hours. According to his descendants, Keynes himself was a workhorse who couldn’t slow down. Listen to this audio story to learn more about Keynes and why making money doesn’t necessarily free us to work less.

Scarcity is a basic economic problem: people have unlimited wants and needs, but the world has limited resources. Resources in that equation include materials, capital, and labor. A pasta factory in southern Italy faced a very particular sort of labor shortage. The Barilla pasta factory in Foggia, Italy had enough employees to keep up with production schedules, but the employees weren’t showing up to work. The absentee rate among workers threatened the survival of the plant. Listen to the story to learn how bosses and managers changed employees’ attitudes and behavior and solved their scarcity issue.

People often speculate about whether the Federal Reserve will raise the interest rate or keep it where it is. The Federal Reserve is charged with the responsibility of keeping the U.S. economy on track, and it has the power to raise and lower the interest rate as well as create money. That’s just what it did in response to the financial crisis of 2008—it created three trillion dollars to prop the economy up. Now that the economy has more or less recovered, all that money poses a threat. Listen to this story to find out why and to learn what the Federal Reserve intends to do about it.

Household management involves using resources wisely and being thrifty to stay within a budget. The word “economy” comes from the Greek word for household management, oikonomia. This management is difficult when people have too little money to buy what they need, which was the case for many after the stock market crashed in 1929. In an effort to make sense of what was going on, members of the U.S. government began to talk about what they called “the economy,” and they developed methods to quantify the situation and account for economic fluctuations. Listen to the story to learn more about the invention of what we call the economy and some of the means by which we measure its strength.

Making a T-shirt takes a lot of time, but it can be made cheaply. The origins of your T-shirts probably come from Mississippi, where cotton is grown, and the shirts were probably spun in Indonesia. In this story, reporters track the assembly of a T-shirt to Bangladesh and try to understand why that Asian country is currently "the cheapest place in the world to make a T-shirt." Bangladesh has established a specialization in garment production, and Bangladeshi garment factories further specialize in the production of cotton garments. Listen to the story to learn how these factories manage to undercut the prices of their competitors in other major garment producing countries and what the future may hold in store for them.

Food banks distribute billions of pounds of food each year throughout the United States to hungry children and adults. The Feeding America network is the nation’s largest organization working to end hunger. But it had a problem. The food banks were receiving large donations of food, but not necessarily the kinds of foods they needed. For example, one center received lots of pickles, but not enough produce. To solve this problem the Feeding America network created a market economy in order to distribute food among it’s food banks. Using fake money, the food banks created a market that assures better allocation of food across the distribution centers. Listen to the story to learn more about how market economics solved their allocation problem.

Millions of people invest billions of dollars in the stock market to make their money grow. Some pool their money with other investors in high risk investment vehicles known as hedge funds. Hedge fund managers employ a variety of strategies with the goal of doing better than the stock market as a whole. The third richest person in the world, Warren Buffett, made a $1 million bet that he could beat the earnings of any hedge fund with his own investments in low-risk index funds. A hedge fund manager took him up on the challenge. Listen to the story to learn who is on his way to winning the bet and why.

Note: At the end of the 10 year time period, Warren Buffett won the bet as the index funds outperformed actively managed hedge funds.

Nurses save lives. They practice in a variety of traditional healthcare settings, and classifications of nurses earn different salaries. On average, nursing salaries in the United States are 7% higher than the average job salary nationwide. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that nursing will be among the ten fastest growing occupations of the next decade. For people who want a good-paying, stable nursing job, one class stands in the way: Anatomy and Physiology. Listen to learn how one technical college adapted its nursing program to increase its rate of student success.

The Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. It is responsible for the effective operation of the U.S. economy and conducts the nation’s monetary policy, stabilizes prices and moderates interest rates, and promotes the safety of individual financial institutions. In 1907, J. P. Morgan organized other leading financiers to backstop a run on banks and bring an end to a nationwide financial crisis. Later, with the encouragement of a powerful senator, a group of New York bankers went on to develop a plan for a central bank that was eventually adopted and that is still in effect today. Listen to the story to learn more about the formation of the Federal Reserve and America’s central banks by Congress.

What should the government spend its money on? With a growing national debt this has become an important question. Economists see the government’s role in providing goods and services to be one that fills a need. The government should pay for things that make our lives better but that the private market cannot or will not provide. Listen to this story from Planet Money to learn the reasons why government has decided to pay for public goods such as lighthouses and autopsies.

The United States economy has experienced slow but steady growth since the 2007-2009 recession. Historically, one result of an improving economy should be an increase in the overall level of prices – inflation. This has not been the case, however, and inflation has stayed low. Inflation has remained low in part because most people don’t worry about it rising, and they aren’t rushing to buy products before they go up in price. Listen to this story from Planet Money and hear what low inflation sounds like, and how your behavior can directly affect whether prices rise or fall.