Planet Money

The world is running out of chocolate.  Cocoa is in short supply. Demand is way up, thanks to China and India developing a taste for the sweet stuff. And producing more cocoa isn't so easy. Cocoa is a fussy plant. It doesn't grow in very many places and it gets diseases really easily.  Today on the show, we learn about one man in Ecuador who came up with an answer to the global cocoa shortage. A warning here: if you're a die-hard chocolate lover, you might not like it.  For more: http://n.pr/1Dg2r5C

They are hundreds of thousands of people out there doing stuff to your internet that you probably think is automatic. They aren't computer programmers, they're just regular people working from their offices, homes and bedrooms. They are the people of Amazon Mechanical Turk.Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace for work. Businesses use it to farm out tiny little tasks like counting the number of people in a photo, and people around the world race to perform those tasks, sometimes for pennies.Today on the show, we sneak into the land of Mechanical Turk to meet the people inside.

Hernando de Soto wanted to figure out what was trapping people in poverty. "There's gotta be an invisible wall someplace," he thought. "Let's find the wall."  Today on the show: How de Soto found the invisible wall that was trapping people in poverty. How it transformed poor countries around the world. And how his discovery almost got him killed.  For more: http://n.pr/1K6ddLZ

There have been short sellers throughout history. Today, the story of a man who was the very first short seller. The first person to bet that a stock will go down. It doesn't go well for him.

If you own a house, stock, bonds, or a retirement account, you're betting that things are going to get better — that the lines on the chart will keep going up. Historically, this is a reasonable bet. But you can place a bet in the opposite direction. You can make a bet that things will go down: a short. For example, if you short Apple stock and the stock price drops, you make money. While all the normal shareholders are consoling themselves, you can celebrate. But for the most part, people don't do it. Experts warn us that we shouldn't either. Today on the show, we ignore the advice of some very smart people, and we put our own money down on a bet against something people love. We short America.

Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran in February 2011. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ignores the advice of America's big-name economists — and listens instead to a guy who helped take care of the trees on his estate. Montagu Norman, head of the Bank of England, gets a coded message at a critical moment — and completely misunderstands what it means. On today's Planet Money: The gold standard and the Great Depression. It's the latest in our series on gold and the meaning of money. 

We visit the respected finance writer (and charming curmudgeon) James Grant. He makes the case for going back on the gold standard. For more:n.pr/1IxK0L2

Note: This episode contains explicit language. Every time there is a big new release of some software, an operating system or a new browser, hackers get to work. Each new release is the start of a race because there are all these giant players who desperately want to find the new flaw in the software. Today on the show, the story of one man who stumbled into a flaw in Apple's operating system, a way to hack the phone you might have in your hands right now – the iPhone 5s. It was a flaw that was worth a million dollars to the first person who could exploit it.

Note: Today's show is a rerun. It originally ran in October 2010.  On today's Planet Money, we go shopping with George Minichiello.  George is one of hundreds of federal employees who goes to stores all over the country and record the prices of thousands of different things. A bag of romaine lettuce. A boy's size-14 collared shirt made of 97 percent cotton. A loaf of white bread.  Their work drives the consumer price index, a key economic indicator known to its friends as CPI. The index measures inflation in the U.S., and it influences everything from Social Security checks to the price of school lunches to how big your raise will be next year.  For more: http://n.pr/1AGluFd

Sometimes all you can say at the end of a story is "time will tell." Today on the show, time has told. We follow up on our favorite stories of 2014 to find out what happened after we turned off our recorders. We follow up on one of the boldest plans of the year: one man's plan to reform all of campaign finance. We see if the new website endings, or top level domains, like .ninja, .wed and .xyz have gained a foothold. Also, we learn the key to passing one of the hardest classes at community college.

CEO pay comes up a lot in the news. The stories often include someone complaining that it's too high. Then there's someone on the other side, defending CEO pay. But that's usually that's where the stories stop. On today's show: an actual story about CEO pay, with a beginning, middle, and an end. It's the story of two guys who tried to cut the pay of the CEO at a small pneumatic tool company on Long Island.

People have always worked. But the thing we think of today as a job — the thing you apply for instead of being born into, the thing you go to in the morning and leave at night — is actually a recent invention. The modern job can act as a buffer to protect workers from the daily ups and downs of businesses. But the job as we know it may be going away.  On today's show, we go in search of the very first modern job.  For more: http://n.pr/1x57BPj

On today's show, a story on a Christmasy theme: Handbells!  But also, a not-so-Christmasy theme: A decades-long feud between two big bell companies, located right down the road from each other.  But then, a Christmasy ending: Peace!  For more: http://n.pr/1wB07Uk

Last month, a bunch of Ukrainian business owners flew to New York to try to convince a bunch of New York portfolio managers and private equity funds to invest in Ukraine. There are lots of reasons that it is crazy to hold an "Invest in Ukraine" conference right now, while a war is going on. But "Invest in Ukraine" isn't just the title of the conference, it is in many ways what the whole year of crisis has been about.  Today on the show, the revolution in Ukraine was supposed to make the country a better place for Western investment, but it ended up sparking a war that is scaring that investment away.  For more: http://n.pr/1HcKXWl

Most businesses would close if their customers never showed up. An empty restaurant is a disaster. An empty store means bankruptcy. At a gym, emptiness equals success.  Today on the show, the mind games that gyms play with you. From design to pricing to free bagels, gyms want to be a product that everyone buys, but no one actually uses.  For more: http://n.pr/1sBAzkp