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#374: Why Is Syria Locked In Endless Conflict?


Fri, May 25, 2012

The uprisings in Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen all started last spring. They've all resulted in regime change — except for the uprising in Syria.

Why is Syria locked in a brutal and seemingly endless conflict? The answer has to do with history, politics, and a growing class of entrepreneurs who are struggling to pick a side. Their decision could turn the tide of the conflict. It could also cost them their lives.

On today's show, we follow a couple guys who run a pizza shop in New Orleans as they buy their first Facebook ad. We visit a business in New Jersey that sells Facebook "likes" in bulk. And we check in with a business school professor who explains what Facebook would have to do to live up to its valuation — which, even after its post-IPO fall, is still roughly $90 billion.

Ashley Dias is 26 years old. She has cystic fibrosis. About six weeks ago, her lungs gave out. She was rushed to the Cleveland Clinic and told she'd need a lung transplant to survive.

Lungs are a scarce resource. But unlike many scarce resources, lungs aren't for sale. So doctors have had to develop a system to allocate them.

Ashley's life depends on that system.

Every single dollar bill in the world — every $20, every $100, everything — is printed on paper made at one small mill in Massachusetts. That's been the case for 130 years.

On today's show, we visit the mill. We hear the story of the guy who jumped out a hotel window to win the government contract to print all that paper. And we ask: Will anybody be using paper money in 50 years?

On today's show, we visit beautiful Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Price of one year at Lafayette: $55,688. Up 63 percent from the price a decade ago.

At least, that's the sticker price — the price you get if you add up tuition, room and board, and all the fees listed on the school's website.

But there's a huge gap between the sticker price and what the average student actually pays after figuring in grants and scholarships.

That's true at private colleges around the country. Nationwide, the average sticker price is more than twice as high as the price students actually pay, and the gap is getting wider.

It turns out, it makes economic sense to have a high sticker price and offer lots of discounts. On the show today, we explain why.

We're in a gym full of high school students. The gym is at the headquarters of the New York Federal Reserve, just a few blocks from Wall Street. The students are here for the High School Fed Challenge.

If you're a high school student and you dream of holding the U.S. economy in the palm of your hand — if you want the power to control interest rates and to print money out of thin air — the Fed Challenge is for you.

On today's show, we sit in on the finals — and hear from a bunch of teenagers about what Fed policy means for them.

Ian Bremmer calls his big idea "G-Zero." Here's how he described it in an essay last year:

We are now living in a G-Zero world, one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage — or the will — to drive a truly international agenda.

On today's show, we take a world tour with Bremmer to find out who thrives and who struggles in a G-Zero world.

Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group and author of a new book called Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. For more, listen to our G-Zero podcast from last year.

On today's show, we bring you three Planet Money radio stories:

1. Pay Your Taxes: A Cautionary Tale

When IRS agents raided the house of rapper Young Buck, they seized all his things: his white leather dining chairs, his watches, his craps table, his tattoo kit. Even his refrigerator. The Nashville artist, who was once part of 50 Cent's G-Unit, owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.

2. On The Million-Dollar Trail Of A Mystery SuperPAC Donor

The superPACs raising money to support presidential candidates have few restrictions. They can accept checks for any amount. One rule they do have: They must reveal who donated money.

3. We Stand At The Doorstep Of A Foreclosed House. Then We Go In.

In Florida, the foreclosure process takes 861 days, on average.

That means houses often sit in limbo for more than two years after the owner stops paying the mortgage. Maybe the homeowner is still living in the house. Maybe he's renting it out. Maybe squatters are living there, or maybe it's empty and falling down.

In New York City, roughly 3,000 food trucks compete for the business of hungry office workers. Being in the right spot means the difference between fortune and ruin.

There are many rules to finding that perfect parking space. Here are six of them:

On today's show Robert Smith rides along in the Rickshaw Dumpling truck, driving from deep within Brooklyn to the heart of Manhattan in search of hungry customers.

Like most central bank chiefs, Ben Bernanke tends toward understatement. But when he testified before Congress earlier this year, Bernanke went big.

"On January 1, 2013," he said, "there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases."

One of the biggest parts of the fiscal cliff is the expiration of the tax cuts passed by President Bush and extended by President Obama. If Congress doesn't act before the end of the year, taxes will go up for most Americans.

Simon Johnson, our guest on today's show, thinks that would be a good thing.

"Our critics say we are proposing a large, middle-class tax increase," Johnson says. "To which the answer is, yes. We are."

He argues that a tax hike is necessary to pay for Social Security and Medicare, programs which are projected to become significantly more expensive in the coming decade.

Johnson teaches economics at MIT and co-wrote the new book White House Burning.

Legislation in Congress would get rid of dollar bills and replace them with coins. Proponents say coins are easier to use and save the country money in the long run. The bill people say none of this is true.

Should we kill the dollar bill?

On today's show we go deep into the nature of money itself, and we find a clear answer to this question.

We haul in a giant box of coins, talk to the guy who actually makes dollar bills, and watch a Senator try to use a vending machine.

Traditionally, when we think about bad behavior, we think about character.

But psychologists who study bad behavior — who study, say, fraud in the business world — have found that that character doesn't explain everything. They've found that a lot of unethical behavior can be explained by cognitive errors — errors that affect almost everyone.

On today's show, we talk to a man who started out as an upstanding businessman, and went on to commit bank fraud involving millions of dollars. It drove several companies out of business and resulted in the loss of around a hundred jobs.

