Planet Money

How does a poor country become a rich country? There's a simple blueprint — or at least, that's what many economists used to believe. But over the years, a lot of rapidly developing economies have sta...

Do you work more for more money? Or work less for more time? For some, this is the ultimate economic choice.  Every single worker in the European Union is guaranteed four weeks of paid vacation. No m...

If you have a credit card, hope to buy a house, or just want stable grocery prices – let’s talk about the future of Fed independence! It’s impossibly important for the Federal Reserve to steer moneta...

Recently, a listener wrote in with a question about OPEC and oil prices. She was prepping for a camping trip… thinking about how much it costs to fill up her diesel-guzzling camper van at the pump.  ...

Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes competition. She – and a Nobel Prize winning economist – were on the team that negotiated a ...

Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game’s highest paid players. He took the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series three times. Then he got traded to the Phillies. He d...

In the world of commercial publishing, there are few crowning achievements more coveted than a place on the New York Times Best Seller List. But how does a book actually end up there? There is, of cou...

It’s way more than fuel costs that pushed Spirit Airlines to the brink of liquidation and led President Trump to muse about “buying” them. Many low cost airlines are struggling due to a canny and calc...

At one point in history, one U.S. company monopolized the rare earths industry. Then China took over the industry. Can the U.S. bring it back? Rare earths are critical to making, like, everything. Fr...

We talk with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Chief Economist at Redfin Daryl Fairweather about two of the biggest issues of our time: AI and housing.  We have been crisscrossing America doing liv...