The continent nobody owns & everyone benefits from (Summer School)

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“of the most important midterm storylines that you need to follow.”

Find the Empire Politics Podcast on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from MPR. [Music] Welcome back everyone to Planet Money's Summer School World Tour. Today is Graduation Day.

We have drilled for oil and Norway, smuggled products into North Korea, traveled the bridges to nowhere in China, and bargained for water rights in Australia.

We've met a paint entrepreneur in Nigeria, shoes salesmen in Argentina,

and an inflation tamer in New Zealand. And all the while we've been gathering up lessons and economics that we can put to use back here, back home. As part of today's graduation celebration, we will hear from your fellow members of the Summer School Class of 2026.

Listeners like you have written in from around the globe with their provocative ideas that could just make life a little better for all of us if we have the will to do it. We'll feature the very best ideas near the end of the show, and then all that's left is for you to take a short online test

and receive your totally real but not legal diploma. The test is at mpr.org/Summer School. Before we play the pop and give our speeches and all, I do have a confession to make. When we started Summer School, I came up with what I thought was a pretty clever tagline.

Seven continents, eight weeks, one thousand ideas.

“I think we've delivered on the eight weeks part and all the ideas,”

but we are missing a continent. We've gone all summer and we have not talked about Antarctica.

The problem I discovered is that planet money has never been to Antarctica,

and I wasn't even sure there were economic ideas to talk about there. Can young penguins not afford to buy their own nests? Is the exchange rate of ice to snow out of whack? But after working all summer to find something, we discovered that there are some profound rules of economics at work

on the continent waiting for us down on the ice, down on the glaciers. We even discovered an economist who did something remarkable. She figured out exactly what Antarctica was worth. She put a price tag on the whole continent, and she joins us as our professor today.

Hi, I'm Natalie Sturkle. I'm a professor of economics at the University of Tasmania. So you live off the southern coast of Australia. Are you the closest economist to Antarctica? I could be. There might be some down on the bottom of South America. So it could be, and that they could well be something, yes.

“So have you actually been there? Have you stepped on the ice?”

I have not stepped on the ice yet. They have all these scientists there. They need economists on the ground. Well, this is what I think we need to tell the world. Yes, I would agree. So what does an economist do when studying Antarctica? It doesn't have money. It has no private ownership.

It seems like the one place where economics doesn't exist. Tell me I'm wrong. I'll absolutely wrong. It means there's no markets that exist. But economics is about far more than markets. And it's trying to use insights from that to think about resources around the world.

And I think Antarctica may not have many markets, but the goods and services that it supplies to the rest of the world are massive. Really hugely important to the entire world economy. You, in fact, put a price on what Antarctica is worth to the planet. And we will get to that in just a moment.

But before we do, I want to go back and just talk about this concept of Antarctica. Who owns it? I suppose philosophically, you could say that the entire world owns it. In terms of it, it's a resource for all. Countries around the world have agreed not to have a massive land grab.

And to actually collectively look at how they can manage various operations that are being undertaken down there. So it's a collaborative form of governance through the Antarctic Treaty System. I look this up. It is my understanding that the treaty says that Antarctica is reserved for peaceful purposes and scientific research. 46 countries have signed it.

It's officially shared territory, no military bases or mining companies. But how exactly is this enforced? What would happen if a rogue country and some countries do have old claims on the territory?

Can anyone stop them?

“A system that relies very much on trust.”

It relies on that willingness to collaborate.

It relies on having respect for the other partners who are in there. And it does rely on having some sort of sanction so that if someone does misbehive, you can actually slap them on the wrists. And I think in any collaborative system there needs to be a way of making sure that the people who are playing the game are actually doing the right thing by everyone. I'm sort of amazed.

It feels like something out of the 1950s when this treaty was signed. You're talking about trust and cooperation and gentle nudges. It doesn't seem like there's many places anymore in the world. And maybe this is my view from the United States where those things still exist. There's enough trust to manage something that is immensely valuable.

The world is going through, I think, somewhat sad and depressing, trained where the trust is breaking down.

And I think we just need to work harder to say,

No, it's some trusted valuable. It's really important.

“And that's what keeps our world to be a wonderful place to live in.”

We will return with our professor in a moment. And we will visit this strange world of trust and cooperation. We'll take you inside McMurdo Station. The largest human settlement in scientific base on Antarctica. We had a listener right in who actually worked there in commerce for money.

