Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

On the eve of Netflix shoveling a fourish-hour chunk of Stranger Things onto Christmas Day, we visit the past, present, and future of binge-dropped television shows. 


The strategy of releasing an entire season at the same time has been key to taking Netflix from a little startup that used to lend us DVDs in the mail … to a company so big and powerful, it is maybe going to buy Warner Brothers and own Bugs Bunny and Tony Soprano and the Harry Potter movies.


But even Netflix may be flirting with some slightly less binge-y models of content release. Are we entering … the end of the binge drop?


On our latest: what data tells us about binge watching. Was it the greatest business decision, and who does binge watching really benefit? 


Here’s some of the research. 


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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Meg Cramer. It was fact-checked by Dania Suleman and engineered by Maggie Luthar. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Would you pay a professional $2,500 or more to put up your holiday lights? Zachary Crockett is walking in a winter wonderland.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Chuck Smith, creator of Planet Christmas.
  • Dean Lyons, founder and CEO of Bright Nights.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "The Suburban Maximalists Making Viral Christmas Displays," by Graham Hacia (WIRED, 2017).
  • "Incandescent vs. LED Christmas Lights: How Much Does it Impact Your Power Bill?," by Kelly Bedrich (Electricity Plans).
  • "Why Christmas Light Installation Is a Great Add-on Service for Contractors," (Sprinkler School).
  • Brite Nites.
  • Planet Christmas.

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "How Christmas Lights Are Made," (Insider, 2018).

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As a country, we are spending more to get data centers up and running than we spent to build the entire interstate highway system. (Yes, that’s inflation-adjusted.) With tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, data centers have kind of become the thing in the US economy. 

But along with that growth have come a lot of questions. Like where is all the electricity to run these data centers supposed to come from? And how much are residential customers’ electric bills increasing as a result?

On today’s episode, we go to Ohio to trace one electric bill back to its source, to see what exactly is causing the big price increases people are seeing. We take a tour of a data center hot spot, and get to the bottom of how prices are set from inside the power company.

Related episodes:
- Asking for a friend … which jobs are safe from AI? 
- No AI data centers in my backyard! 
- What $10 billion in data centers actually gets you 
- Is AI overrated or underrated? 
- Green energy gridlock

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Today's show was hosted by Keith Romer and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact checked by Sierra Juarez and Vito Emanuel. It was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. 

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Welcome to the inaugural Planet Money Pop Culture Draft! In today's episode (a Planet Money+ episode we’re releasing into the main feed) we're gonna go back to the year 1999. Three hosts, Kenny Malone, Wailin Wong, and Jeff Guo, go head to head and each drafts a “team” of economic pop culture. So a movie, a song, and a wild card pick that best represents the Planet Money spirit!

It could be a movie related to business or maybe a song about money … as long as it came out in 1999! Listen to hear each of them make the case for why their team should be crowned the winner!

If you want more bonus episodes like this one and to support our work, sign up for Planet Money+.

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This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone, Wailin Wong, and Jeff Guo. It was produced by Viet Le and edited by Planet Money’s executive producer Alex Goldmark.

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Trees are more than decoration — they’re living economic assets, with measurable costs and benefits for cities and neighborhoods. Zachary Crockett takes a walk on the shady side of the street.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Geoffrey Donovan, owner of Ash & Elm Consulting.
  • Jana Dilley, urban forester for the city of Seattle.
  • Kathleen Wolf, social scientist, former researcher at the University of Washington.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Extreme Heat Is Worse For Low-Income, Nonwhite Americans, A New Study Shows," by Deepa Shivaram (NPR, 2021).
  • "US Urban Forest Statistics, Values, and Projections," by David Nowak and Eric Greenfield (Journal of Forestry, 2018).
  • "The role of trees in urban stormwater management," by Adam Berland, Sheri Shiflett, William Shuster, Ahjond Garmestani, Haynes Goddard, Dustin Herrmann, and Matthew Hopton (Landscape and Urban Planning, 2017).
  • "Urban trees and the risk of poor birth outcomes," by Geoffrey Donovan, Yvonne Michael, David Butry, Amy Sullivan, and John Chase (Health & Place, 2011).
  • "Calculating the Green in Green: What's an Urban Tree Worth?," by Gail Wells (Science Findings, 2010).
  • "The Effect of Trees on Crime in Portland, Oregon," by Geoffrey Donovan and Jeffrey Prestemon (Environment and Behavior, 2010).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • i-Tree Tools.

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In 2008, Chicago’s budget was in a bad place. The city needed money. One way to raise money was to increase property taxes, but what politician wants to do that? So instead, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s administration looked around at the resources the city had, and thought, ‘Any of this worth anything?’ They opted to lease out the city’s metered parking system — to privatize all 36,000 of its parking meters. 

The plan: have private companies bid on operating the meters, modernizing the system, and keeping the profits for a certain number of years. In exchange, they would give Chicago a big lump sum payment. The winning bid was $1.16 billion dollars for a 75-year lease. 

