Planet Money

As the World Cup comes to a close, so does a massive real-time experiment happening just around the edges. Major League Soccer – the top men’s professional soccer league in the U.S. and Canada – has been scrambling to take advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity when average American sports fans suddenly cared a lot about soccer.

In between World Cup matches, NPR Sports Correspondent Becky Sullivan has been following Major League Soccer executives as they try to figure out how best to get a foot in the door with sports fans in the U.S.

In this episode, we tag along to see if U.S. and Canadian professional soccer can harness 2026 for the mythical World Cup bump in soccer interest. What strategies are teams using? And does it stand a chance to work?

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This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Becky Sullivan and Kenny Malone. It was produced by James Sneed with an assist from Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Annlie Huang. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer. 

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China’s turbocharged growth may have made it rich, but now it has to deal with rich country problems. 

High-speed trains that connect every town. Gleaming new bridges and skyscrapers. An apartment (or two) for every family. No country on Earth has seen the kind of economic growth that China has over the last 50 years. China has become the factory to the world, a grand experiment in central government planning mixed with personal ambition. 

It was all enabled by what our guide for today calls, an engineering state, a central planning mindset where leaders believe they can engineer their way out of economic problems. And problems are mounting. 

Today on the show, the perils of prosperity and the despair of success as China deals with overbuilding. 

We’ll travel back to China’s free-wheeling boom-era of the early 2000s and hang out with a property developer who amassed his wealth at the center of the action – private jet rides, thousand-dollar fish soup, casual bribes. Then, as the economy slows, we ask what can we learn from the despair of success. Does rising youth unemployment signal a less prosperous future? With young people struggling to find white-collar jobs, some of them are opting out of work altogether. 

Featured Episodes:
China’s real estate crisis, explained (2023) 
Young, “spoiled and miserable” in China (2023) 

Featured Terms: 

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
Engineering State
Malinvestment

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Dan Wang’s book: Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
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This episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Sophia Paliza-Carre, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Maggie Luthar. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark.

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Once upon a time, if you wanted to buy a luxury brand item secondhand (say, a Chanel handbag) you had to have an in. There was no easy way to find one. But over the past decade, the market for secondhand luxury goods has exploded. There are now many online resellers where you can shop for used and discounted luxury items. One big problem — how can you be sure if it’s real and authentic?

Some online resellers claim to have solved this problem. They say they’ve developed a process of authentication, and so buyers can trust that the bag is really Gucci or Cartier or Hermès or whatever. But according to some luxury brands, authenticity is something that is often imitated but never replicated.

In today’s episode of Planet Money, the fight between Chanel and The RealReal. And how luxury brands are reacting to the enormous and growing secondhand market for luxury goods.

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This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed with help from Charlotte Isidore, who also fact checked this episode. Jess Jiang edited the show and it was engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Come along as we travel the world in search of the best economic ideas to bring home!

From the beaches of Barbuda to the fjords of Norway, there's money (and money problems) everywhere. For this summer travel season, Planet Money Summer School will take you on a world tour for your ears. Pack that sense of wonder and nose for adventure, this is our semester abroad. We’re going to explore exotic locales and discover cultural norms, but we’re also going to buckle down and learn the biggest economic lessons around the world from our guides.

We start as far away as you can get from Planet Money headquarters, New Zealand and Australia. We’ll visit a sheep farm to observe an innovative but controversial market for the most important substance on earth, and we’ll ask when do speculators help and when do they hurt the rest of us? Then, we’ll get to know the economist – and jazz musician – who changed how the entire world fights inflation when he released a secret number to tame the dreaded wild beast. How did that work? Spoiler: it was the great leap forward in economic mind tricks.

Featured Episodes:
Liquid Markets (2021)

The Secret Target (2018)

Featured Terms:
Multiple equilibria
Inflation targeting
Speculators (impact on liquidity)

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Planet Money+

Read: 
Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life (Audiobook here) 

Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter

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This episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Sophia Paliza-Carre, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Annlie Huang with help from Robert Rodriguez.

Music: NPR Source Audio - "The Boy from Ipanema," "Desmontes," "Long Drive,” and “Bondi.”

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Lionel Messi is arguably the greatest soccer scorer of all time. But when it comes to penalty kicks, Messi is merely average. Why? Maybe the answer involves game theory.

According to game theory, there’s an optimal strategy for taking penalty kicks. This strategy involves an idea that was once somewhat controversial in economics — that is, until economists started studying soccer players in real life. 

On today's show, we kick it over to the hosts of the Soccernomics podcast to explain how game theory has changed soccer, and how soccer has changed game theory. 

Watch the penalty shootout between Manchester United and Chelsea in the Champions League final in 2008. 

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Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life 
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This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Annlie Huang. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

The Soccernomics episode was originally hosted by Ashish Malhotra, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski and sound designed by Alex Roldan.

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