Perhaps the only business person on the ice will also have our professor returned and give us a tally of the economic impact of the seventh continent. It's a lot after the break. History is intriguing, but unlike the present, it can feel far off. On NPR's through line, we bring it back to life.

And put you in the middle of it. Go inside the stories from then that shape the world we live in now. Find NPR's through line wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so you're driving to work or you're on a walk or you're at the gym or whatever. And you just need to clear your head.

That's the perfect time to hit the play button on NPR's all songs considered. It's not the news, it's not work or whatever else is weighing you down. It's just a good time with good friends and great tunes. Listen to all songs considered every Tuesday in the NPR music podcast. Okay, class, you have been issued a parka, boots, face covering,

and protective goggles. Do not forget to sign the waiver forms because we are going to the South Pole.

As I mentioned, planet money has never been there,

“but I did remember that back in the 1970s NPR Center reporter”

to Antarctica, and it was a really big deal at the time. NPR was just starting out as a national broadcaster in the 1970s. The theme song for our news program, you're going to love this, had this Synthi vibe. So 70s, they should bring it back.

NPR did not have a lot of money or access at the time, but science reporter, Ira Flado, managed to score an invite to visit the South Pole. There's this famous photo of him standing on the ice, holding a microphone out to a bunch of penguins. I think it's one of the things that inspired me to become a radio reporter.

Let's hear a little bit of Ira talking to NPR host Barbara Hockter Lynch after he returned from the South Pole. This is just a little taste of what the Antarctic Treaty is trying to protect. We saw the penguins sitting on the edge of an ice flow. We're the ocean meets the ice, and we came up to them.

And as they approached us, they greeted us with the sound of a ferrying. That's right, speak for me. Mr. Penguins, speak for me. That's another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin.

My goodness, reporter's a little bit of an eagle. On the way from a meeting to penguins, we ran into another very strange sound. Now, this sound here. Isn't that sound like something from outer space?

It sounds like synthesized music. Yes, electronic almost. Well, these are underwater sounds made by wettle seals. These are 1,000 pound seals that swim under the ice. And they come up above the ground onto the ice.

Above the ice, I should say. And then they have their puppies there. And they bask in the sun and rest and sleep. Oh, why?

And they don't know what they mean.

But they're communicating with one another. They think so. They think they may be ranging like whales and portbuses doing, or sending out, listen to that. It's sending out so-and-art type of sounds,

but they cannot prove it. It sounds like a symphony almost like they're in harmony with one another. So let me just break in here. Robert Smith here. That is the natural side of Antarctica.

“That's what the treaty is there to protect.”

But there's also the man-made part of the continent. McMurdo Station. That is the US-operated base for scientific research. And it's also essentially a small company town of 2000 people who come and go throughout the year. And where you have workers, that means that business and economics come into play.

Let's play a little bit of Irish tour of McMurdo Station and the sound of life there in 1979. And we'll give you an update afterwards. McMurdo itself is unlike the rest of the continent. McMurdo is the New York City of Antarctica.

Noisy or dirtier and more developed than any other base. A diesel-powered electric generator drones on, incessantly. Diesel fuel trickles across the frozen soil. Eips, cables, and telephone poles are all reminders that Americans have brought not only their science,

but their society with them to this remote location. Here are movie houses, mess halls of post office, general store, infirmary, and four drinking clubs. But regardless of how the Americans try to make it feel like home,

there is always one reminder of exactly where you are.

It is this. A huge door, actually a freezer door, made for a supermarket meat locker, but affixed to every building. A door with a huge round knob, or long pull handles. Only this one is designed to keep the cold out, not in.

Sometimes not only the door, but the entire meat locker is here. Like the ones on the ice runway. A few meat lockers are strung together, and into them are stuff that cuts, furniture, clothing, and people. The Navy personnel that manicure the runway and service the planes.

For other service men, small canvas covered quantit cuts, the James Ways, service their sleeping quarters. Another incessant sound in McMurda was the roar of helicopter engines. McMurda serves as the jumping off point for hundreds of scientists who use helicopters, planes, snowmobiles, and sleds

to take their research field parties to other parts of the continent. One of those places, the most coveted for both scientists and sightseers, is the South Pole.

Tomorrow, we take a trip to the Pole.

