The continent nobody owns & everyone benefits from (Summer School)

VPM | By Robert Smith

Published August 26, 2026 at 3:30 AM EDT

This episode is packed with your best economic ideas from around the world and a penguin interview. It all comes together in this final session of Summer School 2026.

Pack your parka, we’re headed to Antarctica.

First, we’ll travel back in time to the late 1970s when NPR was a scrappy young network, with a synth soundtrack, and tons of heart. Science reporter Ira Flatow took a trip to the South Pole that put NPR on the news industry map. We’ll hear an excerpt where he brings us along through what life is like on the ice, including a memorable interview with the wildlife.

*NPR Reporter Ira Flatow asking the tough question in Antarctica* (Katherine Bouton / 1979)

Then we look inside McMurdo Station, the largest human settlement and research base on Antarctica to hear from a listener who managed the store at the base back in the 1980s. Normal retail rules do not apply. We’ll also speak with an economist who has estimated the continent’s monetary value, while asking questions like “why put a price tag on this uninhabitable land”? She makes the case we should consider the environmental benefit as a service.

?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F32%2F33%2Fb83e34434638a2a336c9227e3277%2Fsummerschool2026 diploma4 — (Jackie Lay)

But, we can’t let the episode and the series wrap without marking our achievements! You did it! As part of our graduation celebration, we hear from your fellow members of the summer school class of 2026. Listeners like you who have written in from around the globe with provocative economic ideas that could make life better for all of us if we just have the will to do it. Man did you all deliver on sending in ideas. We’ve curated our favorites. Way better than speeches.

And don’t forget your totally real, but not legal, diploma by taking our short online test. Don’t worry if you need a refresher, catch up on past seasons of Planet Money Summer School here.

Featured Episodes:

Featured Terms:

Ecosystem as a service
Consórcios (a type of ROSCA, a Rotating Savings and Credit Association)
Social housing
Natural capital

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This episode of Planet Money Summer School is hosted by Robert Smith. It was produced by Schuyler Swenson and Sophia Paliza-Carre and edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark. It was fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore and engineered by Annlie Huang.

Music: NPR Source Audio – “Caroldine”, “Pomp And Circumstance March No. 1 Allegro con molto”, “Bismuth Bossa”, “Rumba Cotidiana”, Moons of Saturn”, “Column and Law”, “Our Son the Potter”, “Hutter”, “And So It Goes | 10penny Organ”.

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NPR News Business Economy NPR Planet Money

Robert Smith

Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.

If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.

Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.

Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.

When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.

Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.

Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.

See stories by Robert Smith