13 items
A Planet Money episode, hosted by Kenny Malone, on why companies are now getting billions of dollars back in IEEPA tariff refunds after courts ruled the tariffs illegal, while consumers who paid the higher prices mostly have no way to get their money back.
A Planet Money episode, hosted by Jeff Guo, that visits the Louisville beverage-development lab Flavorman. It gives three reasons the drink aisle keeps growing: advances in flavor science, new functional ingredients, and much lower barriers to manufacturing.
The manufacturing story is the core of the episode. Canning lines used to require a full-truckload minimum of about 12,000 cases. Then the craft-beer boom left thousands of small breweries with spare canning capacity, and falling alcohol consumption has added even more, so upstart brands can now do small test runs. A smaller detail: a stinky-cheese aroma compound turns up in ripe strawberries, and without it a berry flavor tastes flat.
Argues that AI won't transform how large companies work simply by letting everyone build their own tools, since most people aren't tool-builders and most workflows need organization-wide buy-in, audit, and process — the same adoption curve seen historically with PCs, spreadsheets, and the early web.
A Planet Money episode on the shift from earlier to later retirement — a law professor argues for mandatory retirement at 70, while an economist argues people should delay retirement even further, as younger workers say older workers staying on is squeezing career advancement.
NPR's Planet Money traces how viatical settlements, deals letting AIDS patients sell life insurance policies for cash in the early 1990s, evolved into a multi-billion-dollar Wall Street market where investors buy bundled policies from healthy retirees and bet on aggregate mortality.
Healthcare Triage (in partnership with AcademyHealth) breaks down why US health care spending, at about 18% of GDP and nearly double many peer countries, keeps rising: not one villain but a stack of higher prices, rising utilization of new treatments added on top of old ones, coverage gaps, administrative overhead, and underfunded chronic-disease prevention.
NPR's Planet Money Summer School examines how Norway avoided the 'resource curse' after discovering oil, contrasting its disciplined management of oil wealth with its scramble to create foreign demand for a domestic glut of salmon.
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research policy brief synthesizing recent labor-economics research on AI's effect on jobs: aggregate employment impact looks small so far, entry-level hiring in exposed occupations has weakened since 2022, productivity effects are positive but uneven, and firm adoption is accelerating unevenly across sectors.
Benn Jordan coins 'leveragism' to describe an economic system where concentrated capital extracts wealth through leverage rather than productive growth. Traces the mechanism from the Bretton Woods gold standard through the petrodollar, private equity debt traps, housing financialization, and AI investment cycles.
Applies Jevons Paradox to AI inference — per-token costs dropped 1000x since 2022 but total spend is up 10x because usage exploded. The key insight is that agent costs grow quadratically with turns, not linearly, because each step feeds the full conversation history back as context.