Jason Schreier

And they brought in some economists to try to help them fix it.

And their issue is that essentially they were running it kind of...

I don't know, in almost like Soviet Russia, like a kind of communist style or socialist style commune where you have the centralized location and they just decide, based on whatever information they have, how to distribute the food to different places based on what they think is fair.

And they do it in a way that they hope will be equitable for everybody.

But it was very difficult for them to have enough information about all these different food banks to be able to actually distribute what they wanted.

And so they brought in these economists, and these economists put together a market system.

And they went through different iterations of it, but eventually landed on this idea that every single food bank would get fake money and be able to bid on different food items.

And it would have to be a blind bid, so they wouldn't be outbidding each other.

And what they did was they gave more money to the poorer food banks, the food banks that were in more remote cities, and less money to the ones that had a lot of donations and were in richer cities, better off cities in the first place.

And they found that with this system, they learned so much about how to be more efficient because the prices that these different items would land on taught them so much about how...

to collect and what to collect and what to encourage people to donate and what to buy with their money, that it wound up leading to a way more efficient system, which I thought was really fascinating.

It was like peanut butter, turns out, is way more valuable than they had any idea.

And they learned so much from the prices of peanut butter getting driven up by this fake money eBay system.

And it's really fascinating.

And then the book's authors kind of extrapolate on this by being like, prices are not just kind of like a thing that you look at and you're like, okay, this is not just a piece of information for you, but also almost like a newspaper.

Like, you can learn so much from the price of something in that it signifies not just how much something costs for you at the store, but also...

the way that the crops for peanuts worked that year in whatever country that peanuts are grown, or the amount of oil that it took to ship those peanuts across the sea, and how prices just kind of changing can just teach you all this stuff about the world and how much you can learn from them.

Really fascinating book.

And then even more fascinating is that Planet Money, the podcast, did a...

I believe, four-episode series about how the book was made.