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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Poor kids who moved to neighborhoods with less poverty did much better than those who didn't move.
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At the beginning of the personal computer era, a student in Boston dreamed up the first electronic spreadsheet. It was a $99 piece of software that changed whole industries — and created a new worldview.
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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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Hernando de Soto wanted to figure out why his country, Peru, was stuck in poverty. His answer transformed poor countries around the world.
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What the fine print in my policy says about how insurance works.
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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.
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The creation of America's central bank includes a bunch of bankers locked in a private library and a secret trip to a place called Jekyll Island.
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Over the past 50 years, both the way the federal government spends money and what the government spends money on has changed a lot.