In 2010, we reported on a poor town in Haiti, where school was held in a small, one-room church.

Planet Money listeners were moved to donate some $3,000, which the principal of the school thought would be enough to build a school. A few months later, the money was gone, and all there was to show for it was a foundation, some concrete blocks and some rock and sand.

We thought that would be the end of it. Then we heard from Tim Myers, a retired contractor from Colorado who decided to go to Haiti to build the school — and who realized, in 2011, that the project would cost more than $100,000.

On today's show: We return to Haiti, to see how the project is going. And we hear from Tim Myers, who says, if he had it to do over, he might do things differently.

Music: Freelance Whales' "Generator Second Floor." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

That was fast!

Hi, it's Ask a Banker! You should send us questions on email or Twitter, but this particular question, though timely, was made up by me, sorry:

Q. Should banks be required to hold much more capital as a safety net? Or should they be putting that money to productive use by lending it out instead?

Naaaaah, just messing with you. The recent debate over bank capital, sparked by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig's book The Bankers' New Clothes and the Brown-Vitter bill in the Senate, has had at least one unambiguous effect, which is that it is now fashionable in certain circles to say "banks don't hold capital" in the tone of voice formerly reserved for correcting split infinitives or declining ketchup on your hot dog.

Banks don't hold capital! And bank capital isn't money kept in a vault - it can be put to productive use, too.

Okay, that's out of the way. Now, let's talk about what capital is and whether there should be more of it. I feel a little silly doing so because, while The Bankers' New Clothes is sort of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves of financial regulation, it's also a pretty good book about bank capital that is designed to be super easy for the non-expert reader, so you could just read it and I could go do something else.

Nonetheless! The book seems to have sparked the Brown-Vitter bill in the Senate, which would require big (over $500 billion in assets) banks to have capital equal to at least 15% of their assets. This in turn would require those big banks to raise something over $1 trillion in capital or, alternatively, to become much smaller banks.* The banks don't want to get smaller, for reasons you can probably figure out on your own; they also don't seem all that enamored of raising more capital, for reasons that might require more explaining.

So: What is capital? We might as well start with "banks don't hold capital": capital isn't a thing a bank has or holds or keeps in a vault somewhere collecting dust; it's more of a description of where the money comes from. Or, doesn't come from: capital is money that isn't borrowed. Banks, like all companies, own stuff, and like many companies, they borrow money. Here's a roughly accurate diagram of what that looks like at one particular bank (J.P. Morgan):**

Notice that the left side (JPMorgan's "assets") is bigger than the right side (its "liabilities"), which is generally the case - companies that owe more than they own tend to be in trouble. JPMorgan has about $2.4 trillion worth of stuff, some of which represents money put to productive use in the economy (loans to people to buy houses, or loans to companies to build factories), some of which is just money kept in vaults and emergency funds, and some of which is ... derivatives, where, you make the call.

JPMorgan also owes around $2.2 trillion to various people. Some of those people can take their money out any time - like people with Chase checking accounts (under "Deposits"), or people who lend to JPMorgan in the repo markets (under "Other short-term debt"). Others have their money locked in for a while - like people with 6-month certificates of deposit (also under "Deposits"), or people who own JPMorgan ten-year bonds ("Long-term debt").***

If you subtract what JPMorgan owes other people from what it has, you get its capital, which as it happens is about $207 billion:

So, on some simplistic assumptions, capital is just the result of some arithmetic:

Capital is how much money would be left in the bank if you sold all the bank's stuff and paid off all its debts.

If you actually did that - and you wouldn't, it wouldn't really work out this way, but pretend - if you actually did that then that leftover money would go to JPMorgan's shareholders. They're what's called the "residual claimants," which just means that they get what's left after everyone else has been paid off.**** So the capital is sometimes called "shareholders' capital," because it belongs to them.

Where does capital come from? Well, it comes from arithmetic doesn't it? At the birth of a bank, some people get together and decide to start a bank and they each contribute $100 for one share, or whatever, and that's the initial capital that gets the bank started. But over time, the bank's capital mostly grows from arithmetic: if the bank is making profits, then the value of what it owns will grow faster than the value of what it owes. In other words, if a bank is making a profit, its capital will increase.

For reasons we'll get to in a bit, banks sometimes have too much or too little capital - too much if they've been really profitable, too little if they've lost a lot of money. If they have too much capital they tend to return money to shareholders, by buying back stock or paying dividends. If they have too little they tend to raise more capital, by selling more shares. Another arithmetic definition of capital is that it's:

• the total amount of profit the bank has made in its history (minus, of course, all the losses it's made in its history), plus
• the amount of money it's raised by selling stock, minus
• the amount it's spent buying back stock and paying dividends.

