Planet Money

Since the start of the financial crisis, the U.S. government has put $50 billion into General Motors. After GM emerged from bankruptcy this year, the public owned 61 percent of the stock of the newly reconstituted company. How much of that $50 billion will the American taxpayer get back? CEO Fritz Henderson says business at GM is getting better, which is at least a hopeful sign for repayment. But the situation at GM is so complicated, Henderson says, that he can't say yet how much money GM will be able to return to the public coffers. Longtime auto analyst John Casesa has crunched the numbers we have. He says GM would have to do everything right, in a strong economy, to pay back what it owes. Meanwhile, a Congressional Oversight Panel report says the public will get back less than half the money it used to bail out GM and Chrysler.

This month, Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel prize for economics. Ostrom explains her groundbreaking research into the public management of natural resources. The political scientist argues that people should be empowered to organize themselves in small ways that scale up to a global network. Government can be helpful in doing that, but people shouldn't rely on it alone.

Human beings aren't the only creatures who make economic decisions. It turns out that monkeys do it, too. Scientists have observed our primate kin exchanging goods and services and adjusting prices. Ronald Noe, a professor of primate ethnology at the University of Strasbourg, says the vervet monkey of southern and eastern Africa uses grooming as a kind of currency. Vervets determine the value of food providers and divide their attention according to the law of supply and demand.

Gregory Schiedler works for a foreign oil company in Angola's capital Luanda. He lives in a gated community, gets driven to work everyday and is responsible for spending one billion dollars in the next year. Gregory has very little interaction with Angolans except for one, the teenager who sells him chewing gum. Minguito works on the streets of Angola selling cigarettes, shoe shines and gum to foreigners like Gregory and anyone else who wants to buy them. He's tired of working on the street and running from the police, but he says he feels like he has no choice. Retired U.S. diplomat Herman Cohen explains why billions of dollars of oil money flowing into Angola have done little to help the people who live there.

On today's Planet Money: We give a sneak preview of our upcoming This American Life special on health insurance. How much would you pay to protect someone or something you love? Kristin Zorbini Bongard and her husband love their pet hedgehog, Harriet, so much that they spend about $80 a year on health insurance for her. Even with the coverage, they shelled out $1,911.20 for the hedgehog's cancer treatment. Economist Tim Harford, the Financial Times' Undercover Economist, who admits to not being a pet person, says the problem with pet insurance is not that it's for pets. It's that it causes waste, because you're spending someone else's money.

On today's Planet Money: You've got economic riddles, and economists have answers. First up, Emily Oster of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business tackles the question about minimum wage. Why is that cities that have raised their minimum wages so often have lower rates of joblessness and healthier economies? Second, Robert Frank of Cornell wrestles with the question of why software companies set such widely varying prices for essentially the same software.

On today's Planet Money: Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group and professor Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore take us on a brief world tour. Mahbubani, author of the New Asian Hemisphere, argues that the most of the world is preparing for China's coming global dominance. It's a psychological adjustment that Americans aren't yet ready to make. Bremmer, author of The Fat Tail, says that if the Chinese economy remains state-controlled, American businesses won't get a level playing field. But Americans shouldn't necessarily fear the rise of China, because the U.S. and China will continue to need each other for many years to come.

Human beings have always loved their children, but at certain times in history they really needed them, for economic reasons. Mick Watson, chair of the psychology department at Brandeis University, explains how economics have impacted parenting styles from our early days as hunter-gatherers to today's modern industrial society.

You've seen those crazy-looking medical bills, the ones with row after row of prices and treatment codes. How about one that says the service cost $1,200, except your insurer paid $400 and you the patient owe nothing? Where did that other money go? Doctor bills are complicated enough to make you go looking for a Harvard health care economist. Which is just what we did. Today, professor Joseph Newhouse fields your questions.

During the Great Depression, people began ditching capitalism for alternative ideologies like communism or socialism. That hasn't happened during the Great Recession, despite people saying that capitalism's flaws are on full display. Socialist parties have been losing ground across Europe. In Germany, for example, the Socialist Democratic Party just made its poorest showing in elections since World War II. Eurasia Group's David Gordon says the political right is doing well in Europe these days because it has co-opted issues that traditionally belonged to the left. Where the left remains popular, as it does in Latin America, successful politicians have moved to the right. Meanwhile, he argues, the left lacks a compelling narrative about what caused the economic crisis.

The U.S. Senate Finance Committee twice voted down a measure to have the government offer a health insurance plan — the so-called public option. In countries like England and Canada, the public option is a fact of life. Taxpayers put money into the system and everyone automatically gets health insurance from the government, in what's known as a single-payer system. Should the government run our health insurance? Donna Smith of the California Nurses Association says it should. Smith, whose personal insurance nightmare figures in the Michael Moore documentary Sicko, says a single-payer system would get care to more people and save money. Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation says government shouldn't become everyone's insurance company. Butler, who's from the U.K., says single-payer care is no cure-all.

Health care cooperatives are insurance companies owned by ordinary patients who buy in. The Senate Finance Committee is working on a $6 billion measure, pushed by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), that would set up health care cooperatives across the nation. The idea is to have cooperatives take the place of the public option, in which the government would set up an insurance plan to compete with ones from private companies. A health coop that saves you money may be something of a unicorn, says reporter Keith Seinfeld of Seattle's KPLU. Seinfeld belongs to a health care cooperative already, one of only two in the country. He says he doesn't see his own Group Health Cooperative as being better than other providers at controlling costs. What's more, the input from its 600,000 members may not amount to much when only 3,000 of them choose to vote. With an expert opinion from Tim Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee, who says health coops are expensive to start and run. Their main benefit: They make people happier.

On today's Planet Money: Rich nations and developing ones in the G20 got together in Pittsburgh this week to discuss the fate of the world. Also, how to fix it. Among the key issues was how to give emerging markets a meaningful seat at the table. For starters, the G20 will now replace the G8, which includes only leading nations. David Gordon, head of research at Eurasia Group, says that's a start, a small one. Meanwhile, NPR's Scott Horsley ventured out past the protesters in search of an alternative G20 scene.

We revisit the show that fathered our podcast — The Giant Pool of Money. In that show, Adam and Alex set out to explain a simple question: "Why would the financial services industry rush to make lots of loans to people who couldn't pay them back?" They traced the mortgage chain from the people who took out the loans to those who re-packaged them and sold them off. That show aired in May of 2008 several months before we knew the extent giant financial collapse we were headed for. Today we visit two of the people featured in that piece. Richard, a Marine who was facing foreclosure, and Jim Finkel, a CDO manager, to see they've fared in the downturn.

Meet Jacob Hacker, the father of the "public option." Hacker, a Yale political science professor, introduced the notion of the federal government offering a health insurance plan that would compete with ones from private companies. President Obama calls the public option a means of pressuring private insurers to keep policies affordable, while critics say it would put them at an unfair disadvantage. Now Hacker takes a turn defending his big idea, saying that a public plan would cost less to run and be able to bargain for better prices.