We try to figure out why he did it, and what it means for the rest of us.

Iceland has about as many people as Staten Island. It also has its own currency, the krona. This raises a question: Does it make sense to have a currency that's only used by 300,000 people?

After the country's economy blew up in the financial crisis, the government put the krona on lock down. Now, they're trying to decide whether to stay with the krona, or abandon it, and use someone else's currency.

Today's show features special guest host Baldur Hedinsson, a former Planet Money intern who recently moved back to Iceland. We also hear from his sister, who is working in a town where people walk around with rifles to ward off polar bears.

And we talk to Robert Mundell, who won a Nobel for working on questions like the one Iceland is facing.

How do you make money manufacturing a dry, bland cracker that a tiny percentage of the population eats just one week a year?

On today's show, we go inside the matzo business.

A rabbi at a matzo factory  explains why matzo is supposed to be hard to make. A Manischewitz exec tells us why all the rules for making kosher matzo are a boon to the company. And, perhaps inevitably, we explain what all this has to do with the 21st century economy.

On today's show, we eat artisanal beef jerky, sort through the wreckage of the financial crisis, watch Nancy Pelosi raise money, and meet high priced nannies.

It's is a collection of our recent radio stories. Here's more:

• A Revival In American Manufacturing, Led By Brooklyn Foodies
• Wisconsin School Districts Saved After Bad Investment
• On Tour With Nancy Pelosi, Fundraising Rock Star
• The $200,000-A-Year Nanny

David Unkovic is a thoughtful, mild-mannered guy who was appointed to save Harrisburg, Pa. The city had gone broke, and it was Unkovic's job to figure out how to fix things.

We visited Harrisburg a few weeks back. We talked to Unkovic. We talked to some of the people in Harrisburg who were suing him. And we visited the incinerator, a boondoggle that drove the city to bankruptcy.

Then, last week, Unkovic quit. "I find myself in an untenable position in the political and ethical crosswinds," his handwritten resignation letter says. "I wish the citizens of Harrisburg well in their ongoing quest for fiscal stability and good government, both of which they truly deserve."

Since resigning, Unkovic has gone missing. And he hasn't returned our calls or emails.

If you serve in Congress, you have two jobs: Making laws, and raising money to run for re-election.

It turns out, that second job — raising money to run for re-election — is a lot easier if you serve on certain Congressional committees.

On today's show, we reveal which committees are a fundraising goldmine. And which committees actually make it harder for Congressmen to raise money.

The show is a preview of our hour long special this weekend on This American Life — Take The Money And Run For Office.

On today's show, we hear the story of a 16th century German weavers' guild. They were savvy political operators, who knew how to push their competitors out of the market. They set up a system of fines, wage ceilings, and public rebukes that would be the envy of a modern cartel.

It's a tale of economic monopoly and discrimination. Of inequality and conflict. And it's a story of how businesses can stifle innovation even today.

Our guest is Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian at Cambridge.

The U.S. has a really conflicted history with the income tax. For most of American history, there was no income tax at all. At one point it was ruled unconstitutional.

Today, income tax is the federal government's main source of revenue. That raises a question: How did something that was once so strange to us become so central?

The answer includes a few wars, a Supreme Court justice on his deathbed, and Donald Duck.

Willow Tufano is a 14-year-old girl who recently bought a house in Florida for $12,000.

Willow and her mom split the cost of the house, which they're now renting out. Willow saved up money by selling stuff from foreclosed homes on Craigslist; she plans to buy out her mom's share in the next few years.

We did a radio story about Willow earlier this month. The story took off. Since it aired, Willow has been on Ellen, CNN and ABC News.

On today's podcast, we hear the original radio story. And we hear more from the neighborhood where Willow lives. It's a place where people who bought at the top of the bubble — including Willow's family — live next to people who bought identical homes at a fraction of the price.

And we discuss whether a 14-year-old girl buying a house is a sign that that housing market has finally bottomed.

On today's show, we talk with a former manager at Countrywide Financial. Cynder Niemela describes what life was like inside the giant mortgage lender back in 2006. It's not pretty.

Mike Hudson, an investigative reporter with the Center For Public Integrity, is our special guest host for the show. He picked through the wreckage of the housing crisis and talked to dozens of people at big mortgage companies to find out what the mortgage industry was like back then.

Today's show, in three bullet points:

• How the European Central Bank finally used its super power.
• What that has to do with a guy who owns a bar on the coast of Spain.
• And why this may not be the end of Europe's debt saga.

On today's show, we visit Fulper Farms, a family-run dairy in New Jersey. It's a bucolic setting — white farmhouse, rolling hills, etc. But behind that peaceful image lies all the roiling tension, rising inequality and economic volatility of the 21st-century economy.

We meet Claudia, the prized, high-tech cow. We meet Claudia's less-accomplished neighbor, Cow #6. And we learn why even a barn full of Claudias wouldn't be enough to keep a family-run dairy afloat.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that each Mormon in good standing should tithe 10 percent of his or her income.

"That's written in stone, and preached from the pulpit," says Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who is Mormon.

But while the church is very precise about that figure — 10 percent of income — it does not tell its members what income means.

"Which is really interesting to us economists, because we want to know how people define income," says Dahl.

As anyone who has ever done their taxes knows, figuring out what counts as income is harder than it sounds.

On the show today, we look into how Mormons figure out how much to tithe, and what that tells us about how people think about income and taxes.

