Some of our favorite Indicators of the year

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Some Great Indicators

The year 2022 is coming to an end. It’s been a remarkable year for the economy, marked by inflation, rising interest rates, a stock market collapse, a cryptocurrency meltdown, and so many more big stories. The Indicator from Planet Money, our daily podcast, has been there every step of the way, delivering deep insights with a splash of humor and creative storytelling.

The hosts of The Indicator had many favorite episodes this year, but we got them to boil them down to three worth checking out (if you missed them the first time around). Here they are:

How Words Get Minted

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Shrinkflation. Yeet. Supply chain. Unbanked. What do these terms have in common? They're some of Merriam-Webster's newest dictionary entries! Merriam-Webster added more than 300 words to the dictionary this year, and some of them were econ-related. The Indicator spoke with Merriam-Webster’s editor-at-large to pull back the curtain on how words make it into the dictionary. And they lobbied him to include a word that we, over at the Planet Money newsletter, coined ourselves: skimpflation. Listen here

AP Macro Gets A Makeover

Adam Berry/Getty Images

Each year, more than a hundred thousand high school students are taught how the Fed works. The problem: these lessons have been wrong for years. America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, tries to keep interest rates at just the right level. Students were taught the Fed did this through something called "open market operations." But now, the Fed does things quite differently, raising interest rates more directly. The Indicator tells the story of two Fed officials who spent years trying to fight outdated information, and instead spread the word of how the financial world really works. Listen here

Are you being tricked into working harder?

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Since the late 2000s, companies and organizations have been experimenting with gamification: combining game-like features with non-game activities. In schools, it's been used as a tool to help students learn more easily. And in the workplace, employers are using it to try and make their employees more productive. But, Adrian Hon believes there could be a dark side to this "gamification" trend. Adrian was an early adopter of gamification with his app, "Zombies, Run!", which makes jogging more fun, by making you think you're being chased by zombies. But, he argues in his new book You've Been Played, governments, businesses, and institutions are using gamification as a way to exploit workers. Listen here

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