This is Planet Money from NPR. You know, if you're going to hit seven continents in eight weeks, eventually, eventually, you are going to hit a flight delay. So folks, on the flight deck, we have about, uh, between about 13 and 15 aircraft that have a best for takeoff. Thanks to your patience. Appreciate it. Thank you. I guess we're going to have to start the show from the plane. Welcome back, everyone, to Planet Money Summer School World Tour, if we can ever get this thing off the ground. The only international economics degree where the textbook is written in sand, beautiful white beach sand, because this week we are headed to Jamaica and a couple of other islands nearby. We have been saving this episode because we want our semester abroad to at least sound like we're working hard. Now at this point in the series, we can relax, lie in the sun, and let the economics wash over us because, and I am contractually obligated to say this, you can learn a lot about how economies function by looking at the tiniest nations. Small changes there can have huge effects, both good and bad, and we can take those lessons and a few shells back with us to the mainland. Today's lessons will feature two fascinating stories from the islands, a case study about a group of people who challenge the very foundation of economics, property rights, and a mystery caper about the foundation of beaches, sand. Our tour guide and professor today is waiting for us in Kingston, Jamaica. His name is Damien King, and he is the executive director of the, I actually don't know, do you say Caribbean or Caribbean? So in the Caribbean, we say Caribbean. Outside of the Caribbean, people say Caribbean. All right, we're going to do this like they do in the islands. Damien is the executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, a thing taken to Jamaica. That's correct. Nailed it. All right. So Jamaica has 3 million people, and I know the other island nations around you have far fewer people, and economists often talk about the challenges of being a small, open economy. That is a place where you have to import a huge share of what you use. How does that affect life in the islands? What I talk to my economist colleagues around the region, we talk about vulnerability, you know, hurricanes come along, earthquakes come along, and economic shocks come along. All price fluctuations affect us much more than it affects the United States. Global interest rate changes affect us greatly because we are all highly indebted economies. So this idea that your economic fortunes depend upon forces outside of your control is an ever present consideration because it affects the long-term decisions that you make. So if I have a plot of land in Jamaica, I might be afraid to do something ambitious like build a factory or an office building, I might just build, you know, a hotel. Well, even worse than that, you may build a hotel, but are you going to build the cute butty hotel that has over the water bar for which you can charge a much higher room rate because the first hurricane that comes along is going to wipe out the overwater bar. Whereas if you build a concrete behemoth, then it is more resilient to the storms. So the idea really is that it affects all of your investment decisions. So you have these small nations, very similar economies based on tourism, they share similar threats. So why not band together? Will there ever be a United States of the Caribbean? Well, the answer is no, but you know, it was tried. In the late 1950s, when former British colonies were becoming independent, the English-speaking islands in the Caribbean formed a federation, the West Indian federation. It didn't last two years before islands started pulling out of it. And this is unfortunate because it has created economies that are probably below the threshold of economic viability. So it was tried, it didn't work, and it is never going to happen again. What was the main problem? The main problem was political, policy promises that are electorally successful are not necessarily the ones that are best for the actual economy. I hear you, I hear you, David. In our first case study today, we actually deal with this challenge of balancing economics and politics. Coming up after the break, we'll visit a magical place that breaks the primary rule of capitalism. Can you run an island without private property? All right, class, stay together, stay together, we do not want to miss the ferry to the island of Barbuda. Now, don't get confused. Do not get on the boat to Bermuda or Barbados. We are going to a tiny island with a couple thousand residents called Barbuda, Professor Damien King. What should the tour group keep in mind as we visit this island? The great thing about looking at small economies is it has a way of exposing what are really fundamental economic issues in a way for everybody to see because of the small scale. So this episode really is about the importance of property rights. Of course, property rights. But the question raised in this first case study is, does property have to be private? When we come up with other ways of owning property collectively that better serve the people who live on it. The story originally aired in 2020 and was hosted by Scott Garryan and Sarah Gonzalez. There are two ways to get to Barbuda, on a seven-seater, unreliable plane or a rocky ferry. Oh, really rocky. A ferry leaves once a day from Antigua. Antigua and Barbuda are two islands that make up one country and the trip takes about two hours. Antigua is mountainous and touristy with about 98,000 residents. That's where the government is. Barbuda is flat. Like flat, flat, like it looks like a penny. Wow. I've never seen an island that flat before. You could drive across Barbuda in about 30 minutes. It's rural, just