Today on the show, we visit a giant pool of money — worth trillions of U.S. dollars! — at the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank.

To understand how the money got there, we talk to Jacky Jiang and Rosalia Yang, a pair of very friendly exporters who show us around a factory where they make fake-wood flooring.

They tell us about the changes China is going through, and explain why that pool of money might soon start flowing back to the U.S.

Today, in the second of our two-part series on private equity, we take another look at Bain Capital — the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney.

Last Tuesday, in the first part of the series, we looked at a deal Bain did during Romney's tenure that went bad. Today, we tell the story of a deal that turned out better.

And we dig into the arguments about private equity's broad role in the economy.

"History is a battle between creditors and debtors," Philip Coggan says on today's show. "Every so often these two clash, there is a crisis and the whole system is remade."

Coggan, who writes the Buttonwood column for the Economist, is author of the book Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order.

"We had a crisis in the 1930s, in the 1970s and we've got another one now."

We're not even close to resolving the latest crisis, according to Coggan. The debate over debt is "what politics and economics are going to be about for the next 10 years," he says.

Are private-equity firms job-destroying monsters? Or are they knights in shining armor, riding in to fix troubled companies and make the economy work better?

When you have a presidential candidate who used to run a private-equity firm, the arguments tend to shed more heat than light.

So we decided to look at what private equity firms actually do — by telling the stories of two companies purchased by Bain Capital, the private equity firm co-founded by Mitt Romney.

On today's show, we look at a deal gone bad. On a future podcast, we'll look at another deal that turned out differently.

Romney's campaign wouldn't comment on tape for the podcast, but they did send us this statement:

"Mitt Romney spent 25 years as a businessman and entrepreneur. ... At Bain Capital, he helped launch and guide a private equity and financial services firm. Bain Capital invested in many businesses; while not every business was successful, the firm had an excellent overall track record and created jobs with well-known companies like Staples, Dominos, and Sports Authority."

When you walk around a big city in China, it feels like an entrepreneurial free-for-all — guys selling stuff on street corners, lots of little shops, everybody hustling.

But when you pull back the curtain on the country's economy, you find the government everywhere. The government owns, among other things, the country's biggest cell phone carrier, the three biggest airlines and the four biggest banks.

Those state-owned banks in particular play a central role in the country's economy.

Chinese people have one of the highest savings rates in the world, and they don't have many options for investing the money they save. So they put lots of their money in ordinary savings accounts at those state-owned banks.

The banks, in turn, lend a lot of that money out to other government-owned companies, typically at very low interest rates. Those companies go out and build lots of new stuff. All that building contributes a huge chunk of China's growth.

But the building can't go on forever. In fact, China may already have built too much stuff with borrowed money.

What should the government pay for?

On today's Planet Money, we pose that question to Charlie Wheelan, author of the book Naked Economics, and one-time Congressional candidate. (He lost).

He gives us the econ 101 answer: The government should definitely pay for something if it's a public good, which Charlie defines as "something that we all need that will make our lives better, but the market will not and cannot provide."

The textbook example is a lighthouse. Other examples of public goods include national defense and autopsies. Everyone benefits from the medical knowledge autopsies provide, but it's not really in any individual's interest to pay for an autopsy.

Somehow, this fact leads us to call 1-800-AUTOPSY.

Note: Today's podcast originally aired in 2010.

On today's show: Four genius ideas.

These ideas, as it happens, have all appeared in Planet Money radio stories. But they've never been on the podcast.

• A Man. A Van. A Surprising Business Plan.
• Rethinking The Oreo For Chinese Consumers
• What Do The Dow's Daily Swings Mean? Not Much.
• How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece

Can we have a banking system that provides good services to people at reasonable rates? A banking system that doesn't bring down the global economy every few decades?

Anat Admati thinks we can. She's a finance professor at Stanford, but she never paid much attention to banks until the financial crisis. (This is not unusual in the superspecialized world of academia.)

After the crisis hit, Admati started reading up on banks. And, in a basic banking textbook, she came upon a single line that changed her career.

"I sat in my office and I thought, 'Something is really wrong in banking.' "

On today's show, Admati tells us what she thinks is wrong in banking — and how she thinks we can fix it.

On today's show, we hear how a hobby turns into a lucrative one-man business — and how Apple's App Store is transforming the Internet economy.

The gist is super simple. In fact, it's something that's been going on in the physical world for thousands of years: Giving people a convenient way to buy cheap products.

Our guest on the show is Marco Arment, one of the founders of the blogging platform Tumblr. A few years back, Marco launched a little side project called Instapaper.

On the podcast today, we get a glimpse from inside the room where money changes hands. Jimmy Williams used to lobby for the powerful National Association of Realtors.

Williams tells us about some of the ridiculous issues he's lobbied for, the steady flow of money that congresspeople need, and how he wants to take down the crazy campaign finance system.

It's the 11th hour for Europe's debt crisis. Again.

Greece still can't pay back all the money it owes. So it's trying to cut a deal with its creditors. (Again.)

We've been wondering for years: Who are the people who loaned money to Greece? Are they suckers? Brilliant investors?

On today's podcast we find someone who loaned Greece money: Hans Humes. He runs a hedge fund called Greylock Capital Management. Turns out, his office is just a few blocks away from ours.

Humes is one of the guys trying to hammer out a deal with Greece. He explains just how complicated the negotiations are — and how, even among people who loaned Greece money, there are huge divisions.

