Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein is an NPR correspondent and co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He is the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.
Goldstein's interest in technology and the changing nature of work has led him to stories on UPS, the Luddites and the history of light. His aversion to paying retail has led him to stories on Costco, Spirit Airlines and index funds.
He also contributed to the Planet Money T-shirt and oil projects, and to an episode of This American Life that asked: What is money? Ira Glass called it "the most stoner question" ever posed on the show.
Before coming to NPR, Goldstein was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, the Miami Herald, and the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine. He has a bachelor's degree in English from Stanford and a master's in journalism from Columbia.
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Take every standard lesson about how to sell stuff to people and then break all the rules. That's the secret to some of the nation's biggest retail chains.
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Today, it's an insult to call someone a Luddite. But that's not fair to the original Luddites — cloth workers who launched a war against the machines that were taking their jobs.
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Megan McArdle spent years in a doomed relationship. The reason, she says: She fell victim to a common economic fallacy. Our Planet Money team has a love story with an economic idea at its heart.
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Not all debt collectors work at banks or big, corporate agencies. Many work at small, storefront shops. At least one worked in a former karate studio. -
A new SuperPAC aims to reduce the influence of big money in politics — and it's starting by raising millions of dollars, in part from wealthy donors.
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With the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the economy the past several years, why has inflation remained so low?
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A typical UPS truck now has hundreds of sensors on it. That's changing the way UPS drivers work — and it foreshadows changes coming for workers throughout the economy. -
Over the past 50 years, both the way the federal government spends money and what the government spends money on has changed a lot.
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Clothes donated to charity in the U.S. often wind up for sale in African markets. Here's the story of one shirt that started out at a bat mitzvah in Michigan and wound up in a market in Nairobi.
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The book lists the tax that importers have to pay on approximately every single thing in the universe — and raises a key question about the Planet Money T-shirt.