The fact that "profit plus cash that comes in from selling stock minus cash returned to shareholders" comes out to the same number as "the value of your assets minus your liabilities" is the sort of mild arithmetico-definitional magic that really ought to have a name, like "fundamental theorem of accounting" or something, but as far as I can tell it doesn't.*****

Those arithmetic definitions of capital should make clear an important fact: if a bank loses money, its capital is reduced before any of its debts are. The capital is the "first-loss position"; sometimes people say it "absorbs" losses. If JPMorgan just misplaces $100 billion of cash, then its assets will go from $2.4 trillion to $2.3 trillion, but its debts won't change by a penny: it'll still owe various bondholders, depositors, etc. a total of about $2.3 trillion. This means that its capital will now be $107 billion, say, instead of $207 billion: the entire $100 billion loss will go directly to the people who own stock in JPMorgan — the people with a claim on JPMorgan's capital. If JPMorgan misplaces $300 billion of cash, then its capital will be zero, and the stock in JPMorgan will be worth zero. On top of that, some of the people who loaned money to JPMorgan won't be paid back.

Those arithmetic definitions might raise another question: if capital is, at the end of the day, the value of what you have minus what you owe to other people, or equivalently the value of all your profits added up, then why wouldn't you want more of it? The big banks are subject to capital requirements by regulation, and tend in practice not to have too much more capital than they're required to have. And they are very unhappy with Brown-Vitter, which would raise those requirements dramatically.

But, why? In your personal life having more money and less debt seems like a good thing, no? Most people celebrate paying off the mortgage, rather than running out and getting another one. Why do bank executives disagree?

The answer starts with the fact that bank executives, in theory, work for (and generally are) shareholders - the people with the claim on capital. Those shareholders obviously want the bank to increase its capital by making money. But then they want the bank to give them the money: to "return capital" via share repurchases (which drive up the stock price) and dividends(cash payments to shareholders). For the bank to make money and keep it is relatively less appealing, and what they particularly don't want is for the bank to increase its capital by asking them for money.******

I'm tempted to stop there and say it's as simple as that: people invest in banks because they'd like to make money; having money come out of the bank and into their pockets is good; having money stay in the bank is so-so; having the bank sell more shares is bad.

But there's another issue, which is that banks - and their shareholders - tend to like leverage, which is the superpower that borrowed money creates. Borrowing money - especially when you can borrow it really cheaply, like you can today - allows you to magnify your profits and losses. Magnifying your profits is good for shareholders (they get the profits!). Magnifying your losses isn't great, but since the shareholders don't necessarily suffer all of the losses (their shares can't go below zero), they might still prefer to take the risk. "Capital," remember, just refers to money that the bank hasn't borrowed: the more capital a bank has, by definition, the less leverage it has.

On the other hand, people who think that banks need to be safer like capital and tend to think that there should be more of it. Capital has two features that make it attractive to these people. Or, one feature, which is that you don't have to pay it back. But this means two things: first, you don't have to pay it back at any particular time. Second, there's no particular amount that you have to pay back.

First, time: much bank financing (tri-party repo, for instance) is what is called "overnight" financing because it is literally that: someone is lending you money for less than 24 hours. This is pretty annoying for all concerned, but it has the key advantage for the lender that they can get out at the first sign of trouble. If you've been lending money overnight to a bank for a while and find out on Wednesday morning that they've lost a lot of money to rogue traders, you can just decide not to "roll" your loan, that is, lend the money again Wednesday night. And, there, you're done, you've got your money back.

That's bad for the bank: when they've lost a lot of money to rogue traders is when they particularly need money, and might have a tough time raising it (because who wants to lend to a bank that might be going under?). Look back at that chart: JPMorgan has something like $650 billion of short-term debt - some overnight, but all of it coming due within one year. If they couldn't "roll" that debt then they'd need to pay it all back in fairly short order. They have about $300 billion in cash, which would help, but if they really needed to pay back the full $650 billion they'd need to sell $350 billion of other stuff to raise more cash. Selling $350 billion worth of stuff all at once has a tendency to make it worth less than $350 billion.

This problem - which is often referred to under the name "liquidity" - can be addressed by having lots of capital. Capital never needs to be paid back. Shareholders can never demand that JPMorgan pay them back their $207 billion, so that funding can never cause a crisis.

But the liquidity problem can also be addressed in other ways. For instance: banks could just use less short-term debt, which can cause a liquidity crisis any given day, and more long-term debt, which makes these crises less likely. And in fact there are a lot of proposals to require banks to use more long-term debt and rely less on short-term funding markets. Or: banks could have more liquid assets - more stuff that they could sell quickly, without it losing value, if they did need to pay off their debts suddenly - and, again, that's a popular topic of regulation.