A place where very few people have ever been. That was NPR's "Iraflato" in 1979. As much as I would love to play all of his reports from the South Pole, we are going to stay at McMurda station for a few more minutes. 45 years later, the place still has a frontier in industrial townfield,

but they have much stricter environmental regulations about spilling fuel and recycling waste. I also hear the dormitories are much nicer than cuts at this point, and they are heated.

“And you may remember that I have mentioned a store at McMurda,”

which got our attention here at Planet Money. We had a number of listeners writing, recommending people we could talk to about this, and found one that actually worked at the Navy's store down there for a few years in the 1980s.

Perhaps the sole businesswoman in the entire place. My name is Liz Walters. I was the dispersing officer and the ship store officer. So I didn't know this, but there's a whole part of the Navy that runs general stores

on all the big ships around the world, and they operated one out of McMurda station. People who need to get paid, and people need to be able to buy snacks and ball caps and stuff. I mean, everyone needs stuff.

Liz ran the Antarctic store, which means she ordered the merchandise, which could take six months to arrive. She organized the tiny, tiny space. She set prices.

There were a couple weird things about running a store in such a remote place. One was that your customers already have everything they need for free. If you're a scientist there, the food is included, the lodging is included,

the equipment and clothing are included.

“So what would people want to even buy in a store like this?”

Liz discovered, when she got there, that Antarctic shopping isn't a necessity. It's something you do when you are bored. Economics is all about scarcity and the scarcity resource in Antarctica is entertainment.

It was an event. It was a way of killing time. In a place where people are working six days a week, and they get one day a week off, and they have evenings,

and they still need to kill time, because there is nothing to do. So the people would come to the ship store, and they would stand there in front of the door, waiting there for someone to leave,

so one more person could go in, and then they would come into the store, and it was like, not quite a scavenger hunt,

what's new?

“What's new in the store that I can look at?”

Liz had to figure out how she could

amp up this sense of fun, the sense of entertainment. One thing she did when she arrived was to clear out all the merchandise that wasn't selling. They had stocked towels, for instance,

and towels were included in other parts of the station, so no one needed more towels. She also found some pretty suspect 1980's novelty items. We had bikini panties,

women's bikini panties, with a logo on the crotch that said, the coldest place on her. Can you imagine anyone buying that as a Christmas present for their wife?

I mean, less than 10% of the people on the ice were women. Liz ditched the panties,

and started to commission new logos,

something surprising that she could put on hats and t-shirts. People wanted entertainment and novelty and appropriate presence for the wife, and she had them made from scratch. And then, sure to she was,

Liz didn't just let people see all her new merchandise at once. Remember, this is a show. So, when I had new stuff, I wouldn't immediately bring in

every new thing that came in. I would bring it one thing and then I would let them search for it. I would just dribble it out as slowly as possible, so that during the long weeks,

especially a Christmas time, we could go like three weeks without an airplane.

So, I tried to put something new in the store every week,

some new item, so that people could have a big discover moment, and then what I would do is I would rearrange the store. I would just move things around, especially the things that people would see

while they were waiting to come into the store. That was kind of my featured things. So, the things that I thought should probably sell better than they were. That's where I would put them,

so that people would have to stare at them while they were waiting to come into the store. Liz Walters spent a few seasons on the ice, as they say, working in the Navy store at McMurdo Station.

It would not surprise you that after a Navy Stint was finished, she went into business for herself. I feel like we're putting the Antarctic puzzle together here. We have our penguins and seals making their strange sounds.

We have a tiny amount of buying and selling going on and novelty gifts.

“Can this be the sum economic total for an entire continent?”

Our professor that we talked to at the beginning of the show says no. No, there is something so big. So valuable there that it is hard to even see it, unless you really zoom out,

but it totals up to billions of dollars in value. Let's bring Natalie Stokele back in here. Hey, Natalie. Thanks so much for having me. I read a paper that you published a couple of years ago

that crunched the numbers on the economic value of Antarctica and the ocean around it, the Southern Ocean. The economic value of Antarctica to the entire world. Before we get to that number, why put a dollar figure on something like this?

It makes me a little sad that we have to put a number on what this beautiful place is worth. Yeah, look, my heart bleeds a little of your time. I'd put a value on things also. But I agonize over this.

“And I think one of the reasons I put values on things”

is because I realize that so many of the world's core decision makers don't actually notice anything unless there's a price attached. Now, some of this is because people don't care. But I think also some of it is that the CEOs of corporations are hired to make sure that they focus on profit.

