N -P -R. This is the indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Adrian Ma. I'm Weyland Wong and today is Friday the 13th.
Scoopie! Watch out!
Bad indicators abound.
This ghostly presence is Nick Fountain from Planet Money.
What's up, Nick? Happy to do spooky things with you today.
We're gonna do the Monster Mash.
It's gonna be a graveyard smash.
Werewolf Farmits Fun.
So on this episode of Indicators of the Week, our numbers from the news have to do with higher household incomes, a Keurig K -cup kerfuffle, and believe it or not, fire festival.
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I don't know if you all heard this week there was a presidential debate.
Yeah! 60 -something million people watched it for sure.
That is correct. At the very start of this debate, what I was very pleased to hear was a question about the economy.
And the moderator's question was pretty straightforward for the candidates.
When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?
So I was raised as a middle class kid.
And I imagine. What a dodge!
This is like those like recipe blogs when you just want to learn how to make this to the minerals.
But they're like I was born in a log cabin.
And you're like no, how much yeast am I supposed to use?
I mean yeah, if you didn't tune in for it, Kamala Harris didn't answer the question.
Donald Trump started to answer the question.
This has been a disaster for people, for the middle class but for every class.
On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country.
But then he started some questionable statistics and sort of veered off topic.
So my indicator of the week is aimed at at least trying to partially answer the moderator's original question, how are we doing compared to four years ago?
My indicator is $80 ,610.
It comes from the U .S.
Census Bureau's annual report on household finances, which came out on Tuesday.
And after crunching a bunch of survey data from last year, they found the real median household income, which is to say the inflation adjusted income in 2023 was $80 ,610.
And for some perspective, this is about 4 % higher than it was the year before.
Sick, we love to hear about people's incomes rising.
Especially if they're inflation adjusted.
Totally. And just for context, you know, four years ago, that was around the beginning of the pandemic.
And around that time, household incomes took a dive.
Then about a year in, inflation spiked and it made things worse.
And then, starting a couple of years ago, inflation began easing up.
Thanks to rising wages also and a strong job market, households last year saw their real income grow.
And the median household income returned to pre -pandemic levels.
So by this metric, the economy definitely looks better than it did four years ago.
Which of course is not to say that a lot of people are not still feeling the pinch of higher prices.
And there are a couple more wrinkles in this rising income story.
The data suggests that it hasn't been evenly distributed.
Like median incomes rose a lot faster in the Midwest compared to the rest of the country.
And they also rose about twice as much for men compared to women.
What? Yeah. So, Waylon, you're in the Midwest too, right?
I'm a Midwestern lady.
So I don't know where this leaves me.
I'll check my pay stubs.
All right. So some good news, bad news there.
A little. Yeah. It's a complicated picture.
Generally good news though.
Waylon, what do you got for us?
Well, my indicator is $1 .5 million.
This is a penalty that the company Courreg Doctor Pepper, Inc.
has to pay after a federal government agency accused it of making inaccurate statements about whether K -cups can be recycled.
And I think the agency in question might surprise some listeners.
It was the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yeah. That is surprising.
I mean, that's the agency that oversees the stock market.
Why is the Securities and Exchange Commission of all the agencies in Washington the ones who are enforcing this?
Well, the SEC cares about public companies making accurate statements in their financial reports, you know, because people rely on these disclosures to make decisions about where to invest.
In this case, the SEC says that Courreg's annual reports for 2019 and 2020 talked about how K -cup pods can be quote, effectively recycled.
But in fact, the SEC says that two of the biggest recyclers in the U .S.
had told Courreg that they wouldn't accept K -cups.
Courreg Doctor Pepper, by the way, neither admits to nor denies the SEC's findings.
Long time listeners of Planet Money will know that plastic recycling is a very complicated thing.
It's pretty much a sham.
And these pods are plastic, right?
They are indeed. They're made of number five plastic.
Ah. We reached out to Courreg Doctor Pepper, who said that number five plastic is widely accepted in curbside recycling systems across North America.
But then they also said that people should check locally because the pods are quote, not recycled in many communities.
So that's what they mean by effectively recyclable?
I mean, that's that's effectively confusing.
I know. I am squinting at this statement the same way you have to squint at the tiny numbers on the bottoms of plastic containers.
Why are those numbers so hard to read?
I want the SEC to look into this next.
Okay, consequences for the K -cup maker.
Nick, what do you got for us?
I want you both to get in a time machine with me for a second.
The year is 2017. It's springtime.
It's the weekend. And all of the internet is watching in horror and in schadenfreude as we learn about a music festival in the Bahamas that is turning into a total disaster.
Ah, the fire festival.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
What a spectacle. For those who are not terminally online, like Adrian and Raelynn and me, and power to you for not being terminally online, Fire Festival was billed as this like immersive music festival on a private island in the Bahamas.
There were fancy like teaser trailers for it featuring supermodels.
Fire Festival was supposed to be the new Coachella, the new Burning Man exclusivity.
And as we all know, it turned out to be kind of a ridiculous disaster.
Yeah, for a festival ticket that could cost as much as a quarter of a million dollars with amenities, it was poorly planned.
It was unsafe. People were like sleeping in disaster relief tents.
There were porta potties.
It was entertaining.
So entertaining in fact that there were two documentaries made about it.
And Billy McFarlane, the festival's promoter, ended up in federal prison.
He got out in 2022.
I could reminisce about how ridiculous Fire Festival was all day long.
But Nick, come on. What's the indicators of the week part of this?
Yeah, so this week, McFarlane announced the date of Fire Festival 2.
So that's the indicator.
Good morning everybody.
We just announced on the Today Show that Fire 2 is taking place April 25th through April 28th on a private island off of the Caribbean coast in Mexico.
Ticket applications are available on firefestival2 .com.
So he's not even changing the name?
No, but he's not really involved in the making of the thing.
He's just kind of the face of it, which is a weird choice if you ask me.
And you know, lately he's been talking about ticket prices.
He says they're going to cost anywhere from $1 ,400 and go as high as $1 .1 million for the VIP package where you'll get to scuba dive with him and go on private planes to other countries.
Oh my gosh, I don't trust these people to go scuba diving.
That's like a life or death situation.
It is a serious question.
Who is going to trust these people again?
Because it was such a public disaster.
But I will tell you, McFarlane said they released these $500 promo tickets and 100 people bought them.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the vast majority of those people are like documentary crews, journalists, hoping to get fodder for their next big documentary or magazine profile.
I'm not going. You're going, Adrienne?
I would go. Oh, I'm not going.
Oh, I figured we could just get sort of a dispatch from Firefest 2.
We would not physically have to be there sleeping on the ground.
An audio postcard from the port of party.
Gross. This episode was produced by Asia Corrares with engineering by Valentino Rodríguez Sanchez.
It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez kicking in and edits the show and the indicators of production of NPR.
I'm Danielle Kurtzleben.
I cover the presidential campaign for NPR, so I go to rallies.
A lot of them. I want to hear what the candidates say, talk to voters, and find out what ideas are resonating.
And I put it all in my reporting to help you make sense of this election.
It's why being there is important.
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