The second advantage of capital is unique to capital:******* you don't have to pay back any particular amount. A bank share, unlike a bank bond or deposit, doesn't have a fixed dollar amount; it's just worth whatever it's worth. This sounds like a meaningless advantage because, as we just said, you never need to pay it back at all, but there's nonetheless some psychologico-regulatory meaning that's worth discussing. It goes like this:

• If you lend money to a bank, for example by putting your life savings in a checking account at the bank, and the bank loses all of it, you will freak out, and so will your congressperson; whereas
• If you invest money in bank stock, and the value of that stock goes to zero, it's really your fault, man. You can freak out if you want, and the world being what it is you can probably find someone to get angry along with you, but it ain't me. You bought bank stocks, you got what you deserve.

Is that ... unsatisfying? Because it's kind of important. The thing about "more capital makes banks safer" is that in a certain light it's nonsensical: a bank's risk of losing money depends on its actions and its assets. If it buys terrible mortgage-backed securities or gets sued for fraud all the time, then it will lose money, no matter how much money it owes or doesn't owe to other people. The question is just who will bear those losses.********

But that's an important question. If JPMorgan, with its $207 billion in capital, loses $50 billion, then to some approximation its shareholders will suffer $50 billion in losses. Tough luck to them! But if it loses $500 billion, then the shareholders' $207 billion of losses are the least of our problems. The big problem is where the other $300 billion in losses go: which of the people holding the $2.2 trillion in JPMorgan debt don't get paid back (or don't get fully paid back).

There are not a lot of great answers. The depositors? Like, JPMorgan's failure should cause you to lose what's in your checking account? Nah, we have deposit insurance because that seems like such a bad idea. The creditors and trading counterparties? Maybe, but remember that those tend to be financial institutions too; if they take unexpected losses on JPMorgan debts that they thought were totally safe, then they might run into trouble too, causing a domino effect of financial panic.

The answer is probably: there'll be a taxpayer bailout. Hahaha, no, the whole post-financial-crisis regulatory world is oriented around finding ways to avoid a bailout. There'll be an "orderly liquidation" where a carefully managed process causes some of a failed bank's creditors to take losses without sparking a panic or touching the creditors (depositors, etc.) whom we don't want touched. I mean, sure, whatever, maybe. But there's no doubt that the simplest way to reduce the risk of panic on the one side, and bailouts on the other, is to raise capital requirements in advance: to force banks to get relatively more of their money from people who expect to bear losses, and relatively less from people who don't.

The advantage of making banks have much more capital is that it makes the risks clearer: it forces banks to be funded more by shareholders who knowingly accept the risk that they might lose money, and less by depositors and repo markets who pretend that their financing of bank activities is risk-free.

The disadvantage of making banks have much more capital is, also, that it makes the risks clearer. Banks exist to hide risks: to take money entrusted to them for safekeeping and lend it out to fund the risky activities that help our economy grow, without scaring people about the risk. Banks "exist to hide such information; they are created and structured to keep secrets." The secret being: someone might lose money!

But sometimes that's a good secret to keep. Ultimately banks get their money from people. People seem to have some preference for putting money into banks in "safe" forms (deposits, etc.), rather than "risky" forms (shares of stock). If regulation shifts the mix into more "risky" forms of bank financing - if it makes people face up to the risks of their banks - then they will have a harder time satisfying that preference for safe assets. Then what happens?

Maybe we all just get wiser and more mature about our risks, and fund our risky economy with a clear-eyed, world-weary stoicism. But: when has that happened? Maybe we shadow-bank: we shift our money into other, non-bank, areas that promise us safety but carry their own risks of financial disaster. (And that are less blessed with enlightened regulation than the banking sector is.) Or maybe we just reduce the size of our banking sector, which a lot of people might like, but which might also mean less lending, less financing for new businesses, and less economic activity.

Which, when our economy is shaky to begin with, might turn out to be a high price to pay for facing the demons of our banking system. Increasing bank capital may force everyone to be more realistic about the risks of banking, but realistic isn't always what we want.

Correction: The following sentence originally said "billion" when it should have said "trillion." Thanks to the commenter who pointed out the error. If JPMorgan just misplaces $100 billion of cash, then its assets will go from $2.4 trillion to $2.3 trillion, but its debts won't change by a penny: it'll still owe various bondholders, depositors, etc. a total of about $2.3 trillion.

* Though, amusingly, the bill seems to prohibit that approach. The legislative process is not always pretty.

** This is not meant particularly seriously; you could carve up the categories differently, and probably a lot of what I'm calling "monstrosities" could be more accurately lumped with cash, or stocks and bonds, than with the core monstrosities of opaque derivatives.

*** There's also a tiny sliver of preferred stock. People who own JPMorgan preferred stock can never demand their money back - they just put up, say, $10,000, and get back, say, $550 a year in interest for the rest of eternity. Under certain definitions preferred stock is capital; under others it isn't. That's kind of a boring debate? Under U.S. accounting rules it's normally "equity" rather than "liabilities," so my presentation here is somewhat nonstandard, but I'm conforming to the Brown-Vitter approach, which believes that the only real capital is common equity capital.

