Planet Money
NPR (podcasts@npr.org)
5 episodes
Inside the insurance industry’s destruction lab
6 Nov · 32 min
- Insurer-funded IBHS runs a South Carolina lab that builds houses to destroy in simulated hurricanes and wildfires.
- IBHS raised $40m after Katrina and Witch Creek, and a fortified test house survived 2010 winds at under 5% extra cost.
The history of light (classic)
4 Nov · 21 min
- Planet Money reruns its 2014 episode The history of light in memory of economist Bill Nordhaus, who died at 85.
- Nobel-winning Yale economist Nordhaus found a day's wages bought ten minutes of Babylonian light and twenty thousand hours by the 1990s.
Is this how the great international borrowing spree ends?
31 Oct · 26 min
- Investors increasingly doubt France will repay its debt, even though Italy and Greece are more deeply indebted and the US deficit is worse.
- Thomas Philippon says rich countries have not borrowed this much for this long since World War Two, and he calls debt above 100% of GDP the new normal.
Politicians are afraid to fix taxes. So 100 citizens tried.
28 Oct · 31 min
- Connecticut's citizens' assembly of 100 randomly selected residents ended with a 1% tax on earners above $1m a year, a school services consolidation plan, and interstate tolls to reduce car taxes.
- Sean Scanlon, the state comptroller, withheld the proposals before the election until an emergency meeting forced him to back down and release them.
How surveillance crept up on us
23 Oct · 35 min
- The NYPD's domain awareness system draws on more than 80,000 cameras, drones, license plate readers and facial recognition, searchable without a warrant, Planet Money reports.
- Scott Stringer found a 2007 memo let the NYPD classify tech purchases as special expenses that avoided council and public scrutiny.