about 1,000 homes, 1,500 residents. Goats. Probably more animals here than people. Goats and sheep. Just the kind of island where wild donkeys just walk into your home. The houses are all like pastel turquoise with gray, mint green with peach, peach with orange, and where no one wants lobster anymore. We have lobster for breakfast, we have it for lunch, we have it for dinner. We have lobster three times a day, so a piece of chicken in between is not bad. The land of sun and sea. Beautiful Barbuda. This is Natalia John. Natalia was born in Barbuda. Her mom and her grandma were two. She actually lives in her grandma's house. She has her own plot of land too, but she hasn't built anything on it yet. No, not as yet. But I have my son and my stone on it, so nobody can go and take it. What does that mean, your sand and your stone? Just to show that something is going to happen on that land soon. You put some sand and some stone down just to show that something's going to happen on that land soon, so don't take it. Because in Barbuda, land isn't something you buy and sell. It's something you just have, for free. No money. For free. No money. So that's how I grow up. Not even taxes? Not even taxes. Free free. No paperwork. No lease. No rental agreement. No title. Just a whole 62 square mile tropical island shared, communally and informally. This is why we came to Barbuda. Barbuda and say they don't just own the plot of land they put a fence on. They own and share the whole island, collectively. All the three sources, all the land. They use it in common. That's what it's called. Barbuda has the greatest land deal on earth. This is Albert Patti Simon. They call me the grill. The grill? Oh, you don't know that. For those who are not familiar with the term, it simply means a verbal historian. We wanted to talk to Patti because he knows how Barbuda got this special land arrangement. Once upon a time, no one lived on Barbuda. Even when the Caribbean was all indigenous populations, they would just come to Barbuda to hunt and fish and then go back to the other islands they lived on. Barbuda was never inhabited. And then during the 1600s colonization times, this English guy Christopher Codrington comes along and says, "I have a plan for that island." Oh, yeah. Codrington was a slave master. He leases the whole island from the King of England. And his payment was a fat sheep, one fat sheep. He had his slaves over there and it was like a supply. The whole island was made up of 500 enslaved people at its peak and one white manager in his family, sometimes maybe no more than a handful of other white workers too. So schools and churches and all the other things that Antica had, they didn't really get built in Barbuda because there were no white people. And for almost two centuries, a bunch
of different caudringtons run Barbie to this way. Slavery is abolished in 1834, but that doesn't actually change anything for several more decades. Eventually, the caudringtons leave. They're least expires. And when they leave, there are no white people left, just formerly enslaved people. So, they stay. And as they're there, living, no one ever came up and said, "Wait, but you need a property title." Technically, the king of England had claimed the land and considered the people of Barbie to tenants, but there's no evidence that anyone paid rent or anything like that. So, for more than a hundred years, people on this island were pretty much left alone to use the land however they wanted. And they never took on a formal property rights system. And people didn't really fight over land either, like who gets what? Because there was plenty of it. Sixty-two square miles. Most of it undeveloped, and not that many people. In 1981, Antiga and Barbuda gained their independence and become one country with one prime minister. Around that time, they set up a Barbuda council, kind of like a city council. When Barbudans want to build something, they check with them. And at some point, the council does start leasing land to developers. There are a few beachfront hotels and resorts on the island. Princess Diana used to vacation here. But Barbudans never sold the land. They just rented it out to whoever they wanted. And then in 2007, Barbudans get this special informal land system, formalized into law. Parliament passes the Barbuda Land Act, which says, yes, Barbudans, you now officially own the land in common. And it stays this way until 2017 when a hurricane hits. Hurricane Irma. On September 6th, 2am, dark out. The wind started to pick up. This is Natalia again. So the water started to come in like Russian. Not so much rain, but water from the sea. Sea water. Yes, it was a lot of water. And remember Barbuda? Flat as a penny. A lot of wind. And then you just say the windows started to burst, the doors are, you know, all over the island, just shells of buildings were left. No doors, no roofs. Open to the sky. Barbudans were totally exposed. And then they heard another hurricane was coming in three days. Hurricane Jose. And the prime minister who, remember, lives in Antigua. He doesn't really come to Barbuda. Antigans rarely do. He does this kind of dramatic thing. He gets a private helicopter, takes himself and a cameraman to Barbuda, lands, jumps on the bed of a pickup truck and makes a big announcement. The entire country has been decimated. I have never seen anything like this before. He orders a mandatory evacuation of the island. Barbudans were sent to shelters, someone with family in Antigua. But actually the second hurricane never hit, it ended up turning out to sea. So everyone is like, okay, we're going to go back now. The prime minister calls all Barbudans to a meeting at some university in Antigua. Like every Barbudan come to this meeting. A little weird. The