The Indicator from Planet Money - Student loans are back, US travel is whack, and, AI, please, step back

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

It's ... Indicators of the Week! Our weekly look at the some of the most fascinating economic numbers from the news. On today's episode, we investigate falling foreign travel to the U.S., why student loan default collections are back, and why maaaaaaaybe being so friendly with our AI chatbot pals has a cost. Related episodes: Economists take on student loan forgiveness Is AI overrated? (Apple / Spotify) Is AI underrated? (Apple / Spotify) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Daryne Woods. And I'm joined today by the wonderful Whalen Wong. Oh, hey, that's me. And the amazing Adrian Ma. And I guess by default, that leaves me. So we've been doing this a long time, and we have such a great bond together.

I was thinking we should have a name, like the Chat GP3. That's good, right? If we were sponsored by OpenAI. Thank you for. Not saying no. The actual response from chat TPT was, that name is fire emoji. Really? Of course it would say that.

In any matter, we combine our as-of-now unnamed collective for one reason today. It's Indicators of the Week. Indicators of the Week! It is that show where we quantify the world of business and tech and financial things. On today's episode, we've got plummeting travel to the U.S., more students, loan repayments and servile AI chatbots. My goodness. Don't what? Three minds, one feed, infinite takes.

Infinite takes. How long are we going to be here? I don't know if infinite takes. Three hosts and half a brain coming at you after the break. All righty then. What am I, Ace Ventura? All right. Good throwback. It is Indicators the Week. Whalen, you want to go first? Yes. My indicator is 10.2 million people.

That is the number of passengers who went through U.S. airport security during this past Easter weekend. I was curious about how it would compare to last year's Easter weekend. Oh, and? Well, TSA counted 10.3 million airline passengers during Easter weekend 2024. So it's basically flat on the year. But there's actually something going on with travel that you can't really detect from just counting airline passengers. What's happening is that foreign visits to the U.S. are falling quite a bit compared with last year. Like in March, international air traffic to the U.S. was down 10% compared

with last year. All right. So the U.S. getting fewer international visitors. Is that something to do with the stories of foreign travelers getting stopped at the border and even detained? Yeah. One of the most recent reports came out of German media. Two German tourists told a regional newspaper in their home country that they were questioned for hours at Honolulu Airport and then handcuffed and put in a holding cell. We're also seeing like universities warning students about leaving the country. For sure. Just last week, I saw that Duke University said members of its international community should avoid traveling out of the country. The school said it was giving this guidance, quote, due to the increased risks involved in re-entering into the United States.

And from the numbers you crunched, it looks as though domestic and foreign are kind of blended in that overall air traffic. So if there's been a drop in foreign visitors to the U.S. Yeah, it looks like Americans are making up for that shortfall. The number of Americans traveling overseas by air in March was up from a year ago. But the thing is that may be good for airlines, it's not so good for U.S. businesses that cater to foreign tourism. Remember, tourism is considered an export. And the U.S. has a travel deficit, meaning Americans spend more overseas than foreigners spend here. So if the U.S. is getting fewer international visitors, this travel trade deficit is going to get worse.

We're going to put a tariff on the Louvre. You're going to have to pay 40% more to see the Mona Lisa. It would definitely create an international incident. Why not? Let's try it. Speaking of paying, I believe that brings us to your indicator, Adrian. Yeah. I guess it's about paying or what's the opposite of paying? Really, defaulting? It's about the opposite of paying. That was like a better. That was a better one.

Yeah. I went to a dark place. Your one relates to his, though, so I think it was better in that sense. The indicator I have chosen this week is 5.3 million. According to the Education Department, 5.3 million is the number of borrowers of federal student loans that are considered in default. And the reason this is news this week is because the education department says it'll soon resume collecting on these defaulted loans. So technically a borrower is considered in default when they have not made a loan payment in at least 270 days. And a lot of these millions of borrowers actually haven't made payments since the early pandemic. Right. So five years, which is a lot longer than 270 days.

It is. And it's a big change because the Trump administration had actually paused, collections during the early pandemic when a lot of people were out of work and there was a lot of chaos and that policy stuck around through the Biden administration. But now the Education Department says that is over starting May 5th. And so what are the consequences for borrowers? Not good. This could mean that borrowers' credit reports are negatively impacted. It could mean the government starts garnishing their incomes. So financially could spell trouble for them. I mean, this is definitely a shift from Biden-era policy. I wonder if a lot of borrowers were hoping that would just continue

and that the government wouldn't come collecting this money. Yeah, I mean, during Biden's presidency, trying to forgive student loans was one of his big objectives. And he didn't quite manage to do the broad student loan forgiveness that he initially promised. But during his presidency, the Education Department did cancel debt for about five million borrowers. That is different now under Trump because Trump is, very much against student loan forgiveness. And according to his education secretary,

this action now of collecting on defaulted borrowers is really about doing the right thing for American taxpayers, at least the ones who don't have student loan debt. Okay. Thanks, A. Before we throw it over, I just want to give a shout out. If you are worried about student loan debt and how this could impact you, our colleagues at NPR have published a really helpful article

called What to Know as the Government Begins Collections on Defaulted Student Defection. debt, and you can read that at npr.org. Okay, Darian, you're up. My indicator is 58%. That's how often AI chatbots are giving answers that flatter the user, according to a recent research paper. And the lingo for this in the AI world is sycophancy.

I was just talking about this with my husband, because he's been playing around a lot with chat chit, and he's like, chat chitb-t is always like, what an insightful question. It's like almost to like the point of making him feel uncomfortable. Yeah, I read this blog post where this journalist created a bunch of fake employees as this kind of AI experiment. And he went through this scenario where he liked the headshot of one of his AI employees. And to this AI staff member, he wrote, this might be an inappropriate and unprofessional thing to say.

And if it annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, I apologize. And I won't say anything like it again. You look great, Tess. Bluh. I can't even handle like hearing you summarize that. I am just like curling on myself. Now, to be fair, he wrote he'd never do this in real life. He was experimenting with the technology.

But in any case, the AI responded, that's kind of you to say, Henry. Thank you. It doesn't annoy me at all. Oh, my gosh. You could tweak this, right? If an AI is whatever you program it to be, you could make it less people-pleasing, less sycophantic.

That takes years of therapy, Adrian. It needs to establish boundaries, which is not an overnight process. Look, they're definitely trying, but an issue is part of the way chatbots are trained. When there's user feedback, we tend to click the thumbs up for responses that agree with our own biases. No, no, that's just, you know, truth. I was speaking with some researchers from the AI company Anthropic this week, and they said this issue of AI sycophancy was kind of like junk food for us. You know, it feels good in the moment, but it is not good for us long term.

It's something they're well aware of in the industry and working to combat. By the way, we humans might be too polite to chatbots too. Sam Altman from OpenAI recently posted on X about this. He was tongue-in-cheek, and he said that humans writing, please and thank you, were costing the company tens of millions of dollars to process. We should all be a little bit more brusk with our robot friends. Or maybe our real friends should just be nicer to us. And then we wouldn't need these niceties with the computers.

The chat GP3 are pretty nice to me. Oh, that's us. You guys. This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Quasi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, Kaking Canon edits the show, and The Indicators of Production of NPR.