Can we just change how we measure GDP?

Summary

Planet Money Podcast Summary: "Can We Just Change How We Measure GDP?"

Release Date: March 21, 2025
Host/Author: NPR's Planet Money
Episode Title: Can We Just Change How We Measure GDP?

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Introduction

In this episode of Planet Money, hosts Mary Childs and Nick Fountain delve into the intricacies of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—a primary indicator of economic health—and explore the contentious proposal to alter its traditional measurement. The episode examines historical challenges, political pressures, and the potential implications of redefining GDP.

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Understanding GDP: Definition and Calculation

The episode begins by demystifying GDP, explaining its role as the total tally of all goods and services bought and sold within the economy over a year.

• Steve Landefeld, former head of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), defines GDP as:

  “[00:03:36] GDP is the statistic that captures all final transactions in the US economy. Buying and selling of goods and services within a one year period.”

The hosts break down the GDP formula, highlighting its components:

• Consumption (C): All goods and services purchased by households.
• Investment (I): Business investments in factories, machinery, and equipment.
• Government Spending (G): Expenditures on public services like schools and roads, excluding government transfers.
• Net Exports (X - M): The difference between exports and imports.

They emphasize the significance of GDP in shaping government budgets, business investments, and presidential evaluations.

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The Integrity of GDP Measurements: Steve Landefeld's Perspective

Steve Landefeld discusses his two-decade tenure at the BEA, focusing on maintaining the integrity and accuracy of GDP measurements amidst external pressures.

“[00:05:51] Steve Landefeld: ...he was the defender of GDP's integrity.”

He recounts the constant attempts by various industries to influence GDP figures to present their sectors favorably. Landefeld remained committed to ensuring that GDP accurately reflected economic realities, resisting pressures to inflate sector-specific contributions artificially.

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Political Pressures on GDP Calculations: Clinton and Greenspan

The episode explores historical instances where political figures sought to influence GDP metrics:

1. President Bill Clinton's Administration:

   • Proposal to Adjust Real GDP: In the mid-1990s, the BEA, under Landefeld, proposed a more accurate measure of inflation-adjusted GDP. This adjustment aimed to better reflect true economic growth by using improved inflation metrics.

   • Clinton's Reaction: Clinton's administration interpreted these changes as politically damaging, believing they would retrospectively benefit his predecessors and unfavorably impact his own administration's GDP figures.

     “[00:07:07] Steve Landefeld: Experts agree it's a much more accurate measure of real GDP growth. But what it's going to do is it's going to raise growth prior to your administration and lower it after you came into office.”

   • Outcome: Despite initial resistance, Landefeld and his team successfully implemented the changes, prioritizing statistical accuracy over political convenience.

2. Alan Greenspan's Influence:

   • The Fed Chair's Agenda: Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve, pressured the BEA to enhance productivity measurements in the service sector. His goal was to justify maintaining low interest rates by showcasing robust productivity growth.

   • BEA's Response: Landefeld resisted manipulating data but acknowledged that accurate adjustments did find significant productivity improvements.

     “[00:13:04] Steve Landefeld: No, no, no, no, no.”

   • Long-term Implications: These adjustments were later scrutinized as factors contributing to the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting the complexities of accurate economic measurements in policy-making.

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Efforts to Improve GDP: Green Adjusted GDP

Addressing criticisms that GDP overlooks crucial aspects like environmental degradation and unpaid household labor, Landefeld recounts the BEA's attempts to create supplementary measures:

1. Unpaid Household Labor:

   • Advocacy for Inclusion: Groups argued that activities like cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, predominantly performed by women, significantly contribute to the economy and should be quantified.

   • Challenges: The BEA struggled to incorporate these non-monetary transactions due to the lack of direct financial exchanges, leading to reliance on theoretical estimates.

   • Outcome: Despite recognizing the importance, the BEA did not integrate unpaid labor into GDP, maintaining the focus on transactional economic activities.

2. Environmental Impact:

   • Green Adjusted GDP: In the early 1990s, Landefeld spearheaded the development of an environmentally adjusted GDP to account for pollution and resource depletion.

     “[00:17:04] Nick Fountain: ... instead of changing GDP, he tried something else.”

