Summer School 8: Graduation LIVE!

Robert Smith: This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University. With Capella's FlexPath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.

Robert Smith: Quick note before the summer school finale. As you likely saw, President Trump says he is firing Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Federal Reserve Board. This is big. Our short daily show, The Indicator, already has an episode out about it. We'll have a longer one here soon, so please watch our feed.

Robert Smith: Here at Planet Money, we've covered why Federal Reserve independence is so important for the economy. The Fed's origin stories. When Nixon tried to pressure the Fed, that time Turkey fired its central bankers. We even have an episode about Lisa Cook's work long before she was nominated to the Fed. We put all those shows into a playlist for you. If you're in the mood to dive deeper, to binge, to share with everyone you know, check the show notes for a link. We'll also post it to our socials.

Robert Smith: Okay? Now for summer school. It's time to graduate. This is Planet Money from NPR. Graduates, faculty, parents. Maybe there's parents here. Long-time listeners a bit confused by the whole fake graduation theme. Welcome to Planet Money Summer School. I'm Robert Smith, and this is our live commencement ceremony at the Bell House in Brooklyn. I stand before you today in a dean's robe, green like the Planet Money podcast logo. It was ordered from China, and like everything else about summer school, it is not recognized by any academic or government institution, yes. But what it does symbolize is that we have completed a summer's worth of episodes in political economy. And in these days of short attention spans, that, unfortunately, earns you a degree.

Robert Smith: Today on our final episode, we will test your knowledge. We will salute the unsung heroes of government service. We will have special guests, and we will pick our valedictorian from among you of the class of 2025. Through a cutthroat competition and quiz, 300 people enter the Bell House, but only one will give an inspirational address to the class that will clock in under one minute. Best graduation ever.

Robert Smith: Hey everyone, it's Robert in the studio here, interrupting myself to speak just to you students listening at home. Our graduation ceremony lasted about two hours. That's not bad for a college commencement, but it's still a little too long for the podcast. So today, to help you celebrate your awesome graduation, we're going to play just the very best segments of the evening. We'll fast forward through the opening acts, but to give you a little feel for it, we had Planet Money TikTok guy Jack Corbett introduce himself and why we are all here.

Robert Smith: We need to answer tonight's big question. What should the government do in the economy? What a big question. Should the government intervene to take on inequality? Should the government own the land and the tools and the factories on behalf of all of us? Applaud if you agree. Officers, please arrest those communists.

Robert Smith: We also did the traditional invocation at the beginning of the ceremony. We called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, and his ghost responded. Yes, Planet Money, 'tis I, Adam Smith, a reason from the grave to give the invisible middle finger to the idea that I was a radical free-market zealot. And we had a little audience quiz to show off how much you all have learned about political economy this season. We gave audience members the abbreviation of a government agency, and they would usually nail it.

Robert Smith: We begin with SSA. Social Security Administration. Correct. Go to the back of the line. But as the government agencies got more obscure, only a few audience members were left standing. Next agency, DOC. Doctor? Good guess, but incorrect. Next person, I got nothing. Census? I don't know. Oh, good guess, but no, I'm sorry. Return to your seat. It's the Department of Commerce. Yes, it is.

Robert Smith: We had two of your fellow students who aced the quiz. And they will compete later in the show to be our valedictorian for the class of 2025. So let's get on with your personalized best-of version of your graduation ceremony. And at the end, we'll have instructions on how to get sent your very own and very fake diploma from summer school 2025. Commencement picks up again after the break.

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Robert Smith: Welcome back to Planet Money Summer School Graduation Live at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Please welcome to the stage host of Planet Money's The Indicator podcast, Darian Woods.