Katy Perry killed it on the pop charts last year. She went No.1 five times. She was the most played artist on the radio. But the record industry is so weird, it's hard to know whether this kind of success translates into huge amounts of money for her label.

How much did the label spend on Katy Perry? And how much did they make?

On today's show, we try to figure it out.

It seems like there's always some country or another that the United States is imposing sanctions on. The reasons change, but the idea is always the same: economic coercion.

This month, it's Iran. In response to Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, President Obama signed a law that punishes banks for doing business with Iran's central bank. This makes it difficult, in theory, for Iran to sell its oil around the world.

You can see why sanctions are so appealing for the U.S. government: Rather than go to war to stop Iran's nuclear program — to risk American lives — the U.S. can block money from going in and out of the country. That makes life miserable for the Iranians and, in theory, persuades them to give up their nuclear ambitions.

But do sanctions work? Have sanctions ever really worked? Today, we talk to Gary Hufbauer, author of the book Economic Sanctions Reconsidered. And we hear a first-hand account of what life in Iraq was like under the sanctions of the 1990s.

In 1978, a group of farmers in a Chinese village called Xiaogang wrote a secret contract and hid it in the roof of a mud hut.

They were afraid the document might get them executed. Instead, it wound up completely transforming the Chinese economy.

On today's show, we travel to Xiaogang, and hear the farmers' story.

American manufacturing is dead, right? Not exactly. The dollar value of what we make here keeps going up and up. But the success of American manufacturers has come at a cost. The number of manufacturing jobs in this country has collapsed as factories replace workers with machines.

Today on the podcast, we're going to take a trip to Greenville, South Carolina, where factories filled with bright shiny machines sit just across the train tracks from shuttered old mills. It's the perfect place to answer the question — what is the state of the low skilled American worker?

You rarely see lard on menus. There aren't shelves and shelves of it in every supermarket. In this country, we've sort of lost touch with the once beloved pig fat.

On today's podcast, we ask — who killed lard? Was it Upton Sinclair? His novel, The Jungle, contained a memorable passage about the men who cook the lard and perhaps fell into the vats.

Or should we blame William Procter and James Gamble? It was their company which created a new alternative to lard — the "pure and wholesome" Crisco.

Sometimes it feels like all we talk about at Planet Money is how the economy is going down the tubes.

Not today.  We visit a few people who have been doing well this year. There's a guy who buys and stores gold for investors, companies that sell off inventories when stores go bankrupt, and a guy in the coconut water business.  

On today's podcast, we take a page from radio newscaster Paul Harvey and tell you "the rest of the story."

Giving and receiving gifts can be a joyful thing — unless you're an economist. All those books that will never be read and ties that will never be worn are hugely inefficient.

To investigate a possible solution, we went to a seventh-grade classroom at a public school in Brooklyn.

The students were already familiar with the issue.

"This is kind of silly, but I got a Power Ranger," Tadre Jones said. "I was grateful, but I didn't really like it."

So we had no trouble conscripting 10 kids to participate in an economic experiment that aimed to improve the efficiency of gift giving.

Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist, is out of prison and available for interviews. On today's show we talk to him — not about his crimes, but about the legal kind of lobbying that goes on every day. And we find out, how much do companies benefit from the business of lobbying.

If you're looking for the beginning — and, possibly, the end — of the European financial crisis, you can find it in a single building: The Greek statistics office, at 46 Peireos Street in Athens.

We visited recently and found what may be the world's most high-stakes game of office politics.

On one side: The technocrats, led by Andreas Georgiou, who was appointed last year to run the office.

On the other : The old guard, including Konstantinos Skordas.

Georgiou's technocratic ways — like reporting Greek deficit figures directly to European authorities — have landed him in hot water with the old guard.

His email was hacked, he says. His workers went out on strike. And now he faces a criminal investigation that could lead to life in prison.

Earlier this year we reported on the pileup of more than a billion unwanted $1 coins in government vaults. It was the result of a law passed a few years back that ordered the mint to create coins honoring each U.S. president.

Today, the White House said it will end the program. A small number of dollar coins will continue to be minted for collectors, but the coins will no longer be put into circulation. The shift will save an estimated $50 million a year.

On today's podcast, we visit a vault full of unwanted dollar coins and talk to the lawmakers who created the program.

Last week, American Airlines became a member of a club it hoped never to be a part of — major airlines that have declared bankruptcy. Before American came Pan Am, Delta, United, Northwest, US Airways, and Continental.

Sure, fuel costs are high and planes are expensive — but why is it that the industry continues to lose money year after year? By economist Severin Borenstein's count, domestic airlines have lost $60 billion dollars in the last three decades.

Even airline executives don't deny it. Bob Crandall, the former CEO of American, famous for calling it a "nasty, rotten business," says he used to tell his employees not to buy the company's stock. Why? "Because airlines don't make money," says Crandall.

On the show today, Crandall tells us why running an airline is so darn hard, and Severin Borenstein explains why all these bankruptcies are actually good news for us passengers.

European governments have turned their eyes skyward looking for a hero to save them from financial collapse. But the signal they've sent into the skies over Europe is not the usual one in the shape of a bat, it's the initials E-C-B, the European Central Bank.

On today's podcast, we'll tell you about the ECB's super powers and explain why they are so reluctant to use them.

On today's show, we go shopping. We're bringing you stories about how we spend our money and what these purchases teach us about economics.

Why Amazon Loses Money On Every Kindle Fire: The Kindle Fire is a book store, a movie theater and a record shop. And Amazon's the one selling the books, movies and music.

