On today's show: Three short Planet Money stories about trying to figure out what things are really worth.

When Lady Gaga writes a song, does that count as economic output? Is a $20 worth $20 in Myanmar (Spoiler: Probably not.) And economists help a young college grad think through what to do with his life.

Also: An update on our t-shirt project.

As you may have heard, we're making a t-shirt and telling the story of how it's made. We decided a few months ago to work with Jockey to make our t-shirts. Our women's shirt will be made in Colombia. Our men's shirt will be made, in part, in Bangladesh.

But horrifying news has been coming out of Bangladesh's apparel industry recently. A garment factory collapsed a few weeks ago, killing more than 1,000 people. Last year, a factory fire killed hundreds of workers.

As part of the t-shirt project, we'll be traveling to Bangladesh to report on the industry. On today's show, we start to ask: Is buying a t-shirt from Bangladesh a good thing or a bad thing for the people of Bangladesh?

For more: See Adam Davidson's latest New York Times Magazine column, Economic Recovery, Made in Bangladesh?

On today's show, we'll explain what the color of our women's t-shirt has to do with this painting from 1976, and we'll tell you how unfinished buildings halfway around the world are shaping what we see on store shelves right now.

You only have three days left to get your very own Planet Money t-shirt. All it takes is a $25 pledge on Kickstarter.

On today's show, we meet a wholesaler who moves weed across the country, a California weed dealer seeking higher profits in New York, and a special agent who may be inadvertently helping the dealer out by trying to put him in jail.

For More: See The Weed Trail, from WNYC

And we hear why U.S. taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton growers nearly $150 million a year.

This show originally ran in 2011, near the beginning of our quest to make a Planet Money t-shirt. We're re-playing it now because we just re-launched the t-shirt project.

If you want a Planet Money t-shirt, visit our Kickstarter page. We had more about the project in our most recent podcast, The Planet Money T-Shirt Is Finally (Almost) Here.

Music: Johnny Cash's "Cotton Fields" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

On today's show, we visit a candy factory in Ohio (where they want U.S. sugar to be cheaper) and a sugar-beet field in Minnesota (where they don't). And, perhaps inevitably, we hear from Washington, where the fight over sugar has been playing out for years.

For more, read our post from earlier today.

Subscribe to the podcast.  Find us Twitter/Facebook/Flickr.

We are so eager to figure what causes what — that we often get it wrong. I wore my lucky hat to the game. My team won. Therefore, my lucky hat caused my team to win.

On today's show we dive deep into the world of correlation and causation with Charles Wheelan, author of the new book, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data.

Reinhart and Rogoff looked at what had happened in many different countries over many years. And they found a what looked like a clear debt threshold: 90 percent. Average growth was much, much slower in countries with debt-to-gdp ratios over 90 percent.

The paper got a lot of coverage in the press. Politicians cited it in the U.S. and Europe.

Then, this week, a 28-year-old grad student and his professors published a startling finding: Reinhart and Rogoff had made a simple Excel error in one part of their study. The authors of the new critique also questioned other elements of the study and argued that, in fact, there is no debt threshold.

On today's show, we hear from the grad student who found the error. And we ask: How much should we trust economics?

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.

For More: Read our post, "From Abe Lincoln To Donald Duck: History Of The Income Tax."And see War and Taxes, the book Joe Thorndike co-wrote.

Subscribe to the podcast. Music: Nero's "The Promise" and Danny Kaye's "I Paid My Income Tax Today." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Note: This podcast was originally published last year.

On today's show, we look at a huge, often overlooked, surprisingly interesting corner of the tax code: The Earned Income Tax Credit.

For more, see our story A Surprisingly Uncontroversial Program That Gives Money To Poor People.

Then there's bitcoin, a virtual currency that doesn't even exist in the physical world. In the past few months, the value of bitcoin has risen by more than 1,000 percent — from less than $20 per bitcoin a few months ago to more than $200 today.

On today's show, we ask: Is a skyrocketing value a good thing or a bad thing for bitcoin?

But what about songs from your iTunes library you no longer want?

Today on the show, the story of a company that tried to set up an online marketplace where people can buy and sell old mp3s, and what happened to them. It involves a law from 1976, a phonorecord, and a judge that quotes Star Trek.

