Economics class, with better field trips.
Planet Money Summer School is a plainspoken economics course built from stories about fruit sellers, fishing boats, patents, sugar, budgets, and federal data. It treats policy like a practical puzzle, moving quickly from classroom terms to what those rules do to people and businesses.
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Planet Money Summer School is the classroom version of Planet Money: structured, fast, funny, and built around cases instead of lectures alone. The show takes a major economics theme and breaks it into lessons that sound like a course, but move like reported radio. Recent episodes focus on government and business. The frame is broad. The examples are specific. A lesson on institutions turns toward Jamaican fruit sellers, permits, bribes, North Korea, and the difference between systems that let people build and systems that let a few people take. A taxes episode follows the Earned Income Tax Credit into household choices and work incentives. A budget episode races through the federal ledger, showing how a few giant programs dominate the numbers. Regulation arrives through patents, meat innovation, and the difficult line between rewarding inventors and blocking the next one. Industrial policy gets tested through Argentina’s BlackBerry experiment, where political ambition, tariffs, subsidies, inflation, and factory jobs all collide. Market design becomes a halibut story, with safer boats, better fish, fewer operators, and lingering arguments about fairness. Trade policy becomes sugar: old tariffs, protected farms, expensive candy, lobbying, and institutional path dependence. The show also spends time on the fragile trust behind official economic data, from survey callers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It keeps the jokes moving, but the jokes are not the point. The point is that policy is made of rules, incentives, habits, and people trying to survive inside them. It suits listeners who want economics without the fog, and teachers who want examples with real narrative grip.
Made for: For curious listeners who want government, markets, taxes, trade, and public data explained through concrete stories rather than jargon. It also suits teachers looking for accessible case studies with enough detail to start discussion.
What sets it apart: The show turns economic theory into tactile reporting, using one vivid object or job to explain a whole system. It balances classroom structure with field scenes, host banter, archival segments, and clear stakes.
Economics is a game you should know how to play. And once you get the fundamental concepts, you start to see it everywhere: the news, the supermarket and even your dating life. So it's time to learn the rules. Planet Money Summer School is a crash course in economics for your ears. See the world through the lens of an economist and you'll start to feel a little less overwhelmed when making financial decisions. And if you're in front of the classroom? Teachers, this is made for you, too. Let us be your breezy and fun companion to assigned readings...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Reported cases and playful instruction make economic policy legible without hiding its trade-offs, failures, or distribution of power.
Planet Money Summer School turns economics lessons into reported stories, with Robert Smith guiding each class through definitions, cases, and careful questions.
Sugar tariffs and halibut quotas become the economics class you might actually finish.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A live finale about the federal workers behind the numbers.
Planet Money uses its summer-school finale to make the case for the federal workers behind the numbers. The episode stays with federal data collection and the jobs survey, where Erica describes respondents who push back, yell, and later apologize after directing their…
Sugar shows how trade protection can harden into habit.
Trade policy gets a straightforward, useful treatment here. It moves from tariffs and quotas to sugar, which makes the central point easy to see: once protection is in place, it can be hard to pull back.
Market design gets real when Alaska's halibut quotas, safety, and fairness collide.
This Planet Money installment looks at what happens when a market goes wrong and how the rules get reset, using Alaska's halibut quota system to show how tradable rights can cut overfishing and lower the death rate for fishermen.
A sharp case study in how government bets on industry can work, wobble, and fail.
Planet Money treats industrial policy as a real, messy bet: when government tries to steer an industry, what is it actually buying, and how long can that deal hold together?
A plainspoken lesson on how rules decide who keeps the value they create.
Planet Money's Summer School treats government as a question of who gets to keep the value they create. Permits, bribes, and ordinary business friction do most of the work here, which keeps the lesson concrete.
A bank fight turns into a sharp lesson on how American money learned to wobble.
Planet Money Summer School turns the Bank of the United States fight into a brisk lesson in how early American finance kept lurching from innovation to collapse.
A breezy class-celebration episode that keeps startup tradeoffs concrete.
Planet Money Summer School uses a Guppy Tank pitch session to make startup thinking feel plain and usable. The strongest stretch follows the tour-guides business, where scale, safety, competitors, pricing, and trust are laid out in everyday terms instead of business-school…
Productivity becomes a story about light, money, and the infrastructure behind invention.
Planet Money Summer School closes its macroeconomics class by tying productivity to a chain of inventions, money, and infrastructure. It starts with light itself, from kerosene and street lamps to Edison's electric dream, and makes the point that the real breakthrough was not…
Stephen Dubner tests bourbon economics, Alzheimer's research, and money advice against hard data.
Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.
Galloway rotates Office Hours Q&A, Raging Moderates politics, and China Decode geopolitics weekly.
Joel and Matt answer listener money questions weekly in the show's Ask HTM segments.
Brené Brown's long-form conversations linking grief, caregiving, politics, and nonviolence to her vulnerability research.
Graduation gets weirdly practical.
Trade finally gets its Summer School turn.
The episode opens with a plain claim: markets are everywhere.
Planet Money Summer School takes on industrial policy, the point where governments stop just setting rules and start trying to steer the economy.
Planet Money Summer School opens its sixth year by shifting to government and asking why some countries get rich while others stay poor.
Planet Money Summer School opens Lesson Four with the age of the panic.
Planet Money Summer School ends with a graduation ceremony on the imaginary lawn of Planet Money University.
The final episode of Planet Money Summer School pairs economists Kristin Brody and Luigi Zingales with a 2014 Planet Money story tracing the history of light from animal-fat candles to LED bulbs as a way to illustrate the concept of productivity growth.