**** There is some interesting controversy over whether the shareholders are really the "residual claimants," or at least, over whether they're the only ones. You might argue that if there's any money left over after JPMorgan's creditors have been paid back, JPMorgan's bankers and traders will take it, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

***** Loosely speaking it's called "the accounting equation," but only very loosely speaking.

****** This is especially true because, these days, giving a bank a dollar makes it worth a bit less than a dollar. If you go to Google Finance you'll see that JPMorgan's stock - all of it combined, its "market capitalization" - is worth about $193 billion, not $207 billion. So the market places a lower value on JPMorgan's stuff than JPMorgan's accountants do. The market thinks JPMorgan is worth less than its accounting value ("book value") because the market thinks its future is somewhat alarming, or because the market distrusts the value that its accountants assign to its assets, or some combination of the two. What this means is that if JPMorgan raises $1 from shareholders, it will only be worth about 93 cents, and if JPMorgan gives $1 back to shareholders, it'll only cost them about 93 cents. I don't mean to pick on JPMorgan; most big banks these days trade at a discount to their book value due to mistrust and fears about the future. Bank of America's dollars are worth 67 cents.

******* Though not unique to common equity capital. Some other things, like preferred stock or "bail-in debt," is also loss absorbing. The Brown-Vitter and Admati-Hellwig approach stresses simplicity so is deeply distrustful of those sorts of things.

******** I'm lying. The question isn't just that. There are real costs of debt, which are lumped under the heading "costs of insolvency"; roughly speaking, if you lose enough money, then the holders of your debt can put you into bankruptcy and force you to sell all your stuff at a loss and so destroy value. Whereas capital can't do that: if a well capitalized bank loses a lot of money (but less than its capital cushion), it can live to fight another day. There is a lot to say about these issues, and Admati and Hellwig talk more about them in chapter 3 of their book.

On today's show: Three short 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 bill worth $20 in Myanmar? (Spoiler: Probably not.) And how should a young grad decide what to do with his life?

Also: An update on our t-shirt project.

For more:

• Lady Gaga Writing A New Song Is Like A Factory Investing In A New Machine
• Why (Almost) No One In Myanmar Wanted My Money
• I Know I'm Supposed To Follow My Passion. But What If I Don't Have A Passion?
• We're Making T-Shirts. Lots And Lots Of T-Shirts.

Music: TOKiMONSTA's "Go With It", The Flying Lizards "Money", Alice Russell's "Let Go (Breakdown)"Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

Sales of guns and ammunition rose after President Obama took office in 2008, and they went through the roof starting late last year, when a school shooting led to a push for new gun control measures. That's led to a prolonged ammunition shortage, even with manufacturers running at full capacity.

A gun owner in Florida told me he has had a hard time finding .380 ammo for a small handgun for the past six months. Customers at Bob's Little Sport Shop in southern New Jersey told me it's hard to find ammo for some rifles and for the popular 9 mm. Even .22 rounds, the small ones, have been hard to come by.

An economics textbook would say this shouldn't happen. It would say that Bob Viden, who has run the shop for almost 50 years, should respond to the increase in demand by raising prices. And some stores and online sellers have done just that. But, Viden told me, "We don't want to do that. We want to be fair."

Apparently so do some of the best-known ammo sources across the country. At the sporting goods store Cabela's and at Wal-Mart, shelves are empty but prices are mostly flat. During my conversations at Bob's Little Sport Shop, the word "fair" came up about two-dozen times. Or, as one customer put it, "There's no reason to make a profit off of our misfortune."

To a traditional economist, a shortage is evidence prices are too low. But Viden predicts if he raises his prices, his customers won't come back because they'll think he ripped them off.

"Traditional economic theory doesn't really have room for fairness perceptions," Margaret Campbell, a marketing professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told me. But about 30 years ago, she says, "people started noticing that there were these kind of quirks."

In a famous study, the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and two colleagues found that people's ideas of fairness are so strong that, even if it makes short-term sense to raise prices during a shortage, many retailers don't. Campbell says that's because when prices go up, consumers actually care about the reason behind the increase — the retailer's motive.

"If a consumer sees a price go up in an unexpected fashion, they want to know, 'Why? Why has it gone up?' " she says.

There are lots of reasons consumers approve of (if the price the store is paying for the goods has increased, for example). But research has consistently shown that a sudden increase in demand is not one of them. So rather than raise prices, Bob's Little Sport Shop and other stores are rationing ammo in order to keep their customers' loyalty.

There is at least one place where classical market forces seem to be in effect here: Some people have been buying ammo at low cost and selling it at a higher price online. Essentially, they're scalping bullets. Scalpers don't care about return customers. And their customers don't expect them to be fair.