A lot of politicians are elected to try to make sure that they grow GDP. So if something doesn't have a price attached to it, it's effectively invisible. Markets don't see it. And they just end up trashing it.

So I suppose it's saying, look, I know a lot of people know that nature is deeply important. They recognize it. But unless we make the invisible visible, it will get hammered. Well, let's break down how you put a value on an entire continent.

We'll start with the most obvious one, which is tourism. I see people on Instagram who are on ships off the coast of Antarctica. So it definitely happens that used to be in the thousands and now probably more than 100,000 people. Is that right? Indeed, it's 100,000 and rising.

It's growing in popularity, like most tourism destinations. You get the early explorers and over time, you get more and more people coming. I am Googling this so that I can go there someday. It seems like you mostly stay on a cruise ship and you look at Antarctica. Maybe some day trips to the shore to see the penguins and take selfies.

I think they tightly control access to the interior and the station. Even this just glimpsing of Antarctica is big business.

In your research paper, you see the value of the tourism industry is worth around $820 million.

Yes, it was pretty close to that.

“And it doesn't mean that that's how much people spend, but that's a best estimate of the value”

that people get from it over and above what's actually the cost of the resources used up to provide the tourism. Okay, so that one makes sense. Another one that we're used to thinking about is fisheries. There are tons of fish caught in the region and you estimated that value to $370 million US dollars a year. So along with tourism and fish were over a billion dollars.

Yes. Okay, so this is when it gets a little more interesting. Because you posit that Antarctica isn't just a place with things that Antarctica is actually providing a service to the world. And like any service you can put a price on that. What is Antarctica ever done for me?

What is that? That's a lovely way of actually phrasing it. I think Antarctica provides these services that are all but invisible to most people throughout the world.

“If only 100,000 people have ever visited the continent each year, then clearly most people don't see it.”

But for a start it's got this massive ice cap. And that ice is bright white reflects the sun and that helps to keep the planet cool. It also has these oceans which absorb massive amounts of carbon dioxide. And again, that helps to keep the oceans cool. So if in fact Antarctica did not exist and we lost all those sort of regulating services, the climate regulating services,

you could imagine that the climate would be much more unstable. They could potentially be much less agriculture. They could be many more extreme events. They'd be sea level rise. And the damages that could arise if we didn't have those regulating services are massive. It's interesting. I will pay money for someone to store my crap in a storage unit.

And essentially, Antarctica is a storage unit for a lot of water in the form of ice. And by storing that water for me and everyone else in the planet, that means that water isn't lapping up to my apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Where I am, only a couple miles from the ocean. That's a great way of explaining it.

And it is interesting that we will store things when the next to us, when we're close to them, when we see them, we'll pay money to be able to clean that up and get the crap out of the apartment and into a storage unit instead. But it's almost like Antarctica becomes an out of sight out of mind. So we have found value in tourism, fish, and this environmental service that it provides to all of us.

And to be clear, the way Antarctica produces this economic benefit is by staying the way it is, by not mining it or developing it, by remaining natural.

“If we total all that we have talked about today about the value of Antarctica, what is the continent worth?”

Well, we collectively estimated at about 180 billion.

A hundred and a million less dollars. Per annum, yes. Oh, every year. Yes. Who do we send the check to?

Wouldn't that be nice if we could actually put a trust in place? Obviously, I was listening to your podcast earlier in the head. The trust that was put in place for the oil in Norway. And if we could have a trust for Antarctica and somehow use that to protect Antarctica, the southern oceans and the other places, that would just be wonderful.

And then maybe we could look after the place that's doing such a good job of looking after us. Oh, by the way, I think we need to make sure that President Trump doesn't find out that Antarctica is six times larger than Greenland.

And this worth $180 billion.

We got to keep it, keep it, keep it. We'll keep it quiet. Natalie Stokell is a professor of economics at the University of Tasmania. Thanks for calling us from down under. Thanks very much for having me.

It's been fun. As for the rest of you, coming up, we have the moment you have been waiting for all summer. Graduation. Complete with a final exam, a diploma and student speakers, sharing their insightful tips from around the world.

I'm going to put on my Planet Money Green, PhD Rob, and join you all back on the lawn, a Planet Money University after the break. Hi there, I'm Brittany Loose, and not to brag, but I host a really fabulous podcast. It's called "It's been a Minute."

