From Desi Arnaz to SpaceX: Understanding the rules of the modern economy

Since 2008, NPR’s popular “Planet Money” podcast has helped fans and listeners break down the complexities of the economy, making it more accessible and entertaining. It first launched during the financial crisis to help people better understand the global economy through narrative storytelling and hands-on reporting. 

Last month, longtime contributor Alex Mayyasi and the hosts turned the podcast into book form and released “Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life,” with new stories and insights taken from more than a decade of reporting to show how economics shapes our world and how readers can harness its key principles to make their lives a little richer.

The book tackles everything from how AI might help or replace you to how the compounding effect applies to more than your 401(k). It also takes readers to a smartphone factory in Patagonia, a raisin cartel in California, and an Indigenous reserve in Canada that might hold the solution for the housing crisis. 

Mayyasi has been busy — he’s launching “Gastronomics,” a new podcast on food and economics, on June 10. But now, fresh off the “Planet Money” book tour, he took some time to speak with Sherwood News about how the book came together and what tips readers can take away from it to understand the economy better. 

This conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Saleah Blancaflor, Sherwood News: How did you decide which stories or funny anecdotes reveal a deep truth versus just being a weird coincidence? In other words, what makes a story book-worthy?

Alex Mayyasi: What was important was to come up with an organizing structure early. I thought of that subtitle — “A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life” — and the structure of going through different parts of your life. At one point, there was an idea somebody else on the team had to start with when you’re a child and then go through early adulthood, entering the job market through retirement, and I was like, “Well, maybe, that ends with death,” which is maybe a little bit morbid — though, I was into that idea because we have a great episode about graveyards and I thought that would be an awesome epilogue. But that ultimately didn’t feel like the way to go. 

The final sections of the book end up highlighting different parts of your life — working, careers, saving, investing, family, personal life, leisure, and that was a good principle to tackle. There are all sorts of amazing “Planet Money” episodes I love that are not in this book, as much as I might have liked to be able to include them. But we were able to take a classic episode and see if there’s a place for it to fit in the book that fits that structure.

Sherwood: Are there stories that you wanted to include in the book that only worked in a podcast format? 

Mayyasi: The only thing that felt like it only worked in audio, and didn’t work in print, that came up during my process was one where several “Planet Money” hosts made a series of episodes and Kenny Malone uses AI to replace himself and the “Planet Money” hosts as much as possible. That was a really satisfying audio experience because you hear him going through the process of getting suggestions from the AI, following them, and getting AI to write the questions. 

The aired episode was made using a lot of LLMs. It just didn’t seem like it would be really satisfying for a book chapter. It’s not super interesting if I tried to do the same thing and have AI do the writing — and a million other people have already done that. It also would’ve been so dated by the time the book came out — at least a year delay.

There’s also a great episode about how salmon sushi was not a thing in Japan until Norway had been buying lots and lots of salmon from fishermen to support the industry and then had to figure out how to sell all of this high-quality salmon. Eventually, it convinced Japanese fish grocery stores to start having salmon sashimi and work their way up. That’s such a fun, great story. I particularly love the intersection of econ and food, but that’s one of the cases where that isn’t quite an economic force that shapes your life. 

Sherwood: In the book, you describe the economy as “a cage you can’t escape,” but it also aims to help people harness it. For readers who feel trapped by inflation or high rent, what would you say is the first step to leveraging those economic forces?

Mayyasi: It can be calming or empowering just to understand things like inflation better or have a better grasp on it — even something as simple as like, “What causes inflation?” when you hear that the Fed is doing X with interest rates. It’s having a little bit of a map so you don’t feel surrounded by unfamiliar terrain. 

But there are other ideas that can be quite powerful. One is the idea of the superstar effect and Desi Arnaz from “I Love Lucy,” which is highlighted in the “Work and Career” section, where his career is an amazing example of this phenomenon. He started his career as a band leader. He was playing clubs with his band. He would sing and he made good money, but you only can make so much money performing for one room of people at a time. But then he got into plays and got into TV, and he and Lucille Ball were entertaining not just one room full of people, but entertaining the entire country at the time. The number of people that watched “I Love Lucy” episodes live is unimaginable today. As a result, they became very wealthy because they owned a lot of “I Love Lucy” as a show — they had ownership. That’s the superstar effect. 

Because of technology, there are certain fields and sectors where a few stars like Taylor Swift, like Desi Arnaz, can make a lot of the profit in the industry because they’re serving fans in so much of the market around the world. That could be very powerful because maybe a young reader wants to be like Desi Arnaz and wants to understand the way that if you work really hard in your career, you can reap the upsides of that. Going into a career with a superstar effect could be great for you.

It was also a fun process because almost nothing in the book is a one-to-one adaptation of an episode. The Desi episode might be my favorite of all. The episode was about Desi inventing the business model of television and inventing the rerun. The rerun did not exist before Desi Arnaz. They came up with it when Lucille Ball was pregnant, since everyone was obsessed with Lucy, and they tried to figure out what to do. But the history also explains the difference between salaries and wages versus ownership and equity. It’s also a good way to think about taking risks in your career, understanding that risk is not inherently good or bad, but more of a choice about where you want to be on that risk-reward spectrum and the trade-off.