For more on the legal arguments around selling used digital media:

• Is It Legal To Sell Your Old MP3s?
• Update: Is It Legal To Sell Your Old MP3s? Judge Says No.*
• Lawyer Rick Sander blog.
• Bill Rosenblatt's blog, "Copyright and Technology."

But it turns out, our report was a kind of premature obituary for the business. We return to the amusement park, about 5 months after the storm, and find things shockingly normal. Businesses like Deno's are back and some of them are thriving. On today's show, an economic case study. What brought Coney Island back so quickly?

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.

For more at www.npr.org/money.

A con artist saw an opportunity. He launched a company that exported nonexistent gold for nonexistent dollars, and collected a real government bonus. Then, when he was about to get caught, he started his own bank. That's when the scam really took off.

On today's show: How one guy pulled off one of the largest financial scams in Kenyan history, avoided prison, re-branded himself as a man of God, and ran for a seat in parliament.

It's the story of 14 million people who don't show up in most of the numbers we look at to understand the economy. These 14 million Americans don't have jobs, but they don't show up in any of the unemployment measures that we use. They receive federal assistance, but are often overlooked in discussions of the social safety net.

On today's show: What disability in America says about the state of the American workforce, and about what it means to be poor in America nearly 20 years after we ended welfare as we knew it.

For much, much more on disability, see our giant online story and listen to This American Life this weekend (we're doing the whole hour on disability). And we'll have more disability stories next week on All Things Considered.

Correction: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly named the Minnesota congressman who at first voted against the legislation that expanded the definition of disability. His name is Tim Penny and not Tim Perry.

But this weekend, we woke up to find we were wrong. Late night foreign minister meetings, lines at the ATMs, protests in the street — it's all back.

The crisis has emerged again in an unlikely place. On today's show: Why did the world freak out over the Cyprus bailout?

For more about this episode, visit the Planet Money blog.

This is a problem for Lou Caracciolo. He's trying to make high-quality wine, from grapes he grows in New Jersey. But Jersey wine already has a reputation — and fancy isn't it. On today's show: Can New Jersey become the next Napa?

For more, see Adam Davidson's latest NYT Magazine column, Bottle Bing.

Music: Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

And even if we do hit a real, inflation-adjusted high in the next few weeks, it won't mean much. The Dow is a seriously flawed stock index, and it's certainly not a good way to measure what's going on in the overall economy.

On today's show, we rain on the Dow's parade and explain why a lot of very smart people, hate this index so much.

For more on the Dow:

The Dow Isn't Really At A Record High (And It Wouldn't Matter If It Were)

Dow's 'Record Highs' Misleading Without Including Inflation

Sales Are Like Drugs. What Happens When A Store Wants Customers To Quit? J.C. Penney's new CEO came in with a bold strategy: No more sales or coupons. It didn't work.

Should The U.S. Import More Doctors? "We should think of doctors the same way we think of shirts," an economist says. "If we can get doctors at a lower cost from elsewhere in the world then we could save enormous amounts of money."

If A Driverless Car Crashes, Who's Liable? Technology isn't the only hurdle for computer-driven cars.

Music: Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle", Pet Shop Boys "Shopping", Paramore's "Now", and The Black Eyed Peas "Boom Boom Pow," Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet MoneyiPhone App.

Higher land prices have forced Amish off the farms and into business. There are thousands of Amish run firms out there making everything from plumbing supplies to furniture.

But running an Amish business poses unique challenges. Many Amish don't connect to the electrical grid. They don't drive cars. They prize modesty, meaning traditional advertising slogans like "best," "fastest," and "greatest" are out. An Amish company has to be creative about these things.

And, the Amish have tricks they can teach the rest of the business world. For one, they have perfected the art of marketing to a niche audience.

On today's show, we travel to the The Buckeye Tool Expo in Dalton, Ohio to see how the Amish balance their business interests with their personal beliefs.

On today's show, experts (including a priest with a Harvard MBA) tell us what the church needs to do to turn things around.

Music: Faithful Father's Pipe Organ Hymns, & Run DMC's "Down With The King."

Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

For a giant article in this week's Time, Steve Brill went line by line through a handful of bills from hospitals around the country. On today's show, he tells us about the crazy thicket of high prices and hard-to-decipher codes that he discovered, and we talk about what it means for the price of health care in America.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the biggest brewer in the world, wants to buy Grupo Modelo, the maker of Corona. The U.S. Department of Justice is suing to block the acquisition.

On today's show: The story behind the case, and what it says about monopolies, competition and government regulation.

Music: Rihanna's "Cheers (Drink to That)" Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

The uberblogger Andrew Sullivan recently struck out on his own. Now he's trying keep his blog afloat by asking readers for money — and hoping that they'll contribute enough to pay for the the blog's five-person staff. On today's show, he tells us how he's doing.

Also: We hear from Maura Johnston, a music writer who got fired from The Village Voice and is trying to sell a digital magazine.

Among the answers:

• Let in lots more doctors and engineers
• Auction off immigration slots to the highest bidders
• Open the gates, and let everyone in

Why hasn't anyone figured out a better way to sell cars? Why can't you just go to a car store and shop for cars from a bunch of different manufacturers? Why don't cars have real price tags — with real prices, that people actually pay?

Today on the show: Why car buying is so unpleasant, and what your local legislators may be doing to keep it that way.

Here's more on those stories:

1. Why Is The Government In The Flood Insurance Business? The quick answer to why the government sells flood insurance: a hugely damaging hurricane named Betsy.

2. Should Gun Owners Have To Buy Liability Insurance? Most states require car owners to have liability insurance to cover damages their vehicles cause to others; some economists think we should require the same for gun owners.

3. Lance Armstrong's Confession Could Cost Him Millions How one interview could mean he'll have to pay back all the money the U.S. Postal Service and others paid to sponsor his cycling career.

4. How Happy Is America? The government is considering adopting a national happiness index. But how do you measure happiness?

The government of Ecuador faces a choice: Should it protect the park, or go for the money?

The country is trying to do both. The government says it will promise to leave its rainforest untouched — if rich counties give Ecuador billions of dollars.

We visited Iceland just before the vote and met Heiða Dóra Jónsdóttir, a 29-year-old new mom. Heiða was trying to figure out how to vote so we set up interviews for her with a bunch of experts on the subject, including Iceland's president.

Heiða and the majority of Icelanders eventually voted "no" on the referendum, but the fight didn't end there. The British and Dutch governments took Iceland to court to try to recover money their citizens lost when an Icelandic bank failed.

On today's show: we revisit that story from 2011 and give an update on how the years-long, international, multi-billion-dollar battle turned out.

On today's show, we visit a breast pump boutique that has suddenly become a medical supply superstore. And we look at happens when a device goes from being something people have to pay for out of their own pocket to being free for anyone with insurance.

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 is facing criminal charges that could lead to life in prison.

The global food shortage is finally becoming an important story, because now it is affecting me. Costco and Sam's Club are now both rationing rice. You can't buy more than 80 pounds in a single visit. How am I supposed to make my famous kiddie pool paella?!?

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.

Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran on November, 2010.

Bill Ackman thinks the whole thing is a pyramid scheme.Not surprisingly, Herbalife disagrees.

Ackman manages a hedge fund that has shorted more than a billion dollars' worth of Herbalife stock. If the stock falls — and Ackman says he thinks it will fall all the way to zero — the fund will make money.

On today's show, we talk to Ackman and to Herbalife. And we consider what it means when an investor bets that a company will fail.

Chances are you've received an email with a subject line like this: "The hottest method to please your beloved one." Or this: "Want to get good health for low prices?" Or emails offering "low cost med pills!"

You've probably wondered — who is sending these emails? Does anyone actually click on these links? What happens when they do?

On today's show — we go deep inside the world of spam to answer these questions with the help of cyber-security reporter Brian Krebs and researcher Stefan Savage.

1. Are E-Books Actually Destroying Traditional Publishing? Conventional wisdom says e-books are destroying the traditional publishing business model. People pay less for e-books and that drives down price. When you talk to publishers though, you realize the story's not that simple.

2. Why Legos Are So Expensive — And So Popular Legos often cost twice as much as similar blocks from a rival toymaker. So why are Legos so much more popular than other brands?