Darian Woods: Glad to be here. Every graduation ceremony needs to present an honorary degree, a recognition to the students that you really didn't need to pay tuition or study at all. You just needed to go out and do something cool in the world and then wait for the dean to call. Our honorary degree this year goes to someone from a part of the government. We were actually going to do a whole summer school episode about government statistics. We thought it would be funny, right, Darian, to do a whole show on government statistics because it's obscure and no one ever talks about it and it definitely never makes the news. Yeah, until it did. It was everywhere. It was the top headline. The president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dr. Erica McIntarfer. So the president was unhappy with the most recent set of jobs numbers. Not only was the number of jobs created in July relatively low, the report revised the jobs numbers for May and June even lower. The president didn't like that and decided that the number and the department needed fixing. The firing was, of course, an intensely political act. And maybe that's what was so shocking to us here at Planet Money. You know, over the years, we've talked to the researchers, we've followed statisticians who produce all the numbers that we use every week. The unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the gross domestic product, GDP. We've covered this stuff for years. Whenever the jobs numbers come out, The Indicator plays an air horn. When my daughters were little, they would ask, is today jobs day? And I'd be like, no, it's the first Friday of the month. Why do we keep going over and over this? I mean we regularly interviewed people like Erica Groshen, the former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and she warned us a long time ago about this moment. If people don't trust the data, then you might as well not produce it. But when we hear the data, we think about the real people, the hard-working data collectors who dedicate their lives to assembling these data points. And they go to extreme lengths to get it. In 2015, Planet Money producer Caitlin Kenney rode around Brooklyn with one of the employees of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, George Mincinello. George goes to the same set of stores every month for years, month after month, to check the prices, to look for inflation, and not just in general. He has a very specific list. A bag of romaine hearts of lettuce, which is usually over here. Now we're going to get the price. Hi. Could you scan that for me? I just want to know the price. $299. $299, thank you. So $299 is the same price. Oh wait, we have a change here. It's the same price, however, the weight is different. So effectively, that's a price decrease for these packaged romaine heads. So we're seeing deflation right here. We're seeing a reduction in the price, yes. This is all for one data point. They do this thousands and thousands of times each month. In fact, his next stop was to check the price for a size 15 boys' cotton shirt. These people are sticklers for the facts. And it's the same for the jobs numbers dismissed by President Trump as, quote, phony. Those jobs numbers are the result of thousands of surveys to businesses across the country. And in 2022, Weyland Wong and I did a report on The Indicator about how the jobs numbers are actually put together. And we got to eavesdrop as data collector Erica Hennion was calling companies. It's Erica with the U.S. Department of Labor. How are you doing today? Doing good. I think I know your voice by now when you call. I know. It's been a while for us. The person on the end of the phone line recognizes Erica because the same business will get a call each month for anywhere between two to four years. And Erica, by the way, told me that her mother was a hairdresser. So she's good at talking to strangers to give out information. And so for that pay period that included May 12th, then how many total employees work to receive pay? 80. 80? Went up another person. Yay. We'll take it. It doesn't happen very often lately. Now, this whole data collection process is a human endeavor. And like everybody says these days, their jobs are getting harder. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is working with a smaller budget than in the past. When you take into account inflation, the BLS's budget is 10% smaller than it was in 2009. These cuts have been happening for years. So those lettuce numbers? The BLS is no longer sending out people to price romaine in Provo, Utah. They cut people pricing arugula in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in Buffalo, New York. We don't really know if endive is getting more expensive. Probably, probably a little bit. The data is still solid, everyone tells us, but the cutbacks are starting to stretch them thin. And after the pandemic, the data collectors started to notice that fewer people were answering surveys and talking to the data collectors. I asked Erica, the woman who was calling about the jobs numbers, how her job was these days. It has gotten harder. It has gotten harder over the years, especially after the pandemic. There has been some pushback from different respondents that don't want to report the data because of the political economy, the way it is and everything like that. There has been some pushback. There is some distrust there. And I've actually had a few people that have yelled at me and screamed at me, and then they called me back and apologized because they realized that they took it out on the wrong person. I'm their outlet. I am the person that they can physically talk to about the government. Now, since the firing, we at Planet Money have talked to just about every living person who once ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if you've listened over the last couple of weeks. We talk regularly with the folks at the Census and the Commerce Department and the Federal Reserve, and they all tell us the numbers have not yet been contaminated by politics. The process they use is transparent. It's been done roughly the same way for decades. The economists and these agencies say it would be very hard to fake the data or spin the numbers. There are laws in place and there are norms. But as the former head of the BLS told us on The Indicator, those norms are vulnerable. They can be undermined. It's like what parents tell their kids. Trust takes a long time to build up and it can be ruined in an instant. So not to get cheesy. I mean, come on, it's graduation. This is the perfect time to get cheesy. We all have to do our part. We should answer the surveys, support the data professionals, keep the trust that has been built for 100 years. We hereby declare an honorary summer school degree. So we're going to give out an honorary degree to the thousands of people in more than a dozen federal agencies who work with data collection across the government. The trust may be precarious, but the numbers don't lie. To present this award, I want to bring on the host at Planet Money who spends the most time talking numbers with economists, Mary Childs.

Mary Childs: Thank you. This is so exciting. I'm honored to be able to present this degree. The honorary degree will be presented to literally thousands of people, but I had to find someone, a person, to accept it. A representative sample of N equals 1. So here to accept is the director of research and the head of the research and statistics group at the New York Federal Reserve, Kartik Athreya.

Kartik Athreya: Thank you so much for having me. This is so cool, and this is going to get less entertaining than...

Mary Childs: No, no, no. No sandbagging here. So you are in charge of getting good data to policymakers at the Fed. You don't make policy. You just help them try to understand what even is going on in the economy, correct?

Kartik Athreya: Yes. Y'all are always looking at your screens and your numbers, but you do also get out into the world. You go out into your region once a week. Why? What are you looking for and what are those meetings like?