   • Political Backlash: The introduction of green GDP faced fierce opposition from congressional representatives of coal-dependent regions, resulting in budget cuts and the eventual discontinuation of the initiative.

     “[00:18:09] Mary Childs: Did that surprise you? How did that feel?...”

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Current Debate: Removing Government Spending from GDP

The central focus of the episode is the Trump administration's proposal, led by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to exclude government spending from GDP calculations.

• Technical Feasibility:

  • Simplistic Subtraction: Given that GDP components are already disaggregated, Lutnick could theoretically subtract government spending from the total GDP figure.

    “[00:19:38] Steve Landefeld: You subtract line 50 from line one and you got the number he wants.”

  • Creating New Indicators: Instead of altering GDP, Landefeld suggests introducing new metrics that isolate government spending without disrupting the established GDP framework.

    “[00:20:21] Nick Fountain: So just make up a new. Not make up, make up a new indicator.”

• Potential Consequences:

  • Erosion of Trust: Altering fundamental GDP calculations undermines the autonomy and objectivity of national statistics, potentially leading to mistrust in economic data.

    “[00:21:01] Steve Landefeld: If it were dramatically changed, I'd be very concerned...”

  • Historical Precedence: Landefeld references past attempts to modify GDP for political gains, emphasizing the risks associated with such changes.

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The Autonomy and Trustworthiness of GDP

Landefeld underscores the importance of GDP's integrity for reliable economic analysis and policymaking. He cautions against politicizing economic metrics, stressing that:

• Objective Measurements: GDP must remain an unbiased measure to accurately reflect economic health and guide informed decision-making.

• Potential Catastrophic Impact: Manipulating GDP figures for political advantage could lead to misguided policies and erode public confidence in economic institutions.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with a reinforcement of GDP's critical role in economic assessment and policy formulation. Hosts Mary Childs and Nick Fountain, alongside Steve Landefeld, advocate for maintaining GDP's integrity against political and ideological pressures. The potential alteration of GDP measurement by excluding government spending is portrayed as a dangerous move that could compromise the reliability of one of the most vital economic indicators.

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Key Quotes

• Steve Landefeld on Political Pressure:

  “[00:07:07] ... For the sake of sound statistics.”

• Landefeld on Greenspan's Pressure:

  “[00:13:20] ...papering him with questions, run circles around them.”

• Landefeld on Green Adjusted GDP Backlash:

  “[00:18:09] ...All politics are local.”

• On GDP's Autonomy:

  “[00:21:32] ...they have to be trusted. They have to be objective.”

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Planet Money offers a comprehensive exploration of GDP's significance, the challenges in its measurement, and the implications of potential reforms. Through expert insights and historical anecdotes, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of why GDP remains a cornerstone of economic analysis and the perils of altering its foundational structure.

Transcript

[Mary Childs]

This is Planet Money from npr. Next month, a crucially important measure of the economy comes out. It's the measure, really, gross domestic product. It's the total tally of all the goods and services bought and sold in the economy.

[Nick Fountain]

In this case, it'll be for the first quarter of 2025. This one big number that tells us how the economy's doing after a pretty intense couple of months. And the report is right now being put together by the statistics nerds over at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, or the bea.

[Mary Childs]

And its publication is kind of always a big deal. It is closely watched because people can see how hot the economy is running or how cold, like if we're tipping into a recession. But this release, this is going to be even closerly watched, and that is.

[Nick Fountain]

Because earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Ludnick, who oversees the bea, he went on Fox News and made what was maybe a big pronouncement.

[Steve Landefeld]

You know, the governments historically have messed with gdp. They count government spending as part of gdp. So I'm going to separate those two and make it transparent.

[Mary Childs]

In other words, Letnick is saying he's going to strip government spending out of gdp. And the stated reason for this proposed change, he doesn't think that a lot of government spending is great for the economy. He doesn't want it incentivized, and he doesn't want it included in gdp.

[Nick Fountain]

The unstated reason seems to be the Trump administration is firing a whole bunch of government workers, shrinking budgets, canceling contracts. And if, or I guess when that shows up in gdp, it'll look bad.

[Mary Childs]

But, like, can they do that? Can they change how we measure the economy just like that? Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Mary Childs.

