Planet Money

There's one part of Obamacare that doesn't get mentioned a lot, but that could end up being a big deal. It sets up experiments in hospitals all over the country to try to figure out how to save money without lowering the quality of care. On today's show, we visit a hospital in Akron, Ohio that's engaged in one of these experiments. We sit in on a tense conversation where doctors argue about why it's so hard to start surgery on time. And we hear what happens when you change the way hospitals and doctors get paid.

Today's show is the final installment of the Planet Money T-shirt project. In all, each shirt cost us about $12.42. We open up the books and explain how that breaks down —  how much went to cotton, how much went to the workers in Bangladesh, and how much went places we would never have imagined.

Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the used clothes they get. But a lot of the clothes get sold, packed in bales and sent across the ocean in a container ship. The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year — and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa. On today's show, we visit a giant used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya to see what happens to American clothes (including, presumably, some Planet Money T-shirts) after Americans are done with them.

On today's show, the Planet Money T-shirts arrive at the Port of Miami. But they're not quite here yet. If you've ever waited at an airport to clear customs, you can understand where our shirts are now: waiting for permission to enter the country. Standing between our shirts and the rest of America is a 3,000 page book. The book is a powerful force that creates and destroys entire industries around the world. Squadrons of government agents use tools of violence and destruction to ensure that the rules laid out in the book are followed. Also, the book tells us how much we'll have to pay in taxes to import our T-shirt into the U.S.

On today's show: the story of an often-overlooked innovation that's essential to the global economy. The innovation is a box. A big, metal box. The standard shipping container has completely transformed commerce in the past 50 years. It's part of the reason the Planet Money men's T-shirt comes from cotton grown in Mississippi, spun into yarn in Indonesia, and sewn together in Bangladesh. On today's show, we see the shipping container in action, and hear the story behind it. For much more, see the 'Boxes' chapter of our online T-shirt project.

The nation of Bangladesh was created out of chaos in the early 1970s, at a moment when millions in the country were dying from a combination of war and famine. The future looked exceedingly bleak. Abdul Majid Chowdhury and Noorul Quader were Bangladeshi businessmen who wanted to help their country. "We asked ourselves, 'What the hell do we want?' " Chowdhury recalls. The answer he and his friends arrived at: "We need employment. We need dollars." Their solution involved Richard Nixon, an obscure but hugely influential trade deal, and a cultural struggle over kimchi.

The Planet Money men's T-shirts were made in Bangladesh. The Planet Money women's T-shirts were made in Colombia. On today's show, we move from Bangladesh to Colombia — and we see an entirely different world. It's a world where workers make more money and work under better conditions than their counterparts in Bangladesh. But it's also a world that may not last. See all of our T-shirt stories so far.

Today's show is about love and betrayal. It's about the lives of two sisters who worked on the Planet Money T-shirt. And it's about the social upheaval that has followed the rise of the garment industry in Bangladesh. We'll have much more on Bangladesh and the rest of the T-shirt story in future shows. Here are our previous stories from the series.

After years of planning and months of production, the Planet Money T-shirts are here. They'll be in the mail soon. We promise. The shirts were touched by people in rich countries with advanced degrees and by people working for some of the lowest wages in the world. They traveled thousands of miles across three continents. Over the next several weeks, we'll tell the story of the shirts, and of the world behind them. Today, we begin at the beginning: where the cotton in our shirt came from.

Payday lenders made about $49 billion in high-interest loans last year. More than forty percent of those loans were made online. On today's show, we go looking for the people making these loans and find a bizarre online marketplace where people's personal financial information is bought and sold. Plus, we talk to state regulators about why it's so hard to police high interest lending happening online.

There's a charity called GiveDirectly that gives money to poor people in Kenya — no strings attached. When we did a story about GiveDirectly earlier this year, they told us we needed to check back in. It turned out, they were in the middle of a big study designed to figure out what happens when people get money for nothing. Do they invest it? Waste it? Something in between? Now, the results of the study are in. On today's show: What happens when you give farmers in Kenya more money than they've ever had? Also: giving money to thieves and drug addicts in a country that's much worse off than Kenya.

Note: This episode originally aired in May of 2013. Back in the nineties, Jim Logan started a company called Personal Audio. The concept was simple — people could pick out magazine articles they liked on the internet, and his company would send them a cassette tape of those articles being read out loud. The cassette tapes didn't catch on like Jim hoped, but he had bigger dreams for the idea behind them. He dreamed that one day you wouldn't need a cassette player, you would just be able to hear smart people talking about whatever subject you wanted, and that audio would be magically downloaded to a device of your choice. He says he dreamed of podcasting as we know it today. Now Jim Logan did not create the technology to podcast. He himself is not a modern-day podcaster. But he did get a patent on that big dream of downloading personalized audio, and he claims to have the patent on podcasting. On today's show, he says all the people out there podcasting today, owe him money.

On today's show, we talk to Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller, who shared this year's economics Nobel. Shiller is a famous explainer of bubbles; Fama is a famous bubble skeptic.

Lincolns used to be the coolest cars in the world. They used to be driven by kings, moguls and celebrities. Today, Lincolns are driven by the old, the out-of-touch, and the guys hustling you at the airport. On today's show: How Lincoln is trying to regain its former glory — and how the story of Lincoln may be the story of the U.S. auto industry, for better or for worse. Note: This episode was originally posted last year.

We recently became obsessed with a strange, select club:The top rated reviewers on Amazon. These are ordinary people — not Amazon employees — who write and record hundreds of astonishingly detailed reviews on Amazon. At this moment, Amazon's number 1 reviewer is Michael Erb (Amazon screen name, M. Erb). He's has reviewed more than 850 products, ranging from telescopes to facial wipes. On today's show, we talk to Erb and another top reviewer, and we try to figure out: Why do they spend so much time and effort reviewing stuff on Amazon?