3. 3-D Printing Is (Kind Of) A Big Deal It's miraculous to see: Press a button, make anything you want. But will it transform the economy?

Local officials are trying to turn Williston into a real town, where people want to bring their families. But it's a tough sell.

On today's show, we visit Williston, and we learn why one guy endures a thousand-mile commute, why a one-bedroom apartment costs $2100 a month, and why the town is building an indoor lazy river.

On today's show, we explain why LeBron is getting hosed — and why that's probably a good thing for NBA fans, team owners, other pro players, and even LeBron himself.

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.

This episode was originally released in August, 2011.

We look back at the stories we've done in 2012 and tell you what we got right, what we got wrong and how everything turned out in Belize. Plus, we try to to figure out whether that Facebook ad did anything to help Pizza Delicious.

So we wondered: Is there a way to make the holiday season both more efficient and more joyful?

On today's Planet Money, we try to answer that question by conducting a wildly unscientific experiment. We go into a seventh-grade classroom and give a bunch of kids some small gifts — candy, raisins, fig newtons.

Then we ask them how much they value what they got, and if they can think of a way to make everyone better off, without buying any more gifts. They quickly arrive at a solution: trade.

Behold, the power of economics!

On today's show, three professional negotiators walk us through techniques that members of Congress may be using right now. They explain these techniques not with textbooks, but with examples from their everyday lives.

Firefighters don't go to fires as much as much as they used to. That's because, thanks to modern building codes, fires are not as common as they used to be. Yet the fire dept is still set up the same way: big trucks, lots of fire stations, and lots of firefighters who retire with lifetime pensions.

Rather than close fire stations, the firefighters in Contra Costa County agreed to take a pay cut a few years back. But the county still couldn't afford the fire department.

So the firefighters came up with a new plan: Ask the local citizens to support the fire department by paying higher taxes.

On today's show: Three Planet Money stories that aired on the radio but haven't yet made it into the show.

Will A $1.9 Billion Settlement Change Banks' Behavior?

Why The Falling Birthrate Is Bad News For My 2-Year-Old Son

A Huge Pay Cut For Doctors Is Hiding In The Fiscal Cliff

• What Schoolhouse Rock didn't tell us
• Why Aaron Burr and Jimmy Stewart are the two great villains in filibuster history
• How Senators can now filibuster bills without having to talk for hours on end

Banks printed their own paper money. And, unlike today, a $1 bill wasn't always worth $1. Sometimes people took the bills at face value. Sometimes they accepted them at a discount (a $1 bill might only be worth 90 cents, say.) Sometimes people rejected certain bills altogether.

On today's show, we figure out how this world worked. And explain how the Civil War — and the Union's need for money — changed everything.

Not surprisingly, there are legitimate, legal (at least under state law) marijuana entrepreneurs trying to start businesses around the country.

On today's show, we discover the one big thing that's standing in their way: getting a bank account. And we learn how hard it is to run a business on cash alone.

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.

So 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.

On today's show: Four Planet Money stories that aired on the radio but haven't yet made it into the show.

* A Sequester Is A 'Jelly-Like Mass,' And Other Notes On Fiscal-Cliff Jargon

* Clear The Secret Genius Of Taylor Swift

* The Weird Story Of Why Helium Prices Are Going Through The Roof

* Energy Independence Wouldn't Make Gasoline Any Cheaper

The man worked as a money changer. He said he was getting a lot of requests from traffickers who had a problem: They had so much cash that they didn't know what to do with it. They couldn't figure out how to launder their money.

What they needed was an offshore bank to help them. On today's show, we hear how two U.S. agents — one IRS, one DEA — created a fake offshore bank to catch drug traffickers.

Under the leadership of Lance Armstrong, the U.S. Postal Service cycling team was wildly successful, winning the Tour de France seven years in a row.

According to a recent report, the team was running a high-tech, secret doping operation during those years. The operation was run like a business, and its leader was Lance Armstrong.

On today's show, we find out why. The answer includes a half a million vending machines, a 7.5 cent coin, and a company president who just wanted to get a couple lawyers out of his office.

