Category: 3-EconSometimeCommentary

Thanks to online booking platforms, the way we make reservations has changed — but a table at a hot restaurant on a Friday night is still a valuable commodity. Zachary Crockett books a four-top for 7 p.m.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Lisa Blount, director of marketing and public relations at Antoine’s Restaurant.
  • Adam Iscoe, writer.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation," by Adam Iscoe (The New Yorker, 2024).
  • "New York Passes Bill to Make the Restaurant Reservation Black Market Illegal," by Emma Orlow (Eater, 2024).
  • "When Canceling Your Reservation Costs as Much as Dinner," by T.M. Brown (The New York Times, 2024).
  • "65% Of Diners Go Directly To A Restaurant’s Website To Book A Reservation," by Tessa Zuluaga (Toast, 2024).
  • "No-Show Diners by the Numbers," by OpenTable (2021).
  • "Selling Reservations Democratizes the Dining Experience," by Tyler Cowen (The New York Times, 2015).
  • Antoine's Restaurant.

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "Why You Shouldn’t Open a Restaurant," by Freakonomics Radio (2018).

For some sports, picking the winner is simple: It's the athlete who crosses the finish line first, or the side that scores the most goals. But for the new Olympic sport of breaking (if you want to be cool, don't call it breakdancing), the criteria aren't quite that straightforward. How do you judge an event whose core values are dopeness, freshness, and breaking the rules?

That was the challenge for Storm and Renegade, two legendary b-boys who set out to create a fair and objective scoring system for a dance they say is more of an art than a sport. Over the years, their journey to define the soul of breaking led them to meetings with Olympics bigwigs, debates over the science of dopeness, and a battle with a question many sports — from figure skating to gymnastics — have tried to answer: Can art and sport coexist?

This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jenny Lawton. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez with help from James Willets and Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School.

Trade has come up in all of the episodes of Summer School so far. An early use of money was to make trade easier. Trade was responsible for the birth of companies and the stock market. And trade was the lifeblood of the early United States.

Today's episode covers 250 years of trade history in three chapters. We start with one of the founding texts of economics, Wealth of Nations, in which Adam Smith argues a country's true value is not measured in gold and silver, but by its people's ability to buy things that enhance their standard of living. Then we'll watch American politicians completely ignore that argument in favor of protecting domestic industries – until one congressman makes a passionate case for free trade as the means to world peace. And finally we'll follow the trade debate up to the modern day, where the tides of American politics have turned toward regulation.

This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

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Welcome back to the Environmental Economics series, hosted by Jordan Lofthouse. On this episode, Jordan interviews Justus Enninga on the intersection of economics, environmentalism and urbanism. In this conversation, Justus speaks on his PPE beginnings spawned from his time spent in Southeast India as well as on Tocqueville, city planning, climate migration, agglomeration effects in cities, immigrant influxes, and more.

Justus Enninga is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London, where his research focuses on the intersection of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) as well as on the question of how different institutional arrangements help citizens to adapt to environmental challenges. In addition to being a PhD candidate, he also works as a director at the Prometheus Institut, a classical liberal think tank in Berlin, as well as an economic policy editor for The Pioneer. He is an alum of the Mercatus Adam Smith Fellowship.

Check out Jordan Lofthouse's work.

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CC Music: Twisterium

There are more firefighters than ever — and fewer fires for them to fight. So the job has changed. Zachary Crockett slides down the pole.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Joshua Hurwitz, lecturer in economics at Tufts University.
  • Eric Mackintosh, administrative battalion fire chief for San Mateo Consolidated Fire Department.
  • Steve Pegram, retired fire chief and township administrator in Ohio.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "The Dire Shortage of Volunteer Firefighters in the US," by Sam Becker (BBC, 2024).
  • San Mateo Consolidated Fire Department 2023 Annual Report (2024).
  • "Essays on the Economics of U.S. Firefighting," by Joshua Hurwitz (Harvard University doctoral dissertation, 2021).
  • "Over Last 20 Years, Annual Fires in the US Declined by About 50% While Career Firefighters Increased More Than 50%?" by Mark J. Perry (AEIdeas, 2015).

 

• EXTRAS:
  • "Getting Old, Adventurously," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2024).

