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Episode 827: Three Indicators

Darius Rafieyan

Stacey Vanek Smith and Cardiff Garcia host the Planet Money spin-off, The Indicator. Each day, they take a number or term in the news, and tell you what it means and why it matters.

Today on Planet Money, we are bringing you three indicators, three numbers that tell us something about the world. We'll tell you what the US really sells to the world, how the conservative tax plan is maybe just what a liberal economist had always hoped for, and how craft beer blew up the hops business.

A note on sourcing: For more about the details of goods exports, we recommend the Atlas of Economic Complexity from Harvard. We also used the latest monthly release of the US international trade in goods and services report from the census bureau and the bureau of economic analysis. The figure for education exports was from Open Doors, a resource funded by the Department of State. And finally, we learned about the great hops bust from this story in The Financial Times.

Music: "Starting Out" and "Take it Back."

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Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
Cardiff Garcia is a co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money podcast, along with Stacey Vanek Smith. He joined NPR in November 2017.