The big idea is that a poor country should take a small, empty part of its territory and say: We're going to build a new city here. And in this new city, we're going to get rid of our existing laws and rules, and bring in the best laws we can find from around the world. Get help from foreign countries. Maybe the UK could serve as a court of appeals. Maybe Canada could send in a few Mounties to help set up a police force.

The two men are Paul Romer, a world famous North American economist, and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the president of Honduras.

They think their big idea could be the answer to one of the oldest, hardest problems in economics: How do poor countries get richer?

And they seem like a perfect match. Paul is a famous economist who can sell the idea around the world. Octavio has the ear of the president in a poor country looking for a change.

On the show, we find out what happens when they try to make their idea a reality.

But in the long run — even in the medium run — New York (and New Jersey!) will recover. And for the U.S. economy as a whole, this disaster will barely be a blip.

This is largely because there are countless backup plans hiding everywhere in our economy. On today's show, a flooded grocery store reveals safety nets that are usually hidden but, at moments like these, are suddenly made visible.

On today's podcast, we ask — who killed lard? Was it Upton Sinclair? His novel, The Jungle, contained this memorable passage about the men who cook the lard:

...and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,— sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

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.

Note: Today's podcast is a rerun. It first ran in January, 2012.

Today, we take it to the people — or, at least, a focus group. We find out whether these economically sound ideas can get anyone's vote. And we create a couple real ads for our fake candidate.

1. A jury finds that Samsung violated Apple's patents, and orders Samsung to pay Apple $1 billion.

2. A judge throws out a case between Apple and Motorola (now owned by Google). The judge goes on to write an article in the Atlantic arguing that there are too many patents in America, and lots of industries could probably get along fine with no patents at all.

These radically different rulings were just the latest reminder that the world of software patents is a mess. Big companies that should be focused on inventing the next great thing are instead spending billions of dollars buying up patents and suing each other. Small companies have to worry that someone with some random patent is going to sue them and shut them down.

On today's show, we talk with Mark Lemley, who has some ideas for fixing the patent mess. Lemley is a professor at Stanford law school and an expert on software patents. Lemley also works for clients in the private sector, including Google.

We'll have more on preschool this weekend on This American Life.

We used to be the number one maker of steel. American steel built bridges and ships all over the world. Not anymore.

But the world's most popular music still comes from American artists. Turn on a car radio in Italy, walk into a store in Mozambique, and there's a good chance you'll hear an American pop tune.

Music is an export, just like anything else. And, as with other exports, businesses in lots of other countries are fighting for their share of the global market. They want people all around to world to be listening to their music. And they're figuring out how to make it happen.

The popularity of PSY's song "Gangnam Style" is not a fluke. Korea has spent the last twenty years preparing for this moment.

On today's show, we follow up with Willow. She just bought another house. She's trying to land a reality TV deal. And she recently wore a Pikachu costume on a trip to Alabama.

We discover the world of "Asset Protection," which is a fancy way of saying "hiding money." It's a world of Latvian companies and offshore conferences, of people trying to hide money from their future-ex-husbands and future-ex-wives.

"It's kind of like Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole," one insider tells us.

Lots of economists write about the economics of illegal drugs. Here's a paper from a Harvard guy. Here's another co-authored by a couple Chicago guys.

One thing missing from those papers: Actual drug dealers.

So for today's podcast, we run some economic theory by Freeway Rick Ross (pictured), who was one of the biggest crack dealers in LA in the '80s and '90s. He went to prison in '96, and was released on parole in '09.

Economists say that people demand a "risk premium" to do illegal, risky work. But it didn't feel that way to Ross:

When you come from where I was when I started selling drugs, you feel hopeless. You don't think you're going to live past 24 years old. Go to jail, come out with stripes. Really wasn't any risk.

Everything I had going on at the time, it was nothing. I was like a lump on a log. The risk most people would look at — you could get killed, go to prison — was Ok.

What's more, he really liked being a drug kingpin.

I loved it. ... I felt like I was powerful. ... It was every man's dream to be free. ... I'd rather be doing that than anything else, almost.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, tells us the story of Pacioli and how his book on mathematics changed business across the planet.

Getting rid of the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Eliminating corporate taxes. Legalizing marijuana.

On the show today, we bring in real political consultants to help us plan a campaign for our fake candidate. Our goal: Sell our candidate to America by making economics sexy.