Update: This story was updated to note that some stores and online vendors have raised prices, though many have not.

Two weeks ago, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to make a t-shirt and tell the story of how it was made. As we wrote on our Kickstarter page:

We'll meet the people who grow the cotton, spin the yarn, and cut and sew the fabric. We'll ride on the cargo ships that bring our t-shirt from factories in Bangladesh and Colombia to ports in the US. And we'll examine the crazy tangle of international regulations which govern the t-shirt trade the whole way.

We used Kickstarter because it helped us answer a very important question: How many t-shirts should we make? And, for that matter, were there even enough people who wanted a Planet Money t-shirt to make the project viable? If we were going to make the shirts, we needed at least 2,000 backers at $25 a piece, for a total of $50,000.

When the Kickstarter project went live two weeks ago, we took an internal poll of the Planet Money team to see how everybody thought we'd do. There was a huge range of guesses based on different methodologies (and we're using "methodologies" very, very loosely here). But even the highest guess — from Adam Davidson, who guessed $530,000 — was too low.

By the time the project closed yesterday, 20,242 people had backed the project. Their contributions added up to $590,807.

We are overjoyed and overwhelmed by the support. Thanks so, so much to everybody who backed the project.

Now it's our turn. Soon we'll start traveling the world to tell the story of how your t-shirt is being made — and what every step in the process tells us about the global economy.

For more:

From Paid Content: Planet Money and Kickstarter: Is web-based crowdfunding the future of public media?

From 10,000 Words: Why Was Planet Money's Kickstarter Campaign So Successful?

From Planet Money: The Planet Money T-Shirt Is Finally (Almost) Here

When Duan Biggs was growing up in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, he used to watch elephants and rhinos walking past his bedroom window. He left home to pursue degrees in biology and economics, and when he returned in 2011 the park looked and sounded "like a pseudo war zone," he says.

"There'd be helicopters flying overhead all the time," he says. "I remember one afternoon coming back to my home from a game drive and the bush was crawling with people with assault rifles, from the army, from the police, and from National Parks. They were looking for poachers."

The military-grade equipment — drones, tracking chips, thermal scopes — deployed to protect wildlife against poachers hasn't prevented transcontinental cartels from slaughtering rhinos across Africa to supply a black market concentrated in East Asia, especially Vietnam, where rhino horn is consumed as a traditional medicine for modern ailments.

Historically prescribed for fever and "blood detoxification," it's now used for hangover and the side effects of chemotherapy. It's also a status symbol. "It's the thing to do. What a great gift for your boss, or your government official," conservationist Douglas Hendrie told NPR's Frank Langfitt in Hanoi, Vietnam.

If unchecked, this seemingly insatiable demand for the horn could result in the extinction of wild rhinos within two decades. This has led African governments to consider two radical — and contradictory — proposals for saving Africa's rhinos.

Proposal No. 1: Legalize The Horn

A rhino's horn is composed of the same protein as human fingernails. And, as with fingernails, if you cut off the horn, it grows back. So, Biggs has been arguing, African farmers could raise rhinos on private farms, and periodically saw off the horns for sale overseas.

"Essentially vets would go in, dart the animal and dehorn it," Biggs tells me. "Thereafter the animal gets up again and runs around the bush and continues life as normal," and the horn grows back.

This idea for a legal rhino trade is gaining supporters in the South African government (South Africa has 85 percent of the world's rhinos). There's a push to submit the idea for international vote in 2016 at the triennial meeting of CITES, the international conference on endangered species that originally banned rhino horn sales in 1977.

This possibility worries conservationists like Ian Craig, founder of the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya. He says ending the ban will lift the stigma — and cause demand to soar. He predicts that horn-selling kiosks will crop up across Vietnam not unlike cannabis coffee shops in Amsterdam.

"All the economists I've met say that as soon as you place a value on the animal then people are going to look after it and its going to multiply," Craig says. "They're not recognizing that supply could never meet the demand, and the demand is what's killing."

Proposal No. 2: Burn It

Craig and other conservationists in Kenya still recall a pivotal moment in 1989 when Kenya curbed the appetite for a different poachers' trophy. On that June day, when Kenya's then-President Daniel arap Moi set aflame 12 tons of elephant tusks confiscated from poachers, ivory had been trading legally at nearly $200 a pound.

"The idea was to send a very strong message to the world that ivory had no value," says Winnie Kiiru, a trustee of the Kenya Wildlife Service. "That a Third World country was setting alight all this? It made no sense. It made absolutely no economic sense."

It made no economic sense, and that was precisely the point, broadcast to television screens around the world: No one has a right to ivory except elephants. After the burn, ivory sales slumped. Among buyers, who were then mostly European and American, it became less cool to flaunt ivory belt buckles and cufflinks. CITES banned the trade three months later. And over the following decade, Kenya's elephant population began a slow climb back from the brink of extinction. USA Today named the burn one of the conservation milestones of the 1980s, up there with scientists finding a hole in the ozone layer.