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“Graduates, professors from around the world,”

kids listening in the back seats of your parents' Subaru. Welcome to the Planet Money Commencement ceremony for the degree of master in international economics. We've listened to the degree alone in our headphones, but hopefully we can come together today

in celebration of what we have all achieved.

You may not recognize your fellow students at first,

but when you are laying on the beach somewhere and the person next to you starts to talk about the vulnerabilities of small open economies like the islands of the Caribbean, you will know that you have found a fellow member of the class of 2026. We have no grades, so our graduation speakers

were chosen from the people who wrote into the show. Every week we've asked you to tell us something clever from a country-oriented or a visitor that we could maybe steal and bring back to the US, and so many of you responded.

We picked our favorites, and they will be this year's graduation, salutatorian, valedictorian, econotorian, whatever else they call it. First up, a listener from Japan,

with a clever lesson in the private use of public spaces. My name is Lang Craig Hill. I'm based in Tokyo, Japan, although I'm currently up in the mountains. What is that I hear behind you, eh?

Yeah, yeah, those are the cicadas. cicadas, okay, so you really are in the mountains. Yeah, you're hearing the sound of the summer and Japan.

I called up Lang because he wrote in with an amazing fact.

For the most part, there is no street parking in Tokyo. I live in New York City, so it is a constant battle to try to find a spot on the curb to park a two-ton piece of metal, especially for free. But in the narrow streets of Tokyo, they've mostly banned it.

There's no one street parking. No one street parking. There's no place to park my car in front of my place. No. So most of the streets you seem to be saying in Tokyo,

are for driving. If there is a street, there is somebody driving on it. There's no room to put a car. There's no room to put a car. If we need a delivery vehicle comes to my house,

they have to run up to the door and get back. If a car comes up behind them. Now, there are a lot of old cities with narrow medieval streets where parking is almost impossible. Although if you've been to Europe, they will try to park anywhere they can.

In Tokyo, the amazing economic part of this is not just the lack of parking, but how the government deals with people who want to buy a car.

“When you buy a car, you have to go down to the local police station”

and show a form that says you have an off-tree parking space that you either own or that you are paying for to keep that car. You have to prove that you have the parking space before you can get the car. Yes. This is genius!

So that means that you always have a place to keep your car.

Do people hate this in Tokyo? This seems like a lot of bureaucracy and that you can't park your car in front of your house. No, it's just part of the environment, part of the terrain. Also, nobody expects to get around by car

because the public transportation system is very good. We've talked a lot in summer school about the concept of externality, which is some free things, have an actual cost. And the parking on your street may seem free, but it is not, in fact, free.

Everyone pays for it. What you're saying is in Japan, the people who pay for their parking are the people with the cars. Yeah, exactly. Lane Craig Hill, in the cicada-filled mountains of Japan.

Hopefully you're not up for reelection.

“Our next graduation speaker and provocative idea”

comes from Vienna, Austria. Lots of cities around the world have tried to tackle affordable housing. Even here in New York, we have public housing for the poorest families and rent control for the lucky. But I will tell you this has not kept the rents down

for the rest of us, New Yorkers. Our next graduation speaker, want to just suggest the way that Vienna handles this problem. So hi, I'm Heidi. I'm 24, I'm an architecture student.

Heidi has studied what is called social housing in Vienna. It's like public housing for vast swaths of the middle class. It's estimated that around half of the people in Vienna live in either government-supported housing or non-profit cooperatives or a covered under rent control, including Heidi herself.

I moved into an apartment on my own for the first time

back in October, 2025.

“The key to Vienna system is that the government builds a lot of housing.”

It takes land from things like the old city airport and unused train stations and builds large and very nice apartment complexes. As a student, Heidi was able to browse a website with hundreds of options. Tell the city how much she was making in income and choose an apartment with a reasonable rent.

The only catch was she had to choose from the list without seeing the place. So she did something clever. Before she picked, she did a little snooping. I would go to these buildings. I would just randomly knock or try to get in.

And I'm like, hi, I'm an architecture student doing a survey on social housing. Can you tell me what it is like to live here? Do you like living here? Do you like neighborhood? What is it like? She made her choice. And when she was offered that apartment, she got to say yes or no.

There's no second chance you go in.

You're like, yes, I want to take the apartment. You sign a paper and then you wait for them to change the locks. It turned out great. Cute place, cheaper rent than the private apartment she was paying. But not by that much because non-profit housing is so common in Vienna.