prime minister, the guy who flew in on a helicopter, he's still the prime minister today, Gaston Brown. He tells Barbudans, you know that lot you've already been living on for free all these years? New plan. We're going to sell it to you for $1 Eastern Caribbean, about 37 cents US. And now, now you'll have a title. And titles open up all these opportunities. You can take a title to a bank. If the individual is going to take responsibility and would want to get a mortgage or short term loan to rebuild or to repair his or her home, he would require ownership. So it was a sensible thing to do to help them to unlock capital so that they could rebuild. Meaning that they could go to the bank with their title in their hands and say, use my property value as collateral to give me a loan. For $1? For $1. Which sounds a little strange to many Barbudans. They're like, hold on, your rebuilding plan is to sell us the land we already own for $1 each. And he's like, yeah, because this whole communal land thing, I think it's just a big misunderstanding. A myth. In the 1700s, 1800s, Barbudans carrying that type of myth, one could empathize with them as individuals who are illiterate. Today, within the 21st century, it is unconscionable, inconceivable that any educated person could believe in that myth today. It is a form of ignorance that has to be broken. You say that Barbudans have been thinking that they own the land and that it is a myth that they own the land, but there is a law that parliament the Antiguaian and Barbudan government passed that says Barbudans own the land. It was a law that violated the Constitution of the country and a law that had sought to give credence to a long standing myth. Barbudans are challenging this whole thing in court. You know, likely go to their version of the Supreme Court, but for now, under the Prime Minister's new plan, communal land is out, property titles are in. He says now, Barbudans can have actual, legally binding titles to whatever plot of land they had been living on. But just that plot, though, the rest of the island, which is about 90% of the island, that'd be open to foreign investment and development. The Prime Minister wants Barbuda to become a big vacation spot. And at least in Barbuda, his plan is not super popular. This is John Mussington. He lives in Barbuda. And let me tell you why. As a Barbuda, I own 62 square miles. Remember, the Prime Minister is only offering Barbudans ownership over the little piece of Barbuda where their homes are built. And John, John does not live on some prime beachfront property. No one in Barbuda does. They're like, why would we build a house on a beach? Beaches are dangerous. They all live on one strip in the middle of the island. So it's not like hotel developers are going to be super interested in their plots of land. So John says it feels like the Prime Minister is stealing the island. 62 square miles is not just a physical land. It is the resources which are sustained by that 62 square miles. The farming resources, the animal resources, the real estate value which increases over time. The food security, the clean air. If every single Barbuda accepted that offer, in one stroke of the pen, we would have converted our ownership of 62 square miles to one little it's a piece of that. And Natalia, she says she actually would like to see Barbuda developed more, but she thinks people on the island should have a say over what projects get approved. The way it's always been. We just want it to be just like what it is. Just pink and peach and mint greenhouses and mango trees and pomegranate trees and watermelon and flowers. Yes. I can see why you would want that. Just awesome. That was Scott Gurion and Sarah Gonzalez from the year 2020. Here in 2026, there is still a legal fight over the land in Barbuda. One court ruled that the residents there have limited property rights, not communal ownership. And a new law allows for the development of resorts on the island. But the high court is still considering an environmental challenge by Barbuda residents over a new private development. Let's get our professor back in here, Damien King. Hey Damien. Hi Robert. Why is the debate on Barbuda about land so important to the economics world? I can see how excited you are to talk about this. If you were to ask me, what is the single most important institution that underpins the tremendous growth in prosperity through the history of mankind? My answer would be the invention of the idea of property rights. Once property rights are invented, and I think this was probably 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, then for the first time, people have an incentive to save a part of their current product, to invest in the property, and then you get the miracle of compounding. You invest a little in the capacity of your product of resource, then you produce more, then you reinvest in it again, and that underlies the exponential growth of property. That all makes sense, but growth means wealth, and there's a question in the story of who gets the wealth eventually, who benefits the most. The Prime Minister argues that if residents have title to the land, then banks will lend the money to improve the land, but some of these residents have no income, they have no assets. It's not guaranteed that banks will want to let them borrow money, so it seems like land ownership alone can't guarantee prosperity. No, it's not a sufficient condition. Other factors have to be in place other than private property rights, so you need to have a secure environment, so that whatever you earn from your economic activity, you have a reason to believe it is safe. That is not going to come and be stolen. In particular, you need to know that it's not going to be stolen by the government itself.