Now, 24 years later, there's an internal memo circulating the halls of Kenya's government proposing to dehorn some of Kenya's rhinos and set those horns ablaze. So as South Africa is inching toward a proposal to legalize the trade and provide seller incentives, the Kenyans are contemplating a symbolic act intended, in essence, to shame the buyer.

Africa as a continent can't go down both paths at once. If South Africa is allowed to market — and advertise — its rhino horn, Kenya can't succeed in discouraging demand. You can't legitimize a trade and at the same time say it's wrong.

Underlying this drug-policy debate about animals is a philosophical gulf about the best way to influence human behavior. Neither side really knows what would happen if you could legally buy a packet of rhino horn in the pharmacy like Tylenol. Would the poachers go out of business, or would they become more audacious, laundering their stolen horn as legitimate? Would we ever be able to see a rhino in the wild again? "If the world at large is happy about rhino sitting in pens and farmed for their horns, then the economists are right," says Craig, the conservationist. "If the world wants wild, free-ranging rhino, then the economists are wrong."

There is one more proposal, so radical that no government will put its name behind it.

Proposal No. 3: Poison It

An organization called the Rhino Rescue Project will, for a fee, come to your land or conservancy and use a "patented process of high-density infusion" to put poison in your rhinos' horns. It won't harm the animal but will make any person who ingests it "seriously ill." As a caveat emptor, they paint the horn with indelible ink, a warning label for any would-be poacher or airport security officer alerted to the meaning of its bright pink color.

It's not surprising that African governments will not support the contamination of horns that people eat, however misguidedly, as medicine. But some private landowners in South Africa and Namibia have poisoned their rhinos' horns. They're willing to let the hazards of poaching trickle down to the consumer.

H&M, Zara, Wal-Mart and JC Penney all buy t-shirts from Bangladesh. Soon, Planet Money will too.

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?

Read Vijaya Ramachandran's paper: Does Poor Mean Cheap? A Comparative Look at Africa's Industrial Labor Costs.

Music: Air Traffic Controller's "You Know Me." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.

Over the past decade, some 39,000 people have come forward voluntarily to tell the IRS about offshore money they haven't been paying taxes on. This group provides a small window into the world of people who are hiding money in offshore havens. (It's a world we've been trying to learn more about, partly by setting up an offshore company in Belize.)

The names of the 39,000 aren't published anywhere, and they're not eager to be interviewed. But I did find Charles Falk, a lawyer who has represented more than 200 of these people.

Sometimes they're business owners, who have earned money abroad and stashed it in Switzerland or on some island. Maybe the account is owned by a trust they secretly control. Sometimes they're hiding money from a spouse. When I asked him if any of his clients would talk to me, he laughed. But he did describe a typical first call with a client.

"A lot of times," Falk says, "the conversation will go like this: 'They can take all the money. I just don't want to go to jail.' And then when you assure them they are not going to go to jail if they come forward, then the next thing they say is, 'Well, how much can I keep?'"

Other people who come forward aren't even sure they've done anything wrong.

Marvin Van Horn and his wife live in New Zealand, where they have a checking account and retirement savings. They weren't intentionally hiding anything from the IRS. But he heard a story on the radio about offshore tax cheats — and realized that the rules might apply to him.

So he decided to go through the IRS's voluntary disclosure program. He learned he would have to pay back taxes for six years, which came to about $20,000. That seemed fair, he said. But then there was the penalty: $172,000.

Van Horn says the penalty would have gutted his retirement savings. So he appealed. And after 851 days (he was counting), the penalty was reduced to $20,000.

There's a spectrum in these cases, attorneys say. There are people who went to great lengths to hide money, people who didn't know they were hiding money, and a lot of people in between.

One other thing about the 39,000 people have come forward so far: They're probably a drop in the bucket. Somewhere between five and seven million U.S. citizens live abroad. Fewer than 1 million of them declare offshore accounts, as required by law.

We asked a bunch of economists what they would say if they were giving a commencement address this spring. Here are some excerpts from their responses.

Justin Wolfers:

Approach your career ambitions the same way you approached your romantic ambitions at college. Sure, you're looking for "The One," but the only way to find that is by going on a lot of dates. And you should think about your first job as a good first date. Try it out. If you like it, stick around for another year. But if not, ask another employer out. And keep playing the field until you've found the job you want to stay with.

This pattern of hopping between jobs while young, before settling down, is in remarkably common. And it makes sense, too. Romantic success never follows from trying to improve your partner; it follows from moving on and finding a better match. The same is true in the world of work.

Indeed, economic research shows that most large pay gains come not from your boss promoting you, but rather from moving to a job that's a better fit, with a different employer.