Why A New York Cheese Buyer Hangs On The Euro's Fate: Most of the cheese at Murray's Cheese Shop comes from Europe. And the cheese buyer's bonus hinges on the future of the euro.

The Income Gap, Explained With Candy Corn: The numbers detailing the income gap between rich and poor can be difficult to grasp so we use candy to help explain.

Plus, a story about the kinds of things governments pay for:

When Governments Pay People To Have Babies It's a strategy some countries have adopted to boost falling fertility rates. Here's why it often fails.

Last month here in New York City, two taxi medallions, the metal plates that make it legal to dive a cab in the city, sold for $1 million each.

On today's podcast, we try to answer the question — why? What makes these little pieces of metal worth so much?

To get the answer, we go back to the 1930's with Graham Hodges, professor of history at Colgate University. Hodges says it all has to do with a famous and violent strike where cabs were set on fire in Times Square.

Plus, we check in with Canadian economist and Bloomberg reporter Ilan Kolet to see how a taxi medallion stacks up against some of today's most popular investments. (Spoiler Alert: The taxi medallion beats out gold, by a lot.)

For today's show, we've collected four Planet Money radio stories that never made it to the podcast. Think of it as an early Thanksgiving buffet:

What A Coin Toss Has To Do With The Housing Market — A simple experiment helps explain why there's still a glut of houses for sale, five years after the housing bubble popped.

Why Are Wedding Dresses So Expensive? — A better question, according to one economist: Why are brides willing to pay so much?

Requiem For Pork Bellies — The life and death of pork-belly futures, explained by a trader in Chicago's meat pit.

Spaceflight Is Getting Cheaper. But It's Still Not Cheap Enough.  --  Elon Musk wants us to live in other planets. First he has to make space flight affordable. So he took the fortune he made in Internet start-ups and started his own rocket company.

Financial planner Carl Richards tells us how he got sucked into the financial mess just like the rest of us and shares what it taught him.

Gary Loveman used to be an economics professor at Harvard Business School. He studied things like the development of the private sector in Poland.

Now he runs Ceasars Entertainment Corporation, a giant gambling company. But he still thinks like an academic. He likes to say there are three things that can get you fired from Caesars: Stealing, sexual harassment and running an experiment without a control group.

On today's show, he tells us how he got from Harvard to Caesars, and explains the surprising results of some of his real-world experiments.

Nevada's an economic disaster zone, with the nation's highest rate of both unemployment and foreclosures. But a few towns strung along I-80 in the middle of nowhere are doing great.

The reason: They're in the middle of Nevada's gold mining country, which has boomed as the price of gold has risen.

On today's show, we visit one of those towns. Elko, Nevada is indeed a happy place. But there's an undercurrent of anxiety.

When you get to the edge of town, you can see why: There are all these ghost towns nearby that boomed when the mines were running, then faded to nothing when the gold ran out.

On today's show, we talk to a guy named Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise. He's a British CEO, and he's offering a $400,000 prize to the person who comes up with the best plan for countries to leave the euro.

Also: The story of another European currency union that fell apart a century ago, and the lessons it holds for the euro.

Today on the podcast, the story of one of the most destructive and mysterious food shortages in recent memory.

The most mysterious thing about this shortage of rice: There was more than enough to go around.

It is the epic story of a shortage that wasn't.

In this global caper of good intentions gone wrong, there are shadowy trade deals, corrupt government officials, and warehouses full of rice in a country that didn't want it.

On today's show, we go inside the rooms in Washington where the daily grind of campaign finance — Congressmen, lobbyists, money — takes place. At least, we try to go inside the rooms. Several times.

And we talk to Jimmy Williams, a former lobbyist now working on campaign finance reform. He describes what it's like to meet with a Congressman when you're a lobbyist and your PAC hasn't been donating to the Congressman.

On today's show, we hear the story of a steel-cage match between two economists. The fight has been going on for most of a century now, and it's never been more relevant: Keynes versus Hayek.

It's a Deep Read interview with Nicholas Wapshott, the author of the new book Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.

Economists love economic growth. It's an essential driver of rising living standards.

But on today's show, we wrestle with a question we've heard a lot from our listeners: Is economic growth bad for the planet?

We talk to one economist, Herman Daly, who argues that economic growth is in fact environmentally unsustainable.

And we hear from a second, Robert Mendelsohn who says economic growth and a healthy environment can co-exist — but who argues we should include the effects of pollution in the price of electricity.

We got our hands on a secret government report outlining what once looked like a potential crisis: The possibility that the U.S. government might pay off its entire debt.

It sounds ridiculous today. But not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system.

Today on the show, we hear from the economist who wrote the report. And we look at how things turned out so, so differently.

Germany and France are a couple tied together by fate.

In the beginning, they were always at each others' throats. At last, they realized they weren't so different. So they stopped fighting and tied themselves together through — what else? — money.

On today's show, the story of France and Germany — the relationship on which the fate of Europe depends.

It seems unlikely that Greece will be able to avoid defaulting on its loans. The real question is how the default will happen — will it be clean and organized or messy and catastrophic.

The nightmare scenario Greece most wants to avoid is what happened in Argentina. A deep recession and doomed dollar peg forced Argentina to suspend payments on its debt, leaving its lenders high and dry.

Today on the podcast, a cautionary tale for Greece.

On today's show, we talk to Daniel Yergin, one of the world's most influential thinkers about energy.