So as much as property rights are an important institution, there are other institutions that need to be in place for an economy to invest and grow. I guess it's also a question about whether the people themselves can form those institutions. There have been successful rural land cooperatives around the world in places like Spain, Portugal, Mexico, where land is shared in common among the farmers and barbudans have figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons where people abuse the collective land. Why isn't that system enough on barbuda? There are institutions and practices which barbuda engaged in, which eliminates one aspect of the tragedy of the commons, which is the main aspect, which is just overexploitation of a common resource, but it doesn't solve the problem of there being no incentive to invest in the common property, to put up a costly investment that will have a high return because it is common property, then there is no way for the investor to keep the returns to themselves. Listen to the story reminded me of an interesting economic concept called path dependence, which is that sometimes the accidents of history can last not just for generations, but for centuries. And in the case of this particular story, the way the island was ignored for so long, the history of slavery on the island and the people who brought them there, those historical facts have lived all the way up to this very moment. I feel like you see this accident of history issue pop up a lot in the Caribbean. You know, that's actually a great point. It's a great example of path dependence because there is no other island on which they have a history of individual private property that are considering changing to communal land ownership. So it does make the point that where you start out, kind of determines down the road what your interest is on what you want to maintain. Damien, I've been reporting on economics a long time. So I do understand the private property arguments. I understand what the prime minister is saying. But I can't help but root for the barbunans to pull this off. Like it is a tiny island. What is the harm in letting barbunans run it like they want to run it? The people don't know what's good for them. Sounds like you should run for political office in Antigua. I don't think the people don't know what's good for them is a good political slogan. Okay, thank you. Thank you, but I won't. Up next, a mystery, a crime thriller complete with a hard nose detective, a chase scene, and a planet money host seeking the truth that no one wants to hear. The game is a foot after the break. Hello class, it is Jamaica Time, which does not mean we're doing a story on the economics of rum and reggae. That would be too obvious. This is an elite educational institution. We are going to talk about the allocation of scarce resources. And yes, okay, the resource is a beautiful white sand beach overlooking azure waters. And I am not out on the run part. But first our professor, Damien King is here. What should our students keep in mind as they listen to this mysterious case study about sand? They should think about any resource that is large or vast, like the rivers, the seas, the oceans, the air. That is difficult to police. How do you police the unpoliceable? I like it. And one other thing to keep in mind as you listen to this story, sand is very valuable. Not just for tourist beaches, but as construction material to make concrete, to make glass, modern life needs sand. This story first aired in 2018, and it was hosted by Karen Duffin. And once again with the difficult beach assignment, Sarah Gonzalez. There's this rustic little beach town in northern Jamaica. One reggae bar on the beach with a tin roof. When the tropical rain comes out of nowhere, everyone runs into this bar. A self-described raster man is in their singing reggae, calling everyone girlfriend. It's not the kind of beach town that tourists walk to. This is a local beach. Okay, it's called Silver Sands. And it's because it's white glyphrine sand against blue waters. Sandra James loves this water. Oh, leave on the beach, water girl. The waves just calms you. But Sandra feels protective very specifically of that white glistening sand, because everyone seems to want it. It happens a lot in this area. Sand, theft. Sand, theft. A lot in this area. You can hear the trucks at nights moving with sand. In Jamaica, sand is valuable. So valuable that a few years ago, just down the road, an entire beach was stolen. There's a lawyer in Kingston, Michael Hilton, real quiet talker, born and raised in Jamaica. Michael was running what is essentially the Justice Department in Jamaica, and then he decided to go into private practice. And in 2008, he gets a call. A beach has been stolen, taken in the dead of the night, hauled out in dump trucks. So there were witnesses who saw trucks in the night moving sand, but who could not say where the sand was being taken. And Michael Hilton, his job was to find this missing sand. The challenge would be to prove where the sand went, who took it and who benefited from it. So Michael heads to the scene of the crime. Drives down a rocky, overgrown dirt road, and peeking out through the beautiful mango trees, is that aqua blue Caribbean sea. And then he sees it. There were holes that were probably 10 feet deep. Oh, there were holes. There were trenches. Deep trenches. Like if someone went down one of these, you probably would not be able to see them. Digging trenches like this would require some kind of excavator type of equipment. The amount that was stolen was not something that you could just hide in some warehouse. It was way too much sand. So Michael thinks there has to be a huge just pile of sand somewhere on this island. It