[Nick Fountain]

And I'm Nick Fountain. So gdp, what exactly is it? How is it calculated? Does it ever change?

[Mary Childs]

We're going to talk to the person who was the keeper of the stat for nearly 20 years. Turns out people from politicians to economists to special interest groups have been trying to bend GDP for decades to make whatever grand project they're working on look better. Today on the show, what's different this time and what is the same as it ever was? This message comes from ServiceNow. People should do the creative work they actually want to do, not boring, busy work. Now, with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, it, HR and more, so your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Get [e-mail] AI agents okay, GDP. What is it? To help us understand, we brought in someone who spent 20 years in charge at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, that fellowship that calculates gdp. Steve Landefeld.

[Nick Fountain]

Imagine you're in front of a room of third graders. Define GDP for me.

[Steve Landefeld]

That's easy. My kids used to ask me that and I said, I'm not going to do it. No, I kept refusing them until one of them actually became an economist.

[Mary Childs]

Okay, so parents, take note. If you want your kids to follow in your footsteps, keep your job a mystery.

[Nick Fountain]

Sure, but our job is to demystify. So we press Steve to give us a definition.

[Steve Landefeld]

GDP is the statistic that captures all final transactions in the US economy. Buying and selling of goods and services within a one year period.

[Nick Fountain]

All the goods and services in the economy in one year.

[Mary Childs]

The concept was developed in the 1930s and there's a formula to calculate it that's basically remained the same for decades.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, it's essentially arithmetic. He here's how you calculate it. You start by adding up everything regular old people buy, what are called final goods. Every car, every meal, every Tamagotchi.

[Mary Childs]

And you add to that everything businesses invest in every factory, every new machine, every important office, foosball table.

[Nick Fountain]

Then add to that most of what the government spends on things like schools and roads, but not on government transfers. Things like Social Security, those are excluded.

[Mary Childs]

And then finally combine all that with what's called net exports. Everything we export minus everything we import. The economist in crowd people like Steve would say the whole formula, this Y.

[Steve Landefeld]

Equals C plus I plus G plus X minus M. Got it?

[Nick Fountain]

Good. You add up all those things. Consumption, investment, government spending, net exports and US. You get a country's GDP. Last year, that number for the US was $29 trillion, which means if you account for inflation, the economy grew 2.8% from the year before, which is not bad.

[Mary Childs]

And GDP is important. Not only does it tell us how healthy the economy is if we're headed towards a recession or not, but also GDP influences how the government allocates money. It influences whether businesses build a new factory or hire more workers. A lot of decisions are made based on how our GDP is doing.

[Nick Fountain]

And because of all these things, presidents are often judged on how GDP is doing on their watch. And so you could see why they would want their GDP numbers to look as good as they can.

[Mary Childs]

Now, Steve, Steve wanted GDP to be as accurate as possible. He was obsessed with that mission for 20 years. He was essentially the defender of GDP's integrity.

[Nick Fountain]

Did you ever get political pressure from a president to change GDP how it's calculated?

[Steve Landefeld]

Never directly, but indirectly, yes. Leading case was a president who.

[Nick Fountain]

You're going to have to name names today. I'm sorry.

[Steve Landefeld]

It was Clinton.

[Nick Fountain]

President Bill Clinton. The story goes, Steve and others at the Bureau wanted to change how GDP accounted for inflation. They wanted to change how they calculated what's called real GDP or inflation adjusted gdp.

[Mary Childs]

Correcting GDP for inflation is really important because if you have 2% growth but also 2% inflation, you don't really have growth. And Steve wanted to use a new measure of inflation that better reflected how prices were factored in, so GDP would be more accurate.

[Nick Fountain]

So it's around 1995, and Steve and his team bring this idea to the higher ups at the Department of Commerce, and it eventually makes its way to Clinton. Basically, Clinton gets a note, like a written memo or whatever, explaining how they're planning on changing real gdp. Steve still remembers some of what the note said.

[Steve Landefeld]

Experts agree it's a much more accurate measure of real GDP growth. But what it's going to do is it's going to raise growth prior to your administration and lower it after you came into office.

[Mary Childs]

In other words, the note said, we are going to make your predecessor look better and you look worse. For the sake of sound statistics.

