NPR: Planet Money

With college, there's the sticker price and the actual price you pay. This is the real cost for each school.

Today on the show: How Price Club and its imitators changed the way we shop. And how a new company is taking what Price Club started to new extremes.

Everybody likes free. But free can be dangerous. On today's show, what happens when you take something that was free and give it a price. That's a highly risky move and the damage can be enormous.

Hidden in the trash heap of commerce there is buried treasure. Abandoned brands, even beloved, trusted brands, are waiting to be claimed and reborn. Today on the show: a cookie comeback.

President Obama had a plan to rate colleges on how well they served students financially. Then he backed off. So we asked three smart people how they would do it.

One Hollywood director leaves the world of big budget blockbusters for something even more lucrative: low budget Hollywood.

When Roddey Player's business started heading south, he did everything he could to avoid the big failure: bankruptcy. But what's painful for Roddey might just be the secret weapon of the U.S. economy.

We travel to Warm Springs to find out if the rumors are true: Did FDR really buy moonshine during Prohibition? Did he violate the Constitution he had sworn to protect?

Patty McCord helped create a workplace at Netflix that runs more like a professional sports team than a family. If you're not up to scratch, you're off the team. Is this the future of work?

When used American clothes are donated to charity, they begin a second life of sorting, refitting, and lots of travel. We trace used American T-shirts to a used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya.

Audiences love to mock campy, low-budget horror movies, but by one very important metric, they are the smartest movies around.

Our women's Planet Money T-shirt got to you thanks to an overlooked innovation that's essential to the modern global economy. The innovation: a big, metal box.

Credit cards have changed a lot — and so have the interest rates we pay. Here's how.

Like lots of other clothes, the men's Planet Money T-shirt was made in Bangladesh. On today's show, we travel to Bangladesh and visit two sisters who made our shirt.

A few weeks ago, we asked the Internet a simple question: how much does this cow weigh?

We wanted to understand an eerie phenomenon that drives everything from the stock market to the price of orange juice. So we asked you to guess the weight of a cow.

We made a T-shirt, and followed it every step of the way. First step: a high-tech cotton farm.

The big question surrounding automation isn't just about economics or technology. It's also about psychology. How do designers make us comfortable with something that can be really scary?

The world economy is more productive than ever before. A lot of people could work fewer hours and still meet their basic needs. But we don't. Why?

On today's show: the screwed-up economics of drought, and why the rational thing to do in California right now is use more water.

On a visit to Greece, we talk to a guy who found an ingenious place to hoard his cash, a government-protected milk peddler, and a would-be olive oil tycoon.

On a visit to Greece, we talk to a guy who found an ingenious place to hoard his cash, a government-protected milk peddler, and a would-be olive oil tycoon.

Guess the weight of the cow. Somebody's going home with a plastic cow trophy.

Today on the show: We're going small. We ask some of the smartest people we know what little thing they would change to improve the world.

Future doctors and lawyers borrow a lot. Future professors, not so much.

The story of the secret battle to create the song of the summer — the music industry's holy grail.

We sit down with a psychologist and a mortgage broker who committed large-scale fraud to try to figure out why respectable people commit fraud.

Trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership are often negotiated in secret. On today's show, negotiators tell us what happened when they were locked in a hotel for days and told to hash out a deal.

A farmer wanted to sell all his raisins, but the federal government said no. So he took it to the Supreme Court.

How couples share the burden of work — over time, and across incomes.

We ask three economists: Is there some falling anvil that's about to crush the economy?

The price tag is a fairly recent invention. And it's already on its way out.

How the American auto industry is built on a trade dispute over frozen chicken parts.

Robots are really bad at many simple human tasks. One possible workaround: Combine the person with the machine.

Stories about a $50,000 loophole, what neighborhoods mean for kids, and what the Six Million Dollar Man would cost today.

The story of a 24-year-old kid and the idea he thought would reduce congestion, cut greenhouse gasses and make urban life easier for everyone. Instead, it brought him nothing but trouble.

Sam Cohen has made a big business out of buying stuff at big retail stores, then turning around and selling it on Amazon. In an era when stores are profit-maximizing machines, how is that possible?

In the early 1960s, Tom Burrell became the first black man in Chicago advertising. Today on the show, the story of how he changed the way people think about ads and how advertising thinks about us.

Today on the show, how we got from mealy, nasty apples to apples that taste delicious. The story starts with a breeder who discovered a miracle apple. But discovering that apple wasn't enough.

Robots don't always replace workers. Sometimes, workers use robots as tools.

Machines have been taking jobs forever. In the past, when jobs disappeared, new ones were created. But is this time different?

Will your job be around in the future? We take a peek at the research.