Why is your money worth less every year? Why is housing still so expensive? What is the worm wall? Since 2008, the NPR show Planet Money has taken listeners on a quest to answer these kinds of questions in a way anyone could understand and even find engaging. The creators are on tour with a new book “Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life,” and host and reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi talked with KUNM ahead of an event Monday night in Albuquerque.
ALEXI_HOROWITZ-GHAZI: The idea of the show originally was to kind of demystify economics, this kind of discipline that looks at how scarce resources are allocated throughout the world, and to understand how those decisions were affecting our everyday lives, to kind of show the web of the entire economy to and to introduce listeners to everybody in the supply chain, connecting them from the things that they're buying and interacting with on a daily basis all the way to the people who are harvesting the raw materials that go into those things. We go into it with real curiosity and a real sense of kind of wonder and humor, and that translates into the stories hopefully, and that is kind of the spirit that's imbued throughout the book.
KUNM: You have a section that mentions universal Pre-K. It's part of a chapter called the global conspiracy to make child care more expensive. Can you say more about that conspiracy?
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Parts of the economy, especially service parts of the economy that depend on human labor and time can actually become more expensive. Everybody's labor hours actually go up, even as productivity gains are bringing the price of other goods down across the economy. So ironically, something like daycare or all sorts of other services become more and more expensive as the rest of the economy finds other efficiencies.
KUNM: You have a really fun sort of postcard gallery section called A World Tour of Spectacular Public Goods that includes the worm wall, which was designed to keep the New World screwworm contained. And obviously it's an issue we're watching here as it inches closer to the border. Why did you all want to talk about public goods in a book about the economy?
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Public goods are kind of one of the most important ideas in economics. These are things that, like many of us have no idea even exist, but are keeping the fabric of the global economy in our daily lives together in some way. So, you know, there are things like NOAA’s hurricane hunters. These are the planes that we send into hurricanes to gather storm information that's used on the ground in myriad ways. Another one of my favorites is the atomic clocks, which allow GPS to function. So, you know, these are things that are unseen, but really kind of make the fabric of society run. And we thought it was a good opportunity to remind everybody what's going on under the hood.
KUNM: As part of making this book. You all at Planet Money actually did a whole exploratory project about creating the book. What did you learn about the publishing process.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: My goodness, what have I not learned about the publishing process? The last several months of my life have been spent spelunking in the publishing industrial complex. The thing that I never understood about books was that, you know, by the time you see one on the bookstore shelf, this is like a survivor of this kind of brutal, Darwinian process by which all the possible books in the world, you know, are selected by agents who think they could be sellable. They might make it on the market. You know, maybe 2% of those are bought by an editor at a publishing house which has been this greatly consolidated industry. Then there's this huge, absurdly complex manufacturing process that often ties together supply chains from across the world, that feels just miraculous to even get that to work. And then at that point, bookstores haven't even decided whether they're going to stock it yet, that might entail ordering maybe 10 or 15% of the books on offer to actually put in the bookstore. So every time, now that I walk past a bookstore and I see one, I just, I can't help but see it as this kind of miraculous object, and it's just imbued with all sorts of backstory I never knew they had.
KUNM: I know that's not the first time you guys have done this. I think you created a t-shirt?
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: That's right, yeah, a huge part of kind of Planet Money's mission as a show is to get our skin in the game do these participatory projects. So yeah, we It started out with this t-shirt project, where we created a t shirt and followed it, kind of from the cotton harvest in the United States all the way to the manufacturing of the shirt in Bangladesh, meeting all of the workers along the way, and kind of seeing firsthand the web of the economy and how it's tied together, and meeting the actual people that you never realize are there kind of back behind all of these supply chains. Since then, we've we did a project where we bought 100 barrels of oil to follow it from the ground to the gas pump. We hitched a ride on a satellite to understand the burgeoning economy in space. We started a record label to publish a inflation song from the 70s. We resurrected a superhero to explore kind of IP dynamics in the Marvel Universe. And yeah, we recently created our first board game, which should be coming into stores, I think later this year. So the book is the tail end of a long succession of projects, but we're really excited about it.