[Nick Fountain]

You can see how he would not want that to happen.

[Steve Landefeld]

Yeah, right. So the joke is he hands it back to him, and then he says, and I want you to do something about that. They walk out. Not really much discussion of what's going on here. And they get back to the office and they look at it and it's scrawled in this is. And they couldn't figure out what the last word was. They were thinking, is it. Anyway, it turns out it said, this is crap.

[Mary Childs]

After our interview, Steve checked, and apparently it said, this is nuts.

[Nick Fountain]

But regardless, for Steve, this was a concerning moment. He ran this independent statistical agency, and he was trying to make GDP more accurate. But the President of the United States had expressed his displeasure about this change.

[Mary Childs]

But Steve was the keeper of the stat. He thought this change was really important. Like, important enough that he was thinking he might quit over it. So he and his team went to his boss's bar, boss, the then Commerce Secretary, and told him, listen, there are a bunch of reasons why we've got to do this.

[Steve Landefeld]

You know what? He bought the whole thing. He was great. He says, we're doing it. I go, woo, woo.

[Nick Fountain]

Steve had stood up to the President of The United States. He'd held the line for statistical soundness because he believed that this methodological change would make GDP more accurate.

[Mary Childs]

And Steve was always protecting gdp. He says people from various industries would try to meet with him to get him to change how their industries were calculated.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. He told us that representatives from the Motion Picture association of America or big companies like car manufacturers were always coming to him because they wanted their industries to look bigger.

[Mary Childs]

It's good for number to go up.

[Steve Landefeld]

Why bigger's better, I don't know, maybe get more attention in Congress.

[Nick Fountain]

Steve says he was always open to ideas as long as those ideas were about making GDP more accurate. In fact, he has this one story of when Alan Greenspan, legendary economist, chair of the Federal reserve for nearly 20 years, invited Steve to his office.

[Mary Childs]

I'm trying to get right in my head the power dynamics here. Is this like, are you peers? Is he more important? Is this like sharks and jets?

[Steve Landefeld]

He's a God and I'm, I'm a foot soldier in the Roman army, you know.

[Mary Childs]

Okay, okay, that's very clear. Thank you.

[Nick Fountain]

It's around 1996 and Greenspan wanted to talk about an issue he was having with gdp. It boiled down to this. Greenspan thought GDP wasn't counting a whole big portion of the economy correctly.

[Mary Childs]

The technical reason was that there had actually long been a problem with gdp. And that is it's hard to capture changes in quality when something gets bad better, but it doesn't always show up in the price.

[Steve Landefeld]

Let me go back to the most basic one, which is the computer.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. A thousand dollar computer in 1990 and a thousand dollars computer in 2000 are extremely different. The new computer is just way more computer, more bang for your buck. It's way faster, it has more storage, it can easily connect to the Internet like AOL dial up. It can accept CD rom, not those inefficient floppy disks. But as far as GDP was concerned, they both cost the same. They both cost $1,000 and so they were counted the same. So the economists at BEA tried to account for this. They made what are called hedonic adjustments.

[Mary Childs]

Greenspan was fine with the hedonic adjustments BEA was doing for goods, but he had a problem with how they were doing hedonic adjustments for services. He was worried they weren't accurately capturing all the improvements in the quality of the service sector. Be people were doing way more in a day in industries like healthcare, in education, and basically everything to do with the Internet. And because GDP wasn't correctly capturing that, BEA was under counting productivity growth, and they should look into that.

[Nick Fountain]

Now, Steve also knew that Greenspan wanted this because he had an agenda. He wanted to keep interest rates low to stimulate the economy.

[Steve Landefeld]

Greenspan was expanding the money supply faster than some people thought warranted. And a lot of people later on said, see, we told you. But any event, one thing that would allow him to do that would be if we were underestimating productivity growth in the services sector, then that would sort of justify what he was doing or what the Fed was doing.

[Mary Childs]

Greenspan, as chair of the Federal Reserve, had been lowering interest rates through a lot of the 1990s, which meant that there was a lot of money sloshing around in the economy. And Greenspan seemed to think if he could convince Steve to do this hedonic adjustment for services, then inflation would seem smaller and real GDP would look stronger, and that would justify keeping interest rates low.