must have been spread out somewhere. And where would sand be spread out? And who has the money to buy a million dollars worth of sand? Beachfront Resorts. They become Michael's primary suspects. Michael sends one of the owners of the stolen beach, a sand scientist and a justice of the piece on a mission, up on a helicopter. And this scrappy eagle-eyed sand squad, they noticed something at two particular hotels. These hotels looked like they were built on beaches that had brown sand. And they kind of looked like white sand had been sprinkled over the brown sand. The pilot lands the helicopter on the border of one of these private resorts. The sand scientist runs out, collects some sand samples, and then runs back onto the helicopter. And while they were flying around in helicopters, a guy from the United Nations was wandering around the beaches. Hello, can you hear us over there? Yes, absolutely. Hello, Sarah. This is Pascal. I'm Pascal Pieduzzi. I'm from Switzerland. Pascal is with the environmental arm of the United Nations. He happened to be in Jamaica at the time, doing research for the UN, talking to the locals. In one village, people told us that some people came overnight, they're the guns and trucks, and they stole the sand, they stole the beach away of a night. And he discovers that this sand theft in Jamaica is just one tiny part of a huge and growing sand shortage. And a ton of money is at stake. Oh, the sand business is big. It's very minimum, $250 billion per year. Most sand is actually just bought and sold legally. But humans are extracting sand faster than the earth can create sand, because it takes forever to make. So Pascal takes all of his research and he publishes a report, calls it sand, rarer than one thinks. And we think it's just infinite, and it's not. And where sand is running out, things are getting violent. And in fact, people have been killed in Mexico, in India, and probably in many other areas, just for sand destruction. And Pascal says the biggest sand importer in the world these days is Singapore. They have imported hundreds of millions of tons of sand. Singapore is in terms of land mass, they don't have a whole whole lot. Where do they put their sand? Oh, they do see the reclamation, so they take the expanded territory by placing sand in the sea. Singapore dumps all of the sand that it buys onto the edges of the country to make Singapore bigger. So you can see this from satellite images. Singapore used to get all of its sand from Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. But then Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia started shrubbing.
shrinking. They were literally selling their countries to Singapore. The U.N. says around 24 Indonesian islands disappeared. They no longer exist because all of their sand went to Singapore. Now, Pascal, he did eventually leave Jamaica. But Michael, he would be on the trail of the missing sand for years. Michael needs to prove that the white sand grains they saw from the helicopter and snuck off with came from his beach. He hires sedimentologists and marine geologists to run forensics on these tiny white sand grains. And Jamaican police are also on the sand forensic beach. They're knocking on these hotel doors. Like, excuse me, we have a warrant to collect some sand samples. There was a whole criminal case. Who would have brought the criminal case? The crown. As in Queen Elizabeth. Of course, she's a queen of Jamaica. But is she really, it's a long story? Long story. Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth, the old British colonies, and nobody messes with the monarchs sand. Because you don't steal beaches from parts of anybody's country. That's Mark Shields. He was the head of the National Police Force in Jamaica during this sand heist. Mark is thinking, how many people were involved in this game? And how high did this crime go up? There were allegations that police were escorting these dump trucks, helping them make a clean getaway. Quite clearly, the police would not under normal circumstances be escorting sand from one location to another. Years into this case, the crown says that their main witness starts getting death threats. Real and specific intimidation they said. The witness no longer wants to testify and the crown is forced to drop the charges. It was clearly quite a conspiracy and some of the people that were involved in this would be quite influential. So in the end, the hotel's just settled with the beach owners without admitting guilt. Jamaica's great sand heist, so big, the evidence could be seen from a helicopter whoever didn't, got away with it. My disappointment in this case is how it ended. There's a part of me that would almost prefer to have lost the case than the nut I've gotten over it. So it's not my favorite case. And since that theft and the UN report, the problem has just gotten worse. In India alone, the UN is aware of thousands of illegal sand mining sites. When I was in Jamaica, I went to one of the resorts that was accused of buying that stolen sand. Pools and bars and rum everywhere, catamaran and tiki-huts on stilts in the middle of the water, and of course a big, expansive white sand beach. And everyone I spoke to for this story told me the same thing. Wherever this hotel got that white sand from all those years ago, that sand is long gone. There was Sarah Gonzalez and Karen Duffen from 2018. After the break, we'll talk about a possible solution to the problem of sand theft, where the tourists aren't going to like it. We are back with our Jamaican economist Damian King. Thanks for showing us around and for being our professor today. Happy to be here and happy to be discussing lessons that the Caribbean can teach the rest of the world. One of the reasons I