Today’s episode is the story of how that bid got put together, and how it came to be hated. There are kidnapped parking meters, foot chases through City Hall, and trashbags filled with secret documents. 

Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. /  Subscribe to Planet Money+

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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Luis Gallo and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Vito Emmanuel and engineered by Cena Loffredo and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Music: NPR Source Audio - “Smoke Rings,” “Reverend,” and “Sniffin Glue.”

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On this episode, Chris Coyne speaks with Brigitta Jones, Nathan Goodman, and Karla Segovia about Kenneth Boulding’s insights on war, peace, and the political economy of conflict applied to contemporary questions about military organization and the dynamics of civil conflict.

First, Jones discusses her coauthored paper with Coyne, “The Political Economy of Milorg,” which uses Boulding’s concept of Milorg to examine the entanglement of public agencies and private firms in the military sector. She highlights how knowledge problems, incentives, and political processes shape what the military produces and how those decisions affect the broader economy.

Goodman and Segovia then join Coyne to discuss their paper, “Unstable Peace in El Salvador,” coauthored with Abby Hall. Drawing on Boulding’s framework, they examine how shifting expectations, beliefs, and “taboo lines” eroded the country’s fragile peace, highlighting how strains such as land concentration, poverty, repression, and escalating violence contributed to the outbreak of civil war.

Together, these conversations illustrate how Boulding’s insights illuminate both the functioning of the modern military-industrial landscape and the complex processes through which societies move between peace and war.

This is the third episode in a short series of episodes that will feature a collection of authors who contributed to the volume 1, issue 2 of the Markets & Society Journal or to a forthcoming special issue from The Review of Austrian Economics.

**This episode was recorded October 27, 2025.

Brigitta Jones is a PhD student in Economics at George Mason University. Her research interests include the welfare state of the United States.

Dr. Nathan P. Goodman is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His research broadly focuses on political economy, public choice, market process economics, New Institutional Economics, and defense economics.

Dr. Karla Segovia is a program manager for Research & Programs and a Research Fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where she works on the Markets & Society conference and journal. She is also an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College.

Show Notes:

• Kenneth Boulding’s book, Stable Peace (University of Texas Press, 1978)

• Kenneth Boulding’s book, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (University of Michigan Press, 1956).

• U.S. Congressional Testimony by Kenneth Boulding (1969)

If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out our other podcast from the Hayek Program! Virtual Sentiments is a podcast in which political theorist Kristen Collins interviews scholars and practitioners grappling with pressing problems in political economy with an eye to the past. Subscribe today!

Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram

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CC Music: Twisterium

From nuclear fission to GPS to the internet, it’s common knowledge that many of the most resource intensive technologies of the last century got their start as military R&D projects in government-funded labs. But as Avery Trufelman explains in her fashion history podcast, Articles of Interest, the influence of the US military is, in many ways, even more intimate than that, shaping much of the clothing we all wear everyday. 

On today’s show, a tale of Army surplus economics. How military designs trickled down from the soldiers on the front lines to the hippies on the war protest line to the yuppies in line at Banana Republic. And why some of your favorite outdoor brands may just be moonlighting as U.S. military suppliers, while keeping it as under the radar as they can.

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This episode of Planet Money was produced by Luis Gallo, edited by Jess Jiang, fact checked by Yasmine Alsayyad, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.

Articles of Interest is produced by Avery Trufelman, edited by Alison Beringer, fact checked by Yasmine Alsayyad, and engineered by Jocelyn Gonzalez.

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Grab a simple bouquet from your local grocery store and you're activating a global network of farms, shipping companies, wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. Zachary Crockett stops to smell the roses.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Bob Mellano, vice president of wholesale operations for Mellano & Company.
  • Jasmine Gomez-Gonzalez, chief operations officer at OC Wholesale Flowers.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "From Colombia with love: The journey of a Valentine’s Day bouquet," by Júlia Ledur and Fabiola Ferrero (The Washington Post, 2015).
  • "Your Valentine’s Day bouquet probably came a long way," by Daniel Ackerman (Marketplace, 2015).
  • "A Brief History of Specialty Cut Flower Production," by Ben Bergmann (NC State Extension).
  • Mellano & Company.
  • OC Wholesale Flowers.

 

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A few years ago, the Jamaican government started making an unusual financial bet. It went to investors around the world asking if they'd like to wager on the chances a major hurricane would hit the island in the next couple of years. 

In finance terms, these kinds of wagers are called "catastrophe bonds." They're a way to get investors to share the risk of a major disaster, whether that's a Japanese earthquake, a California wildfire, or a Jamaican hurricane. 

This market for catastrophe has gotten really hot lately. And it’s changing the way that insurance works for all of us. 

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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Kwesi Lee. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez and Vito Emanuel. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

Music: Universal Music Production - “Lagos to London,” “Sleazy Does It,” “The Sundown Set.”

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