On today's show, we talk to some tax lawyers to try to figure out what we can do with our companies. We draft a resolution so we can go to Belize to meet the fake director and fake shareholder of our company. And we learn owning shell companies in tax havens is a lot more of a hassle than we thought.

They agreed on a broad economic platform that would sink any political candidate that supported it. (Here's the show we did on their platform; here's a blog post.)

Today, we talk to those economists again. This time, we hear a bunch of the ideas some of them liked but others shot down — including free heroin for addicts, a new tax on financial speculation, and $2 trillion in new, deficit spending on infrastructure projects.

On today's show, we have four short Planet Money stories.

People called in sick all the time, typically on Mondays, or on days when there was a big soccer game.

Foggia is in southern Italy. Barilla's big factory in northern Italy had a much lower absentee rate. This is not surprising; there's a huge economic gap between southern and northern Italy. It's like two different countries.

Barilla execs told Nicola Calandrea, the manager of the Foggia plant, that they would close the factory unless he brought the absenteeism rate down.

Calandrea decided that to save the factory, he had to change the culture. On today's show, we visit the factory and hear how Calandrea made it work.

Harford takes us on a failure tour of New York. Highlights include a Gutenberg Bible (turns out the Bible business wasn't so good to Gutenberg) and the Woolworth Building (Woolworth's had some great innovations in its day, but eventually got beat by big-box stores).

Failure, Harford argues, is essential to economic growth. Old companies fail and are replaced by newer companies with fresh ideas.

Perhaps inevitably, we wind up on Wall Street.

"Of course we have this classic phrase now, 'too big to fail,'" Harford says. "That really tells you what was wrong with Wall Street: We created institutions that couldn't fail safely."

This raises a basic question: Can you patent a steak?

On today's show, we talk to Mata. We visit the workshop of Gene Gagliardi, the inventor of Steak-Umm and KFC's popcorn chicken. And we try to figure out what meat inventors tell us about patents and innovation.

That clash is still clashing today. Paul Ryan has cited Hayek as an influence (though they disagree on some key points); President Obama has clearly been influenced by Keynes. And, really, there's no way to reconcile the ideas.

"This election is about two profound, competing theories that really can't exist in the same room at the same time," Wapshott says.

It's on.

A few months ago, Unkovic left a scrawled, handwritten note on the steps of the courthouse. "I find myself in an untenable position in the political and ethical crosswinds," the letter said, "and am no longer in a position to effectuate a solution."

Unkovic fled Harrisburg and stopped answering emails, phone calls, and questions from the press. Until recently. He's started to speak out about what drove Harrisburg into debt — and what drove him out of town.

On the show today, Unkovic speaks. And eats a Philly pretzel.

On today's show, Peterffy tells us his story — and he explains why he's worried about the financial world he helped create.

We learned of Peterffy's story from the forthcoming book Automate This.

It's also a place where it's legal for "coffeeshops" to sell marijuana.

Tourists from around Europe used to come to Maastricht to get high. Recently, though, Maastricht's mayor soured on marijuana tourism, and the town banned the sale of the drug to foreigners.

On today's show: Even in the home of the euro, the European Dream still isn't a reality.

On today's show, we travel to Fairbury, Illinois. We meet three generations of farmers who tell us that, even without government-subsidized crop insurance, their farms would survive the drought.

So why does the government spend so much on crop insurance programs? We talk to an ag economist who has a surprising answer.

On one side of the building, there's a German mailbox and a German policeman. On the other side, a Dutch mailbox and a Dutch policeman.

The building was supposed to make it easy to work in both countries. But it's also a reminder of how the European dream isn't yet a reality.

That was the one time in U.S. history when the country was debt free. It lasted exactly one year.

On today's Planet Money: The legend of the national debt. Where the debt came from, what happened the one time we paid it all off, and why Congress created the debt ceiling in the first place.

This episode originally aired on May 13, 2011.

Get them early, and you'd have everything you need to make a quick fortune. And once — just once, as far as anyone knows — someone did get them early.

On today's show, we talk to the guy who got the numbers before everyone else. And we learn the crazy lengths the government now goes to in order to keep those numbers secret until it's time to release them.