Sherwood: In the “Weighing Cows and Picking Stocks” chapter, you write about how “Planet Money” hosts Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum went to a farm in New Jersey to recreate an experiment that was originally conducted by statistician and scientist Francis Galton, where the two weighed a cow named Penelope, shared it online, and asked for people to guess her weight. What does the story of Penelope tell us about stock markets?

Mayyasi: Penelope is this demonstration of the wisdom of crowds in the way that the stock market is lots and lots of people making their guesses about the correct value of a given company stock. That anecdote and that chapter is really talking about just how hard it is to beat the market.

One of my cohosts had this brilliant point — and this isn’t in the book — but there is new research about how you can improve on the wisdom of crowds by using various levels of certainty people have in their own estimations and other people’s estimations. 

The stock market doesn’t work like this; I don’t get one vote about how much Apple is worth, and so does Jane Street, or something. There are others who have 10,000x as much money in Apple as me, so those people can and will be wrong at times, but the fact that they’re investing so much money is often dictating a certain level of certainty or confidence in their guess, which can improve collective wisdom, whereas for me, it’s just index funds. I’m just making a bet as diversified as possible on the stock market, and people think it’s in the indexes because people think it’s a very good company, as compared to if somebody like Warren Buffett, who could put an X amount of money into one of these companies. But that’s how the wisdom of crowds can be improved on from our Penelope example. 

Sherwood: You talked a little bit about AI already. But “The Hopeful Tale of the ATM and the Bank Teller” chapter talks about automation and highlights how ATMs didn’t necessarily kill the bank teller job, but transformed it into customer service. For young professionals that are worried about AI, how can they distinguish between technology that replaces a worker and one that simply replaces a task? 

Mayyasi: I don’t think there’s one easy answer, but I wanted to share the example of the ATM and the bank teller because there are a few lessons from it that I hope people can learn from. One is that automation can be an opportunity — even when it is disruptive and impacts people’s jobs. Economists often have to phrase it, like, automation often automates tasks, not jobs. As you said, ATMs didn’t automate the job of the bank teller; it automated certain tasks so that the jobs of bank tellers changed. That’s often a lesson about thinking about ways to work with technology.

I interviewed Angie Douglas in that chapter, and she said there were bank tellers who didn’t like this new form of being a bank teller. They would move to a smaller town where the ATMs weren’t there yet. Not everyone will always love that change, while other people may enjoy it and thrive. But there are opportunities, and in the case of Angie Douglas, who’s the protagonist of that chapter, ATMs arrived just as she was starting her career in banking as a teller. You might think that could be the worst possible thing for her, but because adoption is often quite slow, it was an interesting challenge as a teller, especially as senior jobs within the bank were trying to figure out how to make ATMs work, convincing customers that they would work, improving the technology, implementing and integrating them with the bank, and working with first ATMs and then the rise of online banking — that was all part of her job and part of her career. She had a long career in banking. 

There are times when technology can lead to job losses, but there are also benefits. I absolutely wish politicians and Congress were thinking more about concerns around the fact that there might be mass job losses from AI and we should be really thinking about how to support those people and be ready in case that does happen. But I also want individuals to think about its opportunities, too.

There’s actually a great example in the book that someone pointed out to me of the “Hidden Figures” protagonists, if you remember that movie. There’s a point where these women were computers who did computations, and then NASA — or the organization that became NASA — brought in electronic computers, which absolutely was going to automate their job. It was impressive that these women realized it could hurt them, but that it could be an opportunity. Dorothy Vaughan encouraged all the women in her computing group to take programming classes to figure out how to program these machines, went to the administrators, and convinced them to have the women do this programming since they’ve been working, have gained the trust of the astronauts, and know how to work with people — and they knew which computations were needed. They were able to show they had this human capital that’s valuable. 

I’m not saying it’s easy, and it’s often harder for older workers, but that’s an example of how something that seems like it could be a threat could be an opportunity.

Sherwood: Early on in the book, you get into Baumol’s Cost Disease, a theory that shows why costs for services like education, healthcare, and childcare rise faster than goods. Do you think there’s a future where the prominence of AI can help or hurt cost disease?

Mayyasi: It will be interesting because what causes cost disease is this mismatch between parts that get more and more productive over time — thanks to technology — and other parts of the economy that are just very labor-intensive and don’t look very different. No one is now doing five gear trims in the time that it used to take one trim. But the level of progress in other parts of the economy is almost like doing 100 gear trims that make 100 T-shirts in the time it used to take to make one.