[Steve Landefeld]

And so he wanted us hopefully, to go out and find a lot more productivity growth out there by correctly measuring the service industries. And we did find a lot, but it was all legit.

[Nick Fountain]

So Greenspan was coming to you saying, hey, it'd be really useful to my project of expanding the money supply if you could go out and find a little bit of productivity for me in those numbers. No, in a sort of gangster tone. And you went and did it?

[Steve Landefeld]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Nick Fountain]

But it did seem like he was putting the pressure on you. Well, yeah, yeah, he was putting on the intellectual pressure. Steve says Greenspan would pepper him and his top economists with questions, run circles around them.

[Mary Childs]

And, yeah, they knew that Greenspan kind of had an agenda, so they made sure to do their own research, and he wasn't wrong, so they made the changes. Now, looking back, Greenspan's easy money era is often cited as one, just one of the reasons for the risky lending that led to the 2008 global financial crisis.

[Nick Fountain]

Now that we know what we know about 2008, do you feel any regrets about making this change at his behest? So you don't think. No.

[Steve Landefeld]

This stuff was so long overdue for.

[Mary Childs]

Steve, it's not even a question empirically. It was the right thing to do. He says the BEA was trying to keep GDP up to date. And Greenspan, despite his other motives, did help with that.

[Nick Fountain]

Coming up after the break, what Steve thinks of the Trump administration's proposal to strip government spending out of GDP and what he thinks the head of his former agency should do about it.

[Mary Childs]

So far, we've talked about how economists calculate GDP and how sometimes they make Changes to that methodology, incremental changes to capture an evolving economy.

[Nick Fountain]

Economists think that changing the fundamental formula for GDP, that is much more dangerous. GDP is often how we compare policies and leaders across time and across countries. In fact, there are international standards for what goes into it. Countries debate at these painfully long international meetings what counts in gdp. They have to come to a consensus on it. The last update to these global standards was in 2008, and they are working on a new update right now, which could be finalized any day.

[Mary Childs]

But people have always known that the formula doesn't capture everything that's important. For instance, it doesn't capture any illegal activities. And in some countries, that is a big part of their economy. It also doesn't capture inequality or well being or happiness.

[Nick Fountain]

Steve Landefeld, the former head of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, says there is another category of people who have been trying to change what's counted in GDP outside groups. And you could see why. If governments are judged by their GDP growth, they'll focus on whatever makes their GDP look better. They'll work their butts off to do more of the things that increase gdp.

[Mary Childs]

One group that Steve remembers pressuring him argued that all the unpaid household labor, the cooking and the cleaning and the child rearing that often women were doing was not getting counted in gdp. But they argued it should be. It was a huge portion of the economy and women were not getting their due.

[Nick Fountain]

And he thought their argument had merit. So he tried, really tried, to figure out how his agency could capture it all in how they calculated gdp. But because money wasn't changing hands, the math was fuzzy. It had to be based on estimates and theoretical numbers.

[Mary Childs]

Also, there was actually nothing for GDP to capture. GDP generally captures transactions that have happened. Stuff that generates receipts. Just because it could or should be priced doesn't mean it makes it into gdp.

[Nick Fountain]

So Steve never ended up changing GDP to include unpaid household labor.

[Mary Childs]

Another group that lobbied BEA was environmentalists. They argued that if environmental degradation were included in gdp, governments would not sit idly by. As you know, coal plants polluted. But since burning coal raised gdp, they didn't have much of an incentive to stop it.

[Nick Fountain]

Steve was game, but Instead of changing GDP, he tried something else. In the early 90s, he made a new separate measure that environmentalists and policymakers could look at if they wanted, but that didn't mess with the standard gdp. Steve and his team essentially created a green adjusted gdp.

[Steve Landefeld]

We released them and that's when Congress specifically forbid our doing any more work on this stuff and proposed a 20% cut in our budget.

[Mary Childs]

Steve says some very high ranking members of Congress who represented coal mining areas thought Steve's green adjusted GDP would make their regions look worse than regular gdp. And through the grapevine, he found out that Congress was proposing to slash their budget if they kept publishing their green gdp.

[Nick Fountain]

And it wasn't just people who represented coal mining areas, even people from other areas, people he thought he had convinced became worried about how their states looked and they pulled their support.