There's a pill called Suboxone that treats addiction to heroin and pain pills like oxycontin. Doctors and addicts say it's amazing.

"It was the best thing that ever happened," one heroin addict told us. "I was like OH. MY. LORD. This is a miracle pill."

The government spent tens of millions of dollars developing Suboxone. Doctors can prescribe it in their offices. But a lot of people who want it can't get it from a doctor, so they have to buy it on the street.

Today on the show: Why people have to turn to drug dealers to get a pill that fights addiction.

We set up our own company in an offshore tax haven, and we find out where the easiest place to register a business anonymously is.

Just How Blind Are Blind Trusts, Anyway?: With questions swirling about Mitt Romney's investments, a look at how blind trusts really work.

The European Central Bank's Guide To Influence: With much of the continent on shaky financial grounds, the ECB is all about influencing governments, not making friends.

Public Pensions Are About To Look Less Healthy: Accounting rules are changing, and that could mean a nasty surprise for a lot of public employees. (And for more on just what's behind the change, see Monday's blog post, Why Public Pensions Are About To Look Less Healthy.)

The lesson: People have a "present bias," says Frank Partnoy, a professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego. "So people have more impatience in a one-month time period than they do in a one-year time period."

This turns out to have immense implications for public policy — implications that add up to many trillions of dollars over time, and mean the difference between valuing the lives of future generations at a few pennies, or hundreds of billions of dollars.

Consider: If it would cost several trillion dollars to save Los Angeles from being wiped off the map by massive floods that are likely to occur only once every few hundred years, is it worth it?

The answer hinges on the discount rate — the rate you use to size up future costs.

We assembled five prominent economists from across the political spectrum. We gave them a simple task: Identify major economic policies they could all stand behind.

They did. They gave us five tax proposals — plus one change to the criminal code — that every one of them could support wholeheartedly, from left to right.

And in the process, they gave us an economic platform that would surely sink any candidate that supported it.

On today's show: The Planet Money economic platform. Backed by the brightest minds in modern economics. Pure poison to any politician that embraces it.

This week, free of charge, Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg tell the story of the Red Cross and free doughnuts — that suddenly weren't free any more. It happened 70 years ago, and the Red Cross is still feeling the consequences.

But when Luigi Zingales says it, he should know: He's a University of Chicago economist. He was born in Italy. He studies, among other things, what has set the American economy apart from places like Italy.

And he's worried.

On today's show: How the U.S. is taking a few early steps down the risky road toward Italy, and how it could change course.

On today's Planet Money, we talk to economist Joshua Gans and his 11-year-old daughter.

Gans, who wrote a book called Parentonomics, tried to create a toilet-training economy for his young children. He rewarded them with candy for sitting on the toilet — and the older ones got candy if they helped the younger ones.

But, like tiny Wall-Street bankers, the kids figured out how to work the system for maximum advantage.

His daughter managed to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes, all day long. For a while, she got a treat every time.

She also wrung everything she could out of her brother:

I realized that if I helped my brother go to the toilet, I would get rewarded, too. And I realized that the more that goes in, the more comes out. So I was just feeding my brother buckets and buckets of water.

Also on the podcast: We discuss the jobs numbers that the government reported today. And we talked about this graph, the most vivid illustration you'll see of how slow this recovery is.

Note: Part of today's show is a rerun. It first ran in August, 2010.

That element is the number banks use to determine how much to charge their customers — think of it as the measuring stick that determines nearly every other other interest rate around: mortgages, credit cards, corporate loans, complex derivatives transactions. It's called LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, and it pretty much underpins everything.

For years, the British Bankers' Association has calculated the rate by asking big banks what they are paying to borrow from other banks. The answers were largely taken on faith. Now it turns out that at least one big bank — Barclays — was skewing the numbers, during the financial crisis and before. Emails cited in a regulatory complaint against the bank show the casual way the efforts were discussed. Other banks are under investigation as well.

The result: Criminal and parliamentary inquiries on two continents, lawsuits, and a lot of mistrust and uncertainty about interest rates across the financial markets.

On today's show, we look at how Barclays bankers sought to manipulate Libor, and why the repercussions will be felt throughout the global financial system for years to come.