We talk about the future of energy in America, and about Yergin's new book, The Quest.

Yergin's previous book, The Prize, looked at the businessmen and politicians who fought to control oil around the world. The Quest looks beyond oil to alternative energy. The heroes are the engineers and scientists of the energy world — the geeks, in other words.

We went downtown this week to talk to the protesters at Occupy Wall Street.

We asked people why they were there. We heard lots of different answers.

We went to the big nightly meeting, which lasts for hours. Everybody has something to say. Along the lines of:

Should we buy some sleeping bags? Why does that guy get to run the meeting? What if we just buy fabric and make our own sleeping bags?

This kind of back and forth, people told us, is the whole point of Occupy Wall Street. It's not a movement; it's a venue. Standing around, talking about what everybody wants — this is a model of how the protesters want society to be.

This being Planet Money, we immediately wondered: Can an entire economy run on group participation? How could that work? It turns out, there's an economist named Robin Hahnel who's been working on this problem for 40 years. And he has a proposal that he thinks would be perfect.

He calls it participatory economics.

On today's show, we visit a place where global economic forces converge: Colo, Iowa.

The price of farmland in Iowa has doubled in the past few years. People rush to outbid each other at real-estate auctions, and land owners become millionaires in a matter of minutes.

We look visit an auction, look at the broader economic picture, and ask an unavoidable question: Is it a bubble?

In the 1980s, Satyajit Das worked for a finance company that owned a large stake in an airline.

Das got the airline to start making speculative bets on the price of oil. That decision was good for the bottom line: One year, the company made more money from trading than it did from selling tickets on its planes.

But in the long run, Das says on today's show, this was part of a much larger shift in the global economy — and that shift turned out to be a disaster.

For today's show, we've collected four Planet Money radio stories that never made it to the podcast.

A Slow Motion Bank Run In Europe: Fear can wreck a banking system and cause havoc in an economy. That's why the recent worries about big French banks are so important, and so scary.

The Twist, Explained: Chubby Checker and the Fed's latest effort to push down interest rates.

A Shrinking City Knocks Down Neighborhoods: Youngstown, Ohio, gave up on the idea that a city needs to grow. Now, the city is trying to figure out how to shrink.

The Indie-Rock Club Behind Omaha's $100 Million Boom: A couple college friends decided Omaha needed a music venue. The community they created led developers to remake a whole neighborhood.

Germany's parliament votes next week on whether to go ahead with the next phase of the Greek bailout.

On our recent trip to Germany, we talked to lots of people who think parliament should block the bailout. That's understandable, given the painful changes Germany went through to get its own house in order a few years back.

But a surprising number of people told us they do support a bailout — often for very idealistic reasons.

"We need Greece, we need Spain, we need Italy," a cab driver told us in Frankfurt. "It's the ending of war and it's the beginning of a new future. It's the dream for European peoples."

On today's show: Toxie, Planet Money's pet toxic asset, died last year. But we learned recently that she may rise from the grave.

And she could theoretically earn us $75,000 — which is astonishing, given that we bought her for only $1,000. If we do make a profit, all the money will go to charity.

Toxie was (is!) a mortgage-backed security — one of the complicated financial instruments that were the heart of the financial crisis. When we bought Toxie, we bought into a pool of thousands of mortgages around the United States.

Recently, that particular pool became the subject of a lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, the mortgages in the pool were a lot shoddier than they were supposed to be.

The unemployment rate is disastrously high in the U.S. and much of Europe. But the rate in Germany is just 6 percent — and it's declining.

We spent a week in Germany learning their secret recipe. On today's show, we hear the how country transformed its labor market a few years back — and how it still has the scars to prove it.

In a classic game of chicken, two cars race toward each other. The loser is the person who swerves out of the way of the oncoming car.

As it turns out, chicken is something that game theorists have devoted a lot of thought to

Chicken is also a pretty good metaphor for the way Congress handled the debt-ceiling debate.

On today's show, we talk to Steven S. Smith, a political scientist at Wash U. who studies Congress for a living. He takes us deep inside the debt-ceiling-as-game-of-chicken metaphor. And he explains why the supercommittee may actually work out a deal.

In Germany, a cab driver can quote you the inflation rate off the top of his head. A big bank has a contest to guess how much a basket of groceries will cost in 10 years. And a newspaper editor says: "There are two things in German psyche that are important: monetary stability, and soccer."

On today's show, Caitlin and Zoe report from Germany, where the fear of inflation runs deep. It goes back to the years after World War I, when Germany experienced one of the most catastrophic bouts of hyperinflation in the history of the world — an economic disaster that helped lay the groundwork for the rise of the Nazis.

On today's show: A financial crisis that began with the popping of a huge housing bubble and led to a stock market plunge and a banking crisis.

That's right. It's a show about Japan in the 1990s.

We talk to Adam Posen, who argues that the U.S. can learn a lot from Japan's mistakes. Posen is an economist at the Peterson institute and the Bank of England.

Everybody's worried about Europe's economy. What's the worst that could happen?

Bank runs, political riots and falling governments, for a start. Also, the end of the euro as we know it.

On today's show, David Beim, a finance professor at Colubmia's b-school, lays out a worst-case scenario for Europe.

Europe is borrowing money to bail out countries that got in trouble by borrowing too much money.

On today's Planet Money, Satyajit Das explains that European countries aren't actually putting their own money into that big euro-zone bailout fund. Instead, the fund will borrow from investors around the world — the same investors who are growing wary of lending to a bunch of countries in Europe.