love this story is in my mind, sand is infinite. We say something is as numerous as the grains of sand, but of course it's not infinite. The right sand in the right place is actually a scarce resource. And once you're dealing with scarce resources, then you are dealing with economics. In economics, scarce doesn't mean that there is not a lot of it. It just means that there are more uses for it than the amount that exists, that just that the amount is finite. The big concept here is it is inherently difficult to protect numerous or vast public access spaces, rivers, oceans, air, coastlines. It's difficult even in countries that have great public bureaucratic capacity and have lots of money. It's even worse in a small island in which the government's capacity is weak and poor, simply because they don't have enough people and they don't have enough money. There's an economic term we've gone over before for this kind of situation. And that is in negative externality, which is something bad that happens, that is not accounted for in the cost of a good. So when I go to a beautiful resort in Jamaica, I pay a lot for the rum and the food and the towels, but I am not paying for the environmental damage that could have happened in the public beach next door. Very much so. And I'm going to remind you of this the next time you're on that beach and I happen to walk by. You know very well there are guards to keep rogue economists from walking onto the beach. I see. But why not raise the taxes on the tourists and on the resorts to fund a police force to protect the natural resources? That would work. You know, when a 10 to 20% of your GDP is the tourism sector, then the tourism interests are going to say, well, I'm not going to build a hotel. And they can and do whole governments to ransom. And the point is that this is not sort of blaming the investors in hotels. The government itself is not going to be willing to make that step because the governments tend to be desperate to get investment. And so they are really not making that calculus. So Damien, we are asking all of our professors this season to give us a lesson we can take back with us to the United States. So is there anything that Jamaica does economically that we should steal here in the United States? I'm kind of sorry that you added economically because I was going to say, you know, that with a hundredth of your population and one thousandth of your GDP, we produce world-beating sprinters. Like in the Olympics, like Usain Bolt. Yes, Usain Bolt and Shelley and Fraser Price. All right. But economically, what kind of country like the US learn from the Caribbean as a whole? Where you look at the different Caribbean islands, they have pursued different international trade policies over the years. And all of the countries that had high import tariffs are the ones that have done worse in the Caribbean over the last half a century. So that might be a lesson for the United States in the effect of import tariffs even though they are going to have a smaller effect and take a longer time to be manifest. So you're saying the lesson to take from the Caribbean is the value of free trade? Yes. Our students will have to pass a test on the concepts we have discussed today. So we'd like to review them here at the end of the show. We talked about the perils of being a small open economy and one of those dangers is vulnerability. What is that? vulnerability refers to the fact that developments outside of the control of the residents of that country greatly affect their economic fortunes. And that can be hurricanes or the price of oil. A small economy is like a cork bobbing in the vast ocean. Professor, can you in one sentence, just one, remind us of the importance of property rights. Property rights incentivizes individual investment, which increases wealth. Excellent. And we talked a bit about how Barbuda ended up without private property. And that was path dependence. Path dependence is the idea that where a system ends up is dependent on your starting point. Damien King is the executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, a think tank in Jamaica, and a former professor of economics, I should say, and our professor today. Thank you so much, Damien, for doing this. We appreciate it. It's been a joy to become a part of the planet money academy. We'll send you a fake diploma. Please. If you want more stories about how a government can influence the economy of a small island nation, may I recommend page 51 of the new planet money book where they talk about Taiwan. Whole different experience, great new lessons, that's planet money, a guide to the economic forces that shape your life. And hey, if you ever lived in a country with some sort of smart economic idea that the rest of the world should know about, please tell us and you might be featured in our graduation episode. Get in touch now, email us at
[email protected] and put summer school in the subject. Summer school is produced by Sofia Polisa Carr and edited by Alex Goldmark. It is fact checked by Leila Doss. This show is engineered by Anli Huang. I'm Robert Smith and, you know, what I'm not posting summer school and stuck on the tarmac in an airplane. I'm also the host of the new podcast business history, a show about the history of business. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Ladies and gentlemen of Planet Money Center School World Tour, I'm sure the jet lag at this point
is really setting in so make sure and get your knaps in because we are not done. Next up on World Tour, we'll be heading south to Argentina. To learn about what happens when inflation goes off the rails. Next up on Planet Money Summer School World Tour. Next Wednesday.
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