When the ruling came down, we were visiting people who work at a health insurance agency in Connecticut. The Court's ruling means the company needs to find a new line of business or close down altogether. (Here's more on our visit.)

Also, we hear how people's lives changed when they lost health insurance — and when they got it.

Today, though, going public doesn't hold the same allure it once did for many entrepreneurs. "In Silicon Valley, there is a general attitude that the cool kids sell their companies rather than going public," Spencer Rascoff told us.

Rascoff is the CEO of Zillow — which did go public. On today's show, Rascoff makes the case for going public. And we hear from another CEO who is blowing off the bankers pushing him toward an IPO.

"It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license," the e-mail read. "Please delete your ad, or you will be reported."

To get a license, Jestina would have to spend more than a year in cosmetology school. Tuition would cost $16,000 dollars or more. 

On today's show: Why it's illegal to braid hair without a license in Utah. And why that rule — and hundreds of others like it in states all around the country — are a disaster for the U.S. economy.

On today's show, we hear from a Greek economist about the options open to the country. And we talk to a Greek couple that's getting married tomorrow. They're not sure how they're going to pay for the wedding.

On one side were people making what seems like the straightforward argument: People who get Medicaid fare better than people who don't.

On the other side were those making the contrarian argument. They argued that there is already a safety net for the poor and the uninsured, and that Medicaid's reimbursement rates are so low that most doctors don't see Medicaid patients anyway.

The debate was perennial and unresolvable. You couldn't simply compare people with Medicaid to those without, because the two groups had different characteristics.

To truly answer the question, you would need to take a big group of people, and randomly divide them into two groups. One group would get Medicaid, and the other wouldn't. But doing that would be unethical.

Then, a few years back, Oregon announced that it had 10,000 new slots in its Medicaid program. Far more than 10,000 people wanted to enroll. So the state held a lottery.

The state of Oregon didn't mean to be creating the perfect experiment to test whether Medicaid actually helps people. But that's what it was doing.

Katherine Baicker, a health economist at Harvard, followed people who entered the Oregon Medicaid lottery — and she compared the outcomes between those who were given Medicaid, and those who were denied.

On today's show, we talk to her about what she learned — and we hear ger findings mean for the debate over health care in America.

It's the story of how a group of people tried to fix a problem, but wound up creating a banking monster.

On today's show: How Lincoln is trying to regain its former glory — and how the story of Lincoln may be the story of the U.S. auto industry, for better or for worse.

On today's show, we talk to Douglas Diamond, an economist who is one of the go-to guys on bank runs, and we hear from Greek bank teller who is handing out euros to panicked depositors.

We walk through the three things you can do to stop a bank run — and figure out what options are left for Europe.

BONUS: Check out our special bank run playlist assembled by Zoe Chace.

Just as the countries of Europe today share the euro, the Austrian empire and the Kingdom of Hungary had created a shared currency: the Austro-Hungarian crown.

After World War I, the region broke up. All of a sudden there were lots of countries wanting to switch to their own currencies.

At the beginning, they used a simple system: Countries simply stamped existing Austro-Hungarian currency with particular markings to turn it into new, domestic currency. Some countries used ornate samps; Romania's stamp was just a cross.

This quickly led to chaos. Everyone wanted to get their money stamped in the country they thought would have the strongest currency. Countries sealed their borders, but it was no use.

"You had boxcar loads of currency" moving across borders, says Michael Spencer, an economist who has written about this period.

It turns out, killing a currency is hard to do.

* Note: Today's podcast is a rerun. It first ran in November, 2011.

On today's show, we hear from Illinois, which owes its state pension funds $83 billion.

And we hear from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory halfway around the world. The territory may point to the future for many U.S. states: It just became the first American public pension fund to file for bankruptcy.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

This is what it's like to host the Super Bowl: For one weekend, your city is the focus of the sporting universe. Fans flock in droves. They eat at your restaurants and sleep in your hotels. They buy the "I ♥ [your city]" t-shirts. 

The NFL estimates that hosting the country's premier sporting event will give the local economy a $300-400 million jolt.

Economist Victor Matheson doesn't buy it..

In today's podcast, Matheson, a professor at the College of Holy Cross, presents the case against hosting the Super Bowl.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Note: This podcast originally aired December of '10.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.