Mary Childs: So the core question is always kind of the same, which is what is signal and what is noise? A bunch of stuff comes in. You don't know what's likely to stick and what's likely not to. In my role as a research director, I work with a team of economists, analysts, and statisticians who advise the New York Fed president in my case to say, look, we think this is the part of what's unfolding right now that is actually somewhat durable that you should pay attention to. One of the things that happens with data collection, no matter how good it is, is that it takes time to come in. And we often need help in understanding what's happening now when, in fact, hard data may reveal that only a while from now. So who knows? People making decisions. And I'm going to make a quick plug for Planet Money. It is exceptional in translating decision-making at the individual level back into the economic issues I think it's what it does particularly well and it's why I like it. We didn't even ask for that. That was unprompted. Well, then that makes me feel bad about the framing of this next question. I just won't answer. I wasn't ready for this. Uh, emotionally.

Mary Childs: You spend a lot of time working on all your numbers, so why aren't they perfect? I can do no better than Planet Money just did in telling us all the hurdles that lie between us and a perfect read of the economy at any point in time. This is a huge economy. There's a ton of stuff going on. Endives in Buffalo, you know, lettuce elsewhere. Knowing what's happening in real time is actually very complicated simply by the scale of the economy that we operate with. So I think in that sense that already an impediment. The other thing actually was brought up response rates. We at the New York Fed conduct surveys. One of the things that we try to do is keep track of household expectations for the economy. People don't always respond to the survey. It is hard to get people to respond. And I think also there's just the general complexity of actually the economy underlying that we can't get a read on perfectly. So you would say to everybody out there, tell your friends to answer the calls. Yeah, if one of us asks you, please be in the survey. This is a recruitment event. We didn't mean for that either.

Mary Childs: Well, Kartik, thank you so much for joining us. And on behalf of Planet Money, I would like to present you and all government statisticians with this honorary degree.

Robert Smith: We still need to pick our valedictorian for the class of 2025. It's going to get intense after the break.

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Robert Smith: Class, we have done it. We have worked long and hard this semester studying vocabulary, even doing some extracurricular reading. And now, now we are at the final exam. For tonight's final exam, I will be bringing up the hosts of Planet Money to help proctor. Please welcome back to the stage, Darian Woods, Mary Childs, and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Our two final contestants vying for the title of Planet Money Summer School Valedictorian 2025, Yale Zhang and Atticus Carnell. Atticus, where are you from? Are you a big Planet Money listener?

Atticus Carnell: Um, no. Love it. Love it. Brutal. You're about to figure out what happens when you haven't listened to Planet Money. I know. And you're given an economics trivia test. That's okay, that's okay.

Robert Smith: Yale, where are you from, and are you a big listener? I mean, I live in New York, and I haven't listened to episode 7 because I'm not a Planet Money Plus subscriber. So this should be an incentive to do so. Yes, yes it will.

Robert Smith: Our final exam will be a round of political economy trivia. Each question will be multiple choice with only one correct answer. The contestant with the most correct answers at the end of the game will be, unfortunately, our valedictorian. Sorry about that. Second prize is you don't have to be valedictorian. This title will earn you absolutely nothing tangible, which means it will be weightless as you carry it forever in your heart. Everyone ready? Okay. All right. Our first question for Atticus is from Mary Childs. Hey, Atticus. Hi. Argentina utilized industrial policy to try to grow a whole new sector of its economy. They did this by trying to build a specific product entirely within the borders of Argentina. What was the product? A. Learjets. B. Blackberry cell phones. C. Cheez-Its.

Atticus Carnell: A. I guess you should have listened to Planet Money. The answer is B. Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner fulfilled a campaign promise to build cell phones entirely in Argentina. And while it did work, it ultimately resulted in Argentinians having access to Blackberries that were full years behind the rest of the world's Blackberries.

Robert Smith: Yale, it's coming to you from Alexi. Yale. Dear Yale. The Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, for those who were playing earlier, was heavily criticized after two deadly crashes involving the Boeing 737 MAX. Investigations revealed that the FAA delegated significant portions of the aircraft's safety certification to Boeing engineers themselves. This trend of industry exerting significant influence over its own oversight is known in economics as what? A, tragedy of the commons, B, the fox in the hen house conundrum, or C, regulatory capture?

Yale Zhang: C, regulatory capture. Nailed it! It is not over for you, Atticus. Next question to you from Darian. This season of summer school, we learnt about a tax meant to give companies an incentive to pollute less. That type of tax is called a Pigouvian tax, named after the economist who first proposed it. What was Pigou's full name? We've got A, Bertram Manfield Pigou, B, Arthur Cecil Pigou, or C, Vincent Caswell Pigou.