That pool of real estate competes with private apartments and keeps the rate of the private places in check. One study showed that if you have a 10% increase in non-profit housing, rents in the four-profit buildings, go down 5%. The biggest controversy about the system is even though there are income limits to get in the apartment, you can keep staying there even if your income goes up.

You're a student and you're working part-time in a cafe as a barista or something, but you're going to medical school and you become a well-earning doctor. You still keep living in your social housing apartment. With all the other workers and academics and people like that. There has been some critique of this because people who are valid earning politicians

or CEOs of big companies paying 200 euros a month for their first district central apartment,

which they took over in the 80s kind of fierce unfair for some people, but I think in general this is a very well done system. Congratulations to some of the school students in Vienna. It seems to illustrate the economic instinct that if you build more housing, the prices can remain steady and even perhaps become more affordable.

Our final graduation speaker today has an interesting twist on a finance system used around the world. I'm Alex Morfutany. I'm a finance executive and I live in São Paulo, Brazil.

“And in his country, if you want to make a big purchase,”

you can of course get alone, but the interest rates are high, so people have come up with another way. So one interesting feature that we have here in Brazil is the Consorcio. Consorcio, is that how you said? Exactly.

And what is the literal translation of that word? I guess it's kind of like a consortium, right? It gives you that impression of something that you're putting together a group to do something as that group. A consortio is what is known as a group self-financing system.

They're versions of this around the world called all sorts of different things, broskas, susus, cheat funds, and they work similarly. Let's say you want to buy a car and your friend wants a down payment on a house and another wants to remodel their kitchen. You all agree to pay into a group fund.

And then maybe the first month, you get to take the money out for the car. You keep paying into this fund. And the next month your friend gets the kitchen remodel with his fancy stove. The interesting thing about Brazil's version of this system is in that country, it doesn't have to be informal.

Banks themselves offer this service. The banks will essentially organize these groups. And they kind of put their institutional name and reputation behind these groups. So that when people pool their money, it isn't just sitting in a coffee can somewhere. It's in an actual bank account with some measure of accounting for it.

The central bank has put rules about how this can work. And the bank obviously don't do this for free, so they charge a fee to manage the group.

“So if you're in Brazil and you go into one of these consortios, do you sign a contract?”

Are these people necessarily your friends that you're sharing money with? Or can it be with total strangers? You sign a contract and that's one of the things you're locked in. And so you actually have to keep paying the consortium until the end of that group until you pay. So if we're talking about, let's say, you know, a 36 month consortium.

Even if you get your good or your item in the first month, you have to continue paying,

obviously until the last month and you're obligated and that's part of the contract that you sign. So if you sometimes have to wait to get your big chunk of money, why is it popular? Alex says a traditional loan in Brazil could have an annual interest rate of say 25%. But these consortios charge a one time administrative fee that can range from 10 to 20%. It's not compound interest, so it ends up being much less expensive.

It can also be indexed for inflation. And so even though you got your house already, you may be paying inflation for somebody else's future house. I wonder if there is something about this that makes it emotionally better than just borrowing money from a bank. Is there some sort of feeling that you're in it together?

Are you more likely to pay this because you know that there's somebody like you who's also paying?

“I think maybe what I would venture is there is the lottery aspect, right?”

Because if we form the group with 50 other people, right? Somebody is going to get there later in month one. Sorry, I forgot to mention that you get a letter of credit from the bank when it's your turn, not cash. Somebody is going to get there later in month one. Somebody is going to get there later in month 50, right? How do you decide by doing a random drawing of names?

And if you're lucky enough to be the number one or two or three, you're going to feel really good. If you're number 48, 49, 50, you're going to feel lousy. And I think we all like to think we're lucky, especially if we like drawings, right? And so I think there is that luck aspect or award aspect that I think helps and people say, you know what? I'm feeling lucky, I think I'm going to be awarded the letter very soon.

So this is much better than saving because then I would have to wait until the end. Or, you know, my end is going to be much cheaper than getting a little. That is a very smart analysis.

Because if you pay $100 the first month, $100 the second month, and then you get your $10,000 check to buy the thing you want,

that is going to feel like you have won the lottery. Yeah, I think like anything, right? You know, there is a contract, there are obligations.

“You have to know exactly what you're getting into.”