So for now, play the field. You'll discover what you like, you'll discover what you're good at, and at some point you'll be ready to settle down.

Melissa Thomasson:

Understand that sunk costs are sunk; do not be afraid to change direction.

Betsey Stevenson:

Few people mind the first hour of work in a day. Its the eighth, ninth, or 10th that really starts to hurt. So focus on the last few hours of work in the day when choosing jobs. You'll find that some things that seem like fun will sour quicker than others over the course of the day. This is also why variety in a job can be a terrific perk.

Similarly, the first dollar you earn is more valuable to you than the last, so giving up a few dollars to get a little bit of something else you value—serving the social good, travel—is often a worthwhile trade.

Kenneth French:

When comparing jobs, put a lot of weight on the potential upside and less weight on the potential downside. Everything else roughly the same, pick the job with more uncertainty. If it turns out well, it's likely to turn out really well. And if things don't turn out so well, you can always change jobs or, better yet, go to business school.

Anat Admati:

If you start something, don't view your decision as final, and create possible "exit" points. Consider having new and different experiences for a year or two, for example travel for a few months or more, or enroll in something like Teach for America or Peace Corps. With more information, you will make better career and other decisions. have such opportunities and reversing course becomes more complicated.

Charles W. Calomiris:

If you don't reach your dream job destination until age 35, no problem: you will still have about 35 years working at that job. So look for jobs that build toward a goal, based on an informed understanding that comes from asking older people about their jobs, their skills, and their paths. It is OK (in fact, it's a good thing) if your long-term vision changes over time, but you need always to have one, even if it changes, and an informed sense of how to get there.

Pietra Rivoli:

If you don't have kids or a mortgage, relish this chance to be poor for a while. Forget about what to "do" and instead look for people and organizations you admire and would want to hang out with. "Where" and "with whom" trumps "what." Remember that life satisfaction depends on autonomy and influence, not titles or salaries, so keep the former as criteria.

Katherine Baicker:

"If you don't have a passion (or just don't know what it is yet), find a job that takes advantage of both your skills and your preferences. Jobs pay you based on your skills, but also based on their attributes ("compensating differentials" - you get paid more for jobs that people don't like to do). You could find your niche based on what you're relatively good at ("comparative advantage"), but also based on the job attributes that you like more (or dislike less) than other people.

Emily Oster:

Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring. Since the world is full of people looking for a job that feeds their passion, if you are willing to do something which most people are not passionate about (accountant? Tax attorney?) there's an arbitrage.

Tim Harford:

Economists have found that if you graduate during a recession, your career prospects are stunted long after the recession itself is finished. The economy is recovering now, but slowly. A year's delay would do no harm – might I suggest signing up for a master's degree?

Russ Roberts:

Time is precious. Find a way to use your gifts. If you don't have any gifts, invest in finding some. If you have some, invest in improving them.

We're making a t-shirt that tells the story of its own creation. Part of that story is how we chose the colors.

On today's show, we'll explain what the color of our women's t-shirt has to do with this painting from 1969, 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. Our Kickstarter page has all the details.

Music: April Smith and the Great Picture Show's "Colors." Find us: Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr . Download the Planet Money iPhone app .

When you arrive in Myanmar, you can see how eager the people are to do business. At the airport in Yangon, new signs in English welcome tourists. A guy in a booth offers to rent me a local cellphone — and he's glad to take U.S. dollars. But when I pull out my money, he shakes his head.

"I'm sorry," he says.

He points to the crease mark in the middle of the $20 bill. No creases allowed.

So I pull out another, which he rejects because it's a little bit faded, and a third, which he doesn't want because of a tiny tear, and a fourth, which he calls "not very acceptable" because of a little ink spot.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, was largely closed to the world for decades. It's just getting used to the business of international currency exchange. And, like other countries that have gone through economic turmoil (Russia, Iraq, Argentina), Myanmar wants U.S. dollars to look like they just rolled off the presses.

When I start to ask people in Myanmar, they laugh and say they know it's crazy. But they've learned in their history that the last thing you can trust is an old piece of money.

You've probably heard about the human rights abuses under the former dictatorship in Burma. But the old government also used to screw with the money all the time. Officials would suddenly announce that certain denominations of the local currency were worthless. It would be like waking up to find that the $100 bill was worthless.

The old socialist government was worried that some people were getting rich, Zeya Thu, an editor with The Voice, told me. So without warning, they would take the largest denominations out of circulation.

When it happened in 1987, Zeya's parents were getting ready for retirement. They had just cashed out their life savings to buy a plot of land. They were in the room with the seller, about to buy the land, and the government came on the radio and said the bills were worthless.

The country's leader created new bills overnight in denominations that were multiples of nine — his lucky number. Zeya says the math of adding and subtracting 45s would give people headaches.