Atticus Carnell: B. Arthur Cecil Pigou is correct. The creator of the Pigouvian tax also just a very handsome man. Look at that stare. I'd pay any tax to that man.

Robert Smith: Yale, next question comes from Mary Childs. Taxes don't just raise revenue; they also influence behavior. If something costs more, people tend to buy less of it. Which of the following taxes was actually implemented? A, a Canadian tax on maple syrup to limit domestic consumption, leaving more product for exports. B, an Italian tax on Segway usage to decrease groups of tourists rolling awkwardly along the canals of Venice. C, a Ugandan tax on social media meant to limit the time people spent on things like Twitter.

Yale Zhang: I'm going to guess A. I'm sorry, that answer was incorrect. The correct answer was C. In 2018, Uganda taxed people's social media usage to try to quell protests. This led to an estimated 13% decrease in Twitter users from the country, but an increase in protest participation. This is like a perfect experiment. One person listens to Planet Money, the other doesn't, and they're currently tied.

Robert Smith: Atticus, we have one last question for you from Mary. Atticus, in 2024, the Nobel Prize in economics focused on the role of inclusive institutions and their opposite. What is the opposite? A, an extractive institution. B, an exclusive institution. C, A defensive institution. I feel like this is a trick. It's not. You can do it. B. Okay, you did not do it. I am so sorry. That is not it. The correct answer is A. Extractive institution. These are institutions that are unequal and unfair. Arguably, you would say like this question. This is your chance; it's all coming down to this question. Darian Eugene Gagliari is the inventor of Steakums, that is a type of thinly sliced frozen meat you can use to make Philly cheesesteaks at home. Now it's said he awoke at 3 a.m. one morning with the idea, ran off to his meat processing plant to see if he could pull it off. In which decade did Gagliardi invent the method for producing Steakums? Is it A, 1940s, B, 1960s, or C, 1980s? All right, I'm going to steak my future. Oh! On B, 1960s. That is correct. Thank you very much, Atticus. We give you a lifetime supply of Planet Money episodes so you can catch up on them. We'll have you here next year. And our valedictorian of the class of 2025, it all passes so quickly, is Yale Zhang. The pressure is on. We are going to give Yale, I don't know, 30 seconds to come up with his speech. And we will hear that speech after this break.

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Robert Smith: Welcome back to Planet Money Summer School graduation. We have given Yale Zhang mere minutes, minutes to carefully craft a valedictory address that will be heard by millions on the podcast. No pressure. No one remembers graduation speeches. You know that. But maybe we'll remember this one. All right. Are you ready? Are we allowed to use adult language in the speech? No. How adult? Depends on the context. I think the FC... Can you clean it up a little bit? Okay. For those of you who can't see it, there is a little bit of chaos on stage at this point. Our producer, Eric Menel, is walking over to Yale to see how dirty exactly the valedictorian speech really is. Is it good? I'm a little stumped. Hold on. The crowd is urging us on. Read it! Read it! Read it! Read it! And then I'm brought over as host, just to give it a look. It's pretty tame anatomical humor, and it's a rhyming poem, so it makes an edit a bit tricky. We decide he can read the whole thing except for the last word. The NPR standards department will be very happy. I mean, you've already been defunded. You can't go into I'm going to subscribe to Planet Money Plus. I promise. The floor is yours, fellow graduates. I remember when I was just like you, a mere 10 minutes ago, and I felt anxiety, no pure panic about the future, but one thing I have learned in the long walk to this stage at the Bell House is there are people out there and in this room fighting for truth and accuracy, and it's more important than ever to stand up for what you know to be right and statistically correct. Now that I'm the champion of a political economy trivia and you're valedictorian, I leave you with this one piece of advice. From animal spirits to a squirrel named Peanut, Planet Money has seen it all. So don't buy puts. Don't YOLO into any calls because Robert Smith and Jay Powell has you by the... Ladies and gentlemen, Yale Zhang. Thank you so much. This would be the spot in the show where I would read all your names and have you walk across the stage. You should just imagine that at this point. Your name, the long walk, the handshake, you're done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As the fake dean of a fake podcast university, it is my honor to declare you all graduates in the field of political economy. You may throw your cheap hats we ordered from China into the air. For those of you listening at home, we have one more step to do before we can send you your diploma. It is a short online quiz. You can find it linked in the show notes or on npr.org/money. And we will send you the finest fake digital diploma money can buy. Thank you to our producers tonight, Eric Menel and Cooper Katz McKim. To our production manager, Devin Mellor, and our editor on this show. Yes, it was edited. Alex Goldmark. Once again, Planet Money hosts Mary Childs, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, and Darian Woods. For those listening to the podcast version, thanks to engineer Sina Lofredo and fact-checker Emily Crawford. And thank you to everyone here at the Bell House. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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