What's more, the fund will be guaranteed by the countries that use the euro. So the more the fund is used, the more countries that are already struggling — countries like Spain and Italy — will be on the hook for potential losses.

Note: This podcast originally aired December of '10.

With their current leader, Moammar Gadhafi, on the run, Libya needs to start thinking about its next big challenge — what to do with the massive amount of wealth they as a country possess in oil. It sounds strange to worry about a huge influx of money, but almost all countries that find oil suffer from the natural resource curse.

There is, however, one notable exception — Norway.

An Iraqi geologist named Farouk al-Kasim advised Norway on how to organize its oil industry, and he is credited with helping it escape the resource curse.

Today on the podcast, he tells us how he did it.

The hacker group Anonymous has been grabbing headlines this year for attacking the websites of Sony, the Egyptian government and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).

Unlike other cybercriminals, the group doesn't appear to be hacking these websites for financial gain — so why do they do it? Why do they spend so much time and effort shutting down these sites?

Today on the podcast we talk to some close observers of Anonymous to find out how they operate and what they want.

Switzerland's economy is in great shape. Low debt. Low unemployment. Tons of exports.

In recent months, this economic strength has created a huge problem for Switzerland. Panicked investors around the world, who see Switzerland as a safe haven, have been buying Swiss francs like mad.

That made the value of the franc shoot up — which in has caused big problems for Switzerland.

On the show today, we look into the franc's crazy rise.

For years, Estonia played by the rules and did everything exactly the way it was supposed to. It made cut after cut and, just a few months ago, the country finally got what it wanted: It joined euro.

Despite the euro's troubles, Estonia's still doing well. It has the highest growth rate and the lowest public debt of any EU country.

On today's podcast, we talk to Estonia's president.

Every day, all around the world, people do business in U.S. dollars — even when their business has nothing to do with the U.S.

The dollar is the international language of money. It's essential for global trade.

This provides huge benefits for the United States. U.S. businesses can trade in their own currency. Our government can borrow money more cheaply. Mortgages and student loans are cheaper, too.

For the moment, the dollar's dominance seems secure. Safe-haven currencies like the Swiss franc are too small to replace the dollar. And bigger currencies like the euro and the Chinese renminbi have problems of their own.

On today's show, we hear about how people use the U.S. dollar Brazil and South Africa. And we talk to an economist who says the dollar's days as the world's lone reserve currency may be numbered.

You would never look at a map of the Hudson River, point to the spot where the Tappan Zee Bridge is, and say, "Put the bridge here!"

The Tappan-Zee crosses one of the widest points on the Hudson — the bridge is more than three miles long. And if you go just a few miles south, the river gets much narrower.

Our question for today's show: Why did they build a three-mile-long bridge when they could have built a much shorter, cheaper bridge nearby?

Our search for an answer leads us to a forensic engineer, the Statue of Liberty, and a governor who wanted to be an opera singer.

Italy is in trouble. The country is getting sucked into Europe's debt crisis, and leaders around the continent are trying to figure out what to do about it.

On today's show, we talk to a few Italians who describe how common tax evasion is in Italy, and how big the unofficial economy is.

We also talk to Andrew Balls, head of European portfolio management at PIMCO — a guy whose job is figuring out whether to lend money to Italy.

He says Italy isn't in such bad shape. Yes, it's debt is high. But its annual deficit is small, it didn't have a housing crisis and its banks are in decent shape.

Italy's problem is that investors are getting nervous about its neighbors — Spain, Greece and Portugal. And that tends to spill over.

Patents are supposed to promote innovation. But in the world of software and the Internet, they're having precisely the opposite effect.

Tech companies are spending billions of dollars to buy up patents — not to drive innovation, but to defend themselves from potential lawsuits. There's a legal war on in Silicon Valley, and patents are the weapons.

We talked about this issue recently on This American Life and All Things Considered. On today's podcast, we ask: How much is the patent war costing us? And what does it mean for innovation in America?

For answers, we talk to Jim Bessen, an entrepreneur and researcher, and Eric Maskin, a Nobel-prize-winning-economist.

Today's podcast is a recording of the live show Alex and Adam did in DC this week. In keeping with the vibe of the nation's capital, they go big, and talk a lot about "America."

Key themes:

1. Disco destroyed America.

2. Now there are two Americas: Broken America and American Dream America

3. A three-step plan for solving America's problems.

Let's assume that the U.S. government raises the debt ceiling, and the country keeps paying its bills next month.

It's still very possible that one or more rating agencies will downgrade the country's credit rating.

On today's show we ask: Would a downgrade matter?

We revisit a question we asked last year: How do you rate a country?

And we talk to one expert who says a downgrade of America's credit rating would make for splashy headlines, but would likely have a relatively small impact. Most of America's debt is held by big institutional investors — and those investors do their own research, and don't tend to be swayed much by what rating agencies say.

On today's Planet Money, more twists and turns in our story about the more than one billion dollar coins sitting unused in government vaults:

We talk to self-described 'travel hackers' who use frequent-flier mile credit cards to buy dollar coins and pile up miles.

And we learn that the U.S. Mint  — just today! — said it would stop letting people use credit cards to buy the coins.

Also on the show: Why they love U.S. dollar coins in Ecuador.

Say you're a country with a decent-size national debt. Everything's going fine: Investors are willing to lend you money at a low interest rate, andyou can pay your bills without too much trouble.