So people started to sock away their extra money in U.S. currency. And when your life savings is a few U.S. $100 bills, you want to keep them pristine. Like other people in Myanmar, my translator kept his U.S. bills pressed flat in the pages of a book. Like baseball card collectors, people in Myanmar want their bills in mint condition.

The banks in Myanmar could have solved this problem by accepting old U.S. currency. But for a long time they were cut off from U.S. banks by sanctions, so they didn't want the old bills, either.

As a result, visitors to Myanmar have to bring bills so crisp you can cut tomatoes with them. And bills that are less than perfect end up on the black market. I took my $20 bill with a tiny ink spot on it to a black-market money changer. He gave me $17.75 for it.

A while back, Max Kornblith sent the following email to Tyler Cowen, an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution:

1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor's degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a "passion" such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist? ...

For question two, then, you may sense where this is going ...

2) Assume I have no such passion. Furthermore, I am a fairly well-qualified young generalist.* What paths should most appeal to me if my goal is to maximize doing "interesting" work? Doing meaningful work? Achieving social status? (Which of these goals should be primary?) Need I try to develop a passion before selecting a life path/career, and if so, how do I do it?

All the best, Max

*Two years out with a BA from an Ivy League school. Top 10 percent of the class but not an academic rock star. A record of primarily reading/writing-intensive courses, as well as basic to intermediate economics, calculus, statistics, a proofs course. Time spent abroad in study and travel, though no foreign language fluency. Two years in the private sector with a decent amount of analytic and management experience, but without a big name behind it.

"Max has me stumped," Tyler Cowen wrote recently on his blog.

The fact that Max and other young college graduates can even entertain this question — "What is my passion?" — is a new conundrum, and still a luxury not everybody enjoys. Yet, Tyler recently told me, it is "a central question of our time."

So what's the best, most rational answer for Max? It seems like economics could help; after all, it's about costs and benefits and modeling complicated decisions.

But, Tyler says, "it was a truly difficult, tough question to make any progress on."

Months passed. Tyler felt guilty. So he invited Max to lunch, and brought along two other economists — Bryan Caplan and Garett Jones — for backup. The economists posed questions to help Max frame the issue:

• How much are you willing to suffer in the short run to get a better future?
• Have you ever considered working in Asia?
• How important will it be to spend X number of hours with your kids? And what is that X?
• How well do you understand your own defects?
• What does 50-year-old Max want?
• Can your community be a cyber community, or do you need to have a face-to-face community?

In the end, the three economists did not advise Max to pursue some particular career path. They didn't even give very specific advice. But they did all agree that Max's lack of a passion could work to his advantage. Pursuing a passion — especially if it's a popular passion — often doesn't pay very well.

Economists think prices are close to magic — constantly changing signals that help people figure out what to buy and who to buy it from (and what to sell and who to sell it to).

But in health care, it seems like nobody knows the price of anything. This recent study, for example, found most hospitals can't provide an up-front price estimate for a hip replacement.

So today's government data dump for pricing information from thousands of hospitals is a pretty big deal. (Here's coverage from NPR's Shots blog; here's a nice NYT interactive that lets you compare selected prices at hospitals around the country.)

The data show massive price variation among hospitals — even, in some cases, among hospitals in the same city. There's also a huge gap between each hospital's list price and the price the government actually pays for patients who are covered by Medicare.

It's no secret that hospitals' list prices are ridiculously high and seemingly arbitrary. And today's data dump will be helpful for people who don't have insurance and are trying to figure out the price of a procedure, and to compare prices at different hospitals.

But, as Steven Brill points out, the new data are basically useless for anyone who has private insurance and is trying to shop around. That's because private insurance companies negotiate their own rates with hospitals, and the rates bear little resemblance to the list price.

Brill, the author of a recent ginormous article on hospital pricing, writes today:

Suppose you have a knee replaced at Hospital X. Aetna's discount there might mean it pays $11,000, while United Healthcare's discount might mean it pays $22,000. Or the prices could be reversed. No patient has any way of knowing. But if you're on the hook for 20% co-insurance for each policy, then you'll pay $2,200 with an Aetna policy or $4,400 with a United policy.

Private insurers are regulated at the state level, and Brill argues that states should release hospital price data for private insurance companies. Individual patients already see the price their insurance company paid — it's listed on a form called the Explanation of Benefits. So even if insurance companies don't want to participate, Brill writes, states could crowdsource price information from patients:

...state pricing centers could gather the information from patients who volunteer, in exchange for a promise that their names won't be used, to submit their Explanations of Benefits. After all, a hospital or insurance company can't claim a patient can be prohibited from talking about or making public his or her own bill.

Nearly 20 states have legalized marijuana to some degree. As it turns out, this has profound economic consequences for dealers all across the country.

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

Music: Kid Cudi's "Marijuana." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Download the Planet Money iPhone App.