Cost disease is often the very strong argument for progressive taxation so that we can use all this wealth being created by these productive parts of the economy to subsidize these other parts that are very labor-intensive, but that are super essential that suffer from cost disease, so things like childcare. I think this is partially why firefighting and public school budgets are so stretched thin all the time: it’s because people don’t think that budgets need to go up, but because of cost disease, they do. 

I don’t know and I don’t think anyone really knows for sure what type of productivity gains we’ll see from AI. It’s possible we’ll see lots of bottlenecks and the type of pattern we saw with the personal computers and the internet. There’s this famous line from Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow that goes, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” so that might be the fate of AI for some time until we see this general purpose technology adopted in a way that allows for more productivity gains. 

I think cost disease will become more important. Cost disease is the cost of your own success, the cost of a growing economy. If we do see some best-case 10% GDP growth from AI, or even just something that would be more modest but still great, like if it led to 3% GDP growth in the US instead of 1.5% to 2.5% in profits in the past couple decades, that means even more cost disease — that makes childcare even more hard to afford, and then it becomes even more expensive. Maybe there’s a strong case for taxes going up so that governments can increase the budgets for public schools, subsidizing, or just directly providing childcare. 

I’m sure a lot of Silicon Valley is imagining all sorts of futures for us, and that’s why I feel like maybe one of my pitches to become the norm is: if AI does create all this wealth, then use that wealth so young parents don’t need childcare. It would instead become the norm that people take lots and lots of time off during their kids’ formative years, the same way it was once the norm for people not to retire unless you were super wealthy, but then we made it a norm to give support to older people so that they could retire. That’s another future I’d be interested in hearing more people talk about.

Sherwood: You write that compound interest applies to more than just a 401(k). How should a young person invest in their own human capital right now to ensure they are making the economy work for them?

Mayyasi: For someone who’s young in their career, it’s hard to pay off student debt. It’s really hard to invest. But there are other things that can compound in their career and their life in a really powerful way. One is your professional network. For a lot of young people coming out of college, it can feel like a dirty word trying to suck up to people so they’ll give you a job. But your network is friends you make at your first job who, years later, might be referring you to jobs and might be helping you in any number of ways. It’s all sorts of people you’ll meet that are doing interesting work that’s adjacent to yours.

That can have these quite compounding benefits, because if you have a network of 10 people, those 10 people know 10 more people or whatever. But if you have 1,000 people in your network, then those 1,000 people will know 1,000 people. It’s that compounding growth in a way, and the bigger the network you have, the easier it will be to grow. It’s really valuable to think about putting in the time to meet and keep in touch with people. It’s almost the same way that social networks or platforms like Uber will make it as easy as possible for people to join their networks, and make it as valuable as possible to join their networks. Like being someone who proactively tries to think of ways to help people you meet, or helping people making those offers, to help people in their job search, whatever it is, that can help grow your network. That’s one example of compounding and is something that can snowball in the same way that a 401(k) or Roth IRA can have that really powerful compact growth over time. 

Sherwood: “Planet Money” has always been great at uncovering the hidden rules of the markets. For a retail investor who now has instant access to those markets on their phone, is the biggest challenge still getting in, or is it learning how to ignore the noise once you’re in the room?

Mayyasi: The writer Matt Levine has this great joke (that’s maybe not a joke) that someone should provide a service where you just give them your money that you’re saving for retirement, and they give you absolutely zero updates or visibility on how your investments are doing, and when you actually retire at age 65 or whenever, they say, “Here’s your money,” just so you’re not tempted to sell at the wrong time. 

Now, you can constantly invest at any time and the transaction costs in many cases are zero. While many traders might be sophisticated and experienced, for those that are still learning, one point I find very helpful in illuminating and that I would encourage people to think about and ask themselves is: why is it that it’s absolutely free for me to place these trades? 

Sometimes the answer is that our sophisticated institutional investors are happy to be on the other side of those trades because they think retail investors are going to make bad decisions and make bad bets, so they are happy to cover the trading costs to be on the other side of them. That can be powerful for thinking of a good use of your time versus a boring but powerful alternative like index funds.

Sherwood: Are there any economic superpowers or tips you wish young investors had in the back of their minds as they’re trading in the morning? 

Mayyasi: Index funds are really credible financial innovations that have made it possible for the average investor — someone who’s not going to spend their time researching companies and markets — to just be able to invest their money for very, very low fees in a boring but powerful way, and just benefit from the growth of the American economy and be able to do diversification very cheaply and effectively. 

For those who are more sophisticated about investing, something that’s not so much in the book but that I think a lot about is the increasing prevalence of big, important companies not going public and the question of whether index funds will continue to be as effective if we see companies deciding to stay private.

With SpaceX about to go public and IPO, it’s certainly not that no big, important companies want to go public anymore, but that’s something to keep an eye on. Index funds have been an incredible financial invention for the average investor and has made it possible to benefit from safer retirement, benefit from the stock market, without having to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on and to pay low fees and keep more of your money for yourself. That’s certainly something that I want to pay attention to and keep an eye on — the question of more companies taking place out of public markets and in places that index funds might not touch.