But then investors get nervous and start demanding higher interest rates. All of a sudden, you have to devote more and more of your money just to pay off your debt.

Your economy starts to falter, and investors demand still higher interest rates. Now you're really in trouble.

What causes this to happen? Is there some magic threshold that countries cross before they get into trouble?

On today's Planet Money, we put that question to Ken Rogoff — a Harvard economist and an expert on the history of sovereign debt crises. We talk to Rogoff about three countries in particular: Greece, Italy and the U.S.

North Korea relies on charity to feed its starving people. But the country's elites like their luxuries — imported wine, fine china, dancing shoes.

To buy those things, they need foreign currency. (North Korean currency is worthless outside of North Korea.) To get foreign currency, they need to sell things to the outside world. But North Korea's industrial base is a disaster, and the country doesn't grow enough food to feed itself.

On today's Planet Money, we look at the ways North Korea's leaders have managed to keep foreign currency flowing into the country. Their strategies include manufacturing drugs, counterfeiting U.S. dollars, and selling gigantic statues to foreign leaders.

Bitcoin is a new kind of currency. But unlike, say, the dollar or the yen, it's not backed by any government. Also, you can't hold it in your hand or put it in your pocket; it exists only on computers.

Bitcoin is supposed to be cash for the Internet age — anonymous money that anyone can use without using a credit card or going through a bank.

On today's Planet Money, try to get our hands on a few bitcoins, which turns out to be harder than it sounds.

We dig into some basic questions that come up when you're creating a new currency from scratch.

And we buy lunch.

On today's show, we tell the story of a secret battle that's been going on for more than a year: Creating the song of the summer, the music industry's holy grail.

Our case study is Rihanna's "Man Down." The story starts in the spring of 2010, when Rihanna's label flies in songwriters and producers from around the company for a "writing camp" — a pop-up version of the old hit factories that churned out pop tunes.

Writing camp is expensive. But the real money doesn't start flowing until after the song is done.

*Correction: An earlier version of this podcast used the incorrect version of Jennifer Lopez's, "I'm Real."

In the seventies and eighties, the Antar family ran Crazy Eddie, a popular electronics chain known for its frenetic commercials.

The business was crooked from the start, but the fraud got more serious when the family took the company public in the 1984. In 1987, the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated the family and discovered years of inflated profits and overstated income.

On today's show, one of the masterminds of the fraud, Eddie's cousin Sam Antar, explains how they did it and why it worked for so long.

On today's Planet Money, we travel to a place where people are trying to live without government interference. A place where you can use bits of silver to buy uninspected bacon. A place where a 9-year-old will sell you alcohol.

It's the 2011 Porcupine Freedom Festival, known to its friends as PorcFest. It's the summer festival for people who think we should return to the gold standard and abolish the IRS.

On today's Planet Money, we visit an underground vault that's full of money nobody wants.

The money — bags and bags of dollar coins — is the result of a 2005 law that requires the U.S. Mint to print a series of coins bearing the likeness of each U.S. president.

The problem is, people don't really like dollar coins. So more than 1 billion dollar coins are now sitting, unwanted, in Federal Reserve vaults around the country. By the time the program wraps up in 2016, the Fed will be sitting on 2 billion unwanted coins, according to the Fed's own estimates.

Unemployment is still dangerously high. But things are looking up for both households and companies.

On today's Planet Money, economist Mark Zandi says households have been steadily reducing their debt over the past few years. Companies slashed 8.5 million jobs in the recession and their productivity has soared.

But one thing that Zandi is still worried about: the federal government's long-term deficit.

In the 16th century, coffee shops prominently displayed coin boxes with the phrase "to ensure prompt service" written on the side. If you wanted your coffee in a hurry, you dropped a little something extra in the box, and made sure the waitress saw you do it.

This, according to at least one version of history, is where tipping began.

But today, we tip after we get served, not before. And, according to one expert we talk to on today's podcast, the quality of service we perceive makes a tiny difference in how much we tip. (The weather has a comparable influence on tip size.)

According to one theory, when you get down to it, we don't even tip for good service. We tip because we feel guilty.

If you know the right people — and if can get other criminals to vouch for you — you can go online and buy huge bundles of stolen credit cards.

As it turns out, Planet Money knows the right people.

On today's show, we sit in with Keith Mularski of the FBI. Mularski got so deep into this world that he wound up running a major criminal website.

He takes us to a giant online mall for stolen credit cards, where vendors offer discounts for repeat customers and banners advertise hacking and phishing tutorials.

Take a bunch of 3 year olds from poor families. Randomly divide them into two groups, and give one group free access to preschool. Then follow both groups for 40 years. This is what the researchers in the Perry Preschool Program did, starting in the early 1960s.

The results were astonishing. Kids from the preschool group were less likely to be arrested and more likely to have a job. Among those with jobs, those who went to preschool made more money than those who did not.

Other studies show similar results.

On today's today's Planet Money, we talk with James Heckman, a University of Chicago economist. Based on the data from these studies, he argues that using public funds to pay for poor kids to go to preschool actually saves the government money in the long run.

There's a lot of hand waving in economics. People make big-picture arguments and throw around equations, but often there's not much good evidence to work with.

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo do experiments to try to figure out how to improve the lot of the world's poor. Their goal isn't so much to make big, sweeping statements as to find clear answers to specific questions.

On today's Planet Money, we talk to Banerjee and Duflo about their new book, Poor Economics.