But there are millions of people participating in consortium in Brazil. I think this is a product that has found an audience that has found a customer base. Alex Malfatani, summer school graduate, lives in São Paulo, Brazil. And this idea from Brazil, the consortios, seems totally doable in the United States. If you can split a burrito lunch over four easy payments, I think banks can make this happen.

It builds community, saves you money, and it feels like a lottery. What could be better? JP Morgan Chase, this is your moment. Thanks everyone who wrote in. I will say that many of your suggestions were intriguing enough. They may spark future episodes of planet money. Stay tuned. And stay with us after the break for the granting of diplomas and the links to the final exam.

I think all graduation ceremonies need an omissions. Billionaire Mark Cuban has stared into the belly of the beast of America's healthcare system. I mean, it's so bad you can go through a long list of really quality hospitals, and they don't know their costs. So, can Medicare for all be a solution? We take a hard look at the cost of the program along with US healthcare itself.

Find this and hear more stories from the indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app. I just want to say a few words to the graduates in the audience today. You sit here in a world that gets more international by the day. A world where there are trade barriers, sure, but there are no tariffs of the mind. I'm not even sure what that means, but let the man cook.

I know you signed up for this totally free and fake university for the imaginary travel and fascinating stories, but we hope you learned a little something along the way.

It's industrial knowledge and factory investment.

You know your oil curse from your Dutch disease. They're the same thing. You can throw out the term multiple equilibria at dinner parties. It means multiple things that can reasonably happen. But these are just vocabulary words that will help you on your final exam. What we really hope you got from the season, what I got anyway, is the sense that there are lots of different ways to create prosperity and happiness.

There are multiple equilibria, if you will. The principles of economics are the same from Oslo to McMurdo Station. We're all humans who make trade offs every day and follow incentives. But every country has a different way of using those principles to hopefully create the most good for the most number of people. We've had a few cautionary tales along the way from the repressive government of North Korea to the currency misadventures of Argentina.

But mostly we live in a world where people do get richer, where there is less poverty and more technological marvels.

The secret to international economics is an open mind and the feeling that things can get better if we just learn the right lessons. I want to bring back our Antarctica professor for a moment, Natalie Stokele, any final words for the graduating class. They're worthy of the honor I would say. What a fabulous course it's been.

“I think probably one of the most interesting courses and international economics I've heard of before and it's been such fun to be part of it.”

Huge congratulations to the students and I think and hope that they've enjoyed it as much as I have. Excellent. Thank you so much. That was really nice. We're going to put that on the label. Very happy for you today, sir.

I will now read off every listener's name.

From Erin, Erin Sin, to Zoe Zowinsky. After I turn off the microphone, of course. And present you with a hand shake and an empty folder. The actual diploma to put inside the folder will take one more step. The final exam.

It is at npr.org/summerschool8 challenging questions to see if you have the right stuff to be an international economist. If, sorry, when you pass, you will get an electronic diploma suitable for printing and framing. That's at npr.org/summerschool. Plus, there's a link in the show notes. Again npr.org/summerschool.

“If this is your first fake degree, may I suggest the six other seasons of summer school?”

We have courses in micro and macro economics, a short season on investing. In one course, we do the entire economic history of the world. And in another, you can get your planet money MBA. That should keep you occupied until next summer season. They're all collected by the way in their own podcast feed, where you can listen for 32 hours or more.

No double speed allowed. And of course, I wouldn't be a professor unless I mentioned that the textbook for the course is available now. It's called Planet Money, a guide to the economic forces that shape your life. Now that you can take a well-earned summer vacation, check out page 254 on the economics of leisure.

Or is it the economics of leisure? We're going to ask our fact checker. Summer school is produced by Sophia police a car and Skyler Swenson. It's edited by Alex Goldmark and fact checked by Charlotte Isadora. This show is engineered by Onley Huang.

I'm Robert Smith. Until next time, you can find me on my new podcast called Business History, a show about the history of business. This is npr. You may throw your caps in the air. Thanks for listening.

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“Tonya, I think you did the best interview that I've done seriously.”

Oh, that's a great question. I'm thinking I want to think about that question for the rest of my life. Oh, good question. This is Tonya Mosley, co-host a fresh air. And the questions are only the half of it.

Listen to fresh air on the npr app or wherever you get your podcasts. [Music] You've got a lot of ways to get news and a lot of podcasts in your feed that take a long time to get to the point. Here and now anytime gets to the heart of the day's big story all in about 20 minutes every afternoon. Get smarter and expand your world fast.

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