Latest Planet Money episodes

Driving a truck used to mean freedom. Now it means a mountain of debt. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The surprisingly entertaining history of the income tax.

Why won't some people wear masks? Is there anything we can do to convince them? We look to behavioral economics for help. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The economics of free trade and what happens when governments get involved.

The pandemic is transforming college from a can't-miss into a can't-attend experience. Can colleges survive? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Class 4 brings us an economic conundrum: how do you efficiently share a scarce resource? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

Rest of the Story, Pandemic Edition We check in on the people we've met and stories we've covered since this whole thing started. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In our third class, we take all that we've learned about decisions and markets and bring it to a former drug kingpin. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

First lesson: Economics is not about money. It's a lens of great power and beauty. In this episode, we meet our teachers and learn the first four fundamental concepts of economic thinking, and watch them applied to things like dating and hailing a cab. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In 2005, an anonymous list of the best unmade scripts in Hollywood shook up the movie biz. This episode: how a math-loving, movie nerd solved Hollywood's script problem. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

In our second class, we meet our old friends supply and demand and do graphs using only the power of the human voice. Then, we show you how markets can be created anywhere by telling the story of a food bank that had too many pickles and not enough pancake syrup. It's economics to the rescue. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.