[Steve Landefeld]

I learned a very painful lesson that all politics are local.

[Mary Childs]

Did that surprise you? How did that feel?

[Steve Landefeld]

Well, you know, I would have thought, you know, going into that, oh, I'll be really, really brave here and I'll just say, you know, if you do this, you know, I'm leaving or something, you can't suppress this stuff. But when it came down to it and I thought it through, I thought, talked to a lot of people about it, it wasn't going anywhere anyway. So there was no point in inflicting that kind of harm on the bureau because it probably just made it worse.

[Nick Fountain]

Steve dropped it. He gave up on his green adjusted GDP project.

[Mary Childs]

Now, Steve left his job as director of the BEA a decade ago, but we were curious about what he thought about what's been happening recently with senior administration officials. With the Commerce Secretary wanting to totally strip government spending out of gd, is.

[Nick Fountain]

It like technically feasible to separate those two things out? Government spending versus everything else?

[Steve Landefeld]

Yeah. Well, if you look at table two in the current press release, he points.

[Mary Childs]

To a press Release from the BEA about 20, 24 GDP. Table 2 shows how much each part of the formula contributed to gdp. So how much consumption and investment and net exports and government spending each contributed.

[Nick Fountain]

And since all of those things are broken out, that means that if Trump's Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick wants to, he can just take the top line GDP number and subtract out the government spending portion of that.

[Steve Landefeld]

You subtract line 50 from line one and you got the number he wants.

[Nick Fountain]

There you go. Technically, pretty easy. Just arithmetic, right?

[Steve Landefeld]

Well then, if you want to be more serious about it.

[Mary Childs]

Yeah, if you want to be more serious about it. He says there are several different measures of GDP that, that BEA already publishes different slices of GDP that tell different stories. Like there's one that's GDP just not including net exports. There are a bunch of these.

[Steve Landefeld]

There's 11 different variants of GDP in there already. Add another one and cite it up in your first, first line. You know, GDP did this. It was buoyed by the government sector or pulled down by it. And private GDP did this. Hey, Dan.

[Nick Fountain]

So just make up a new. Not make up, make up a new indicator. And if you wanna talk about that new indicator, talk about that. But don't mess with GDP is sort of your stance, right?

[Steve Landefeld]

Yeah, yeah. And that's historically the way these things have tended to be solved.

[Nick Fountain]

We asked Bea about this. They declined to comment. But that's what Steve expects to see in the coming months. To be clear, he hasn't spoken with anyone there about this, but he expects Bea will whip up a new line and put it at the top of their quarter. Press release.

[Mary Childs]

Steve says if he looks at that press release next month and they've announced that GDP now does not include government spending, well, that is a different story.

[Steve Landefeld]

If it were dramatically changed, I'd be very concerned. You know, we haven't talked about it, but a big, big issue behind all this is the autonomy of a nation's statistics. They have to be trusted. They have to be objective. And if there's even the perception that people are manipulating the numbers to produce particular outcomes of interest to them, that could be catastrophic.

[Nick Fountain]

That's why Steve held the line for so many years. And that's why he, like us, will have his alarm set. Quarter one GDP estimates come out at 8:30am on April 30th.

[Mary Childs]

Before we go, we wanted to let you know about a new perk for Planet Money plus supporters. We have made it easy for you to listen to some of our classic series from the Planet Money archive. Like when we wanted to understand the global financial crisis and bought a toxic asset we named Toxi. You can now find all eight Toxi episodes in one playlist, with more playlists to come this year. If you're already a Planet Money plus supporter, check them out. If you are not, you can sign [e-mail] you also get bonus episodes, sponsor free listening and know that you're supporting the work of Planet Money.

[Nick Fountain]

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Mary Childs]

And I'm Mary Childs. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Steve Landefeld]

Are we overlooking the challenges facing men without college degrees? Richard Reeves thinks so. There are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads. Reeves heads the American Institute for Boys and Men. Have we updated our view about the role of men as quickly as we've changed the economy around them? And the answer is no. That's from a recent Planet Money bonus episode, a look at the economic and cultural struggles of working class men. To hear it and get sponsor free listening, Sign up for NPR + just go to plus.NPR.org.