Planet Money

We go inside the "dirty unspoken world" of bill collectors with listener John Goebel. Goebel's been in the collection industry for a few years now. He started collecting second mortgages and car loans in college and now works part-time trying to recover subprime credit card debt. He says the hardest part of his job is navigating the landmines of emotion that come with each call. He's been hung up on, sworn at, yelled at by children and about once a week he has to listen to someone just completely break down.

As great figures from history go, John Maynard Keynes should consider himself lucky, at least when it comes to his biography. His biographer, Lord Robert Skidelsky, is one of the best. His three-volume biography of Keynes is not only comprehensive (1000+ pages) — it's also funny, insightful and, frankly, a little raunchy. Skidelsky has a new book about Keynes out, called Keynes: The Return of the Master. We talk with him about how Keynes developed the ideas that (at least according to some people) got us out of the Great Depression.

We hear and read stories of corruption every day, but finding cold hard data on the subject is so hard that MIT economics professor, Ben Olken, had to go dig up roads in Indonesia to get some. Olken and his team set out to measure the amount of raw materials that went missing when the government gave local villages money for projects like building roads. The study required the researchers to not only dig up roads — but also to build a few of their own.

How does the U.S. rank in terms of corruption compared to other countries? Transparency International puts us 15th on its Corruption Perceptions Index, which "measures the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories around the world." Jermyn Brooks, chair of the group's business advisory board, tells us how we landed there and what we can do to climb up.

We continue our conversation about how economics and technology have shaped the news business. NPR media correspondent, David Folkenflik, stops by to tell us Microsoft and News Corp. owner, Rupert Murdoch, are in talks to give Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, exclusive access to Wall Street Journal content. The deal could bring Murdoch's media company millions of dollars and give the Bing a real chance compete with Google.

We may think of our independent press today as being the result of political awakening and noble efforts by those seeking truth, but that's not the whole story. University of Chicago economist, Matthew Gentzkow, says we've progressed not just because of good intentions, but because of basic economics. Gentzkow explains how advances in printing helped newspapers expand their audience beyond just one political party.

We announce the winner of our economic abstract translation contest and find out what the paper's author really meant by "hybrid translog cost functions." Plus, we reach out to Aaron Edlin, one of the editors of the Economists' Voice, to get his take on how much jargon we really need.

Another very special radio competition. We sent Adam Davidson, Chana Joffe-Walt and Alex Blumberg to the International Council of Shopping Centers' New York Conference and challenged them to bring back the best economics stories they could find. Listen to their stories, hear our panel of celebrity judges weigh in and then decide who you think should be the winner.

On today's Planet Money: Adam Davidson chats with the intrepid David Kestenbaum about both the theatrics and real policy debates going on at the current climate conference in Copenhagen. First, meet a biker who powers up music with his feet for outdoor dance sessions and, with the late Friday announcement that a global agreement of some sort has been reached at the conference, listen to the potential promises and pitfalls of a key aspect of the deal — a "cap and trade" carbon reduction plan.

On today's Planet Money: In an ongoing investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit investigative newsroom, in collaboration with NPR's Planet Money, reporters found that almost three years since banks starting taking losses that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still asking basic questions about what happened. Planet Money's Adam Davidson and Chana Joffe-Walt and Propublica's Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger talk about the story, published Wednesday on NPR.org.

On today's Planet Money: Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg chat with Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics, about his new book, The Idea of Justice, and its critique of the theory of social justice. Sen spends time in his book, and on the podcast, talking about what he sees as common misinterpretations of Adam Smith's oft-cited but perhaps more complex embrace of an absolute free market.

The Planet Money team hits the streets of New York to check out why stores clump together.

Our own David Kestenbaum is currently on route to Copenhagen where he will be spending several days reporting at the Climate Conference. David gives us an early windup of what he expects to be looking out for, including details on how much money countries plan on putting up to modernize energy economies across the globe. Plus, one very passionate delegate from the Solomon Islands.

Russ Roberts, George Mason University economist and host of EconTalk, explains why he thinks is economics is an imperfect science. Roberts says he has come to believe it's impossible to predict future economic conditions because good data is so hard to come by and even harder to compare. So what about all his fellow economists who seem to have an opinion on almost any topic? Roberts says they should come out and tell the truth, that their policy recommendations are based on philosophy and ideology, not on empirical data.

An American journalist in Japan, Jake Adelstein, has spent a decade covering the world of organized crime. He talks about how the business of the yakuza groups has changed over time and how tighter government restrictions have pushed the Japanese mob into more "traditional" investments.