Maybe you got a boring slip of paper in the mail. Maybe you got a spammy-looking email promising you money. Surprise! You're in a class action. If you've done any commerce in the last decade, there's a good chance that someone somewhere was suing on your behalf and you have real money coming your way... if you know what to do.

Class action settlements are on the rise. And, on today's show, we're helping decipher the class action from the perspective of the average class member. How do class actions work? Why are these notices sometimes undecipherable? And, what do you stand to gain (or lose) by responding?

This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone and Nick Fountain. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School.

Planet Money Summer School has arrived at the birth of the United States and the chance to set up a whole new economy from scratch. Should there be a centralized bank? Should there be a single currency? We'll travel to two moments in the country's early history when the founders said "nope" to these questions and see what happened.

First we'll witness one of the great economic battles in U.S. history – the president of the United States versus the president of the Bank of the United States – and see how the outcome ushered in an age of financial panics. Then we'll drop in on a time before the U.S. dollar existed as we know it, when you could buy things using one of about 8,000 forms of money circulating in the country. We watch as the Civil War leads to the first standard currency. Along the way, we'll learn why the cycle of economic booms and busts persists to today despite efforts to centralize America's economy throughout history.

This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

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How did love stories about vampires, cowboys, and wealthy dukes become the highest-grossing fiction genre in the world? Zachary Crockett gets swept away.

 

• SOURCES:
  • Delaney Diamond, romance novelist.
  • Danielle Flores, high school math teacher and avid romance novel reader.
  • Brenda Hiatt, romance novelist.
  • Diane Moggy, vice president of editorial at Harlequin.

 

• RESOURCES:
  • "Even as Overall Book Sales Are Declining, Romance Novels Are on the Rise," by Elena Burnett, Sarah Handel, and Juana Summers (All Things Considered, 2023).
  • "Key Takeaways from the Authors Guild’s 2023 Author Income Survey," press release by the Authors Guild (2023).
  • "How Amazon Turned Everyone Into a Romance Writer (and Created an Antitrust Headache)," by Ann Kjellberg (Observer, 2022).
  • "Vivian Stephens Helped Turn Romance Writing Into a Billion-Dollar Industry. Then She Got Pushed Out," by Mimi Swartz (Texas Monthly, 2020).
  • "A Brief History of the Romance Novel," by Amanda Pagan (New York Public Library Blog, 2019).
  • "How Harlequin Became the Most Famous Name in Romance," by Kelly Faircloth (Jezebel, 2015).
  • "Fifty Shades of Amish: A Strange Genre of the Romance Novel," by Leah McGrath Goodman (Newsweek, 2015).

Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School.

Once upon a time, every business was a small business. It was run by the owner, maybe the spouse and the kids. Maybe they borrowed money from friends and relatives, but there was only so big it could get. Then came what can only be described as the big bang of economics. Over the span of a few decades, people figured out a way for businesses to sell ownership shares – otherwise known as stocks – and let people trade those shares. There was suddenly money to buy machines and expand.

Today, we head to the Netherlands around the year 1600. First, we'll visit the bridge in Amsterdam where some of the first stock trading took place. Then we track down the Dutch water company that's the source of the oldest "living" bond. It's the origin of stocks and bonds and the stock market and it leads directly to many of the financial innovations that we still have today.

This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina.

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Last weekend we were all thrown for a loop when President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris for the nomination. Just like everyone else, we are trying to quickly wrap our heads around what it means now that Harris is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee for president.

We expect to see the Harris campaign come out with some official policy proposals in the coming weeks and months. But for now, all we've got are clues, little breadcrumbs that she has dropped throughout her career that might lead us to a rough idea of what economic policies she might support.

Today on the show, we're going to visit three key moments from Harris' political career that might give us an idea of how her economic agenda might look. First, the 2019 presidential primary debates, where she laid out her own economic policies. Next, a vote in her Senate years that shows where she might fall on future trade agreements. And finally, a fight with some of the country's biggest banks from her very first year as Attorney General of California.

This episode was hosted by Keith Romer and Nick Fountain. It was produced by Emma Peaslee, edited by Jess Jiang with help from Meg Cramer, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez and Sofia Shchukina. Engineering by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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