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A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report says opting into your bank’s overdraft protection could leave you paying higher fees and make your account more likely to be shut down. Overdraft fees came under fire during the financial crisis, leading to new banking rules that took effect in 2010. But despite new regulations, many consumers are still getting whacked.

“We can see fees as high as $35, even for a $2, $3 cup of coffee,” says Tom Feltner, director of financial services at Consumer Federation of America.

That’s right, the $38 latte lives. Like a slasher movie villain that just won’t die, it still haunts our pocketbooks. It’s a situation that came up over and over in the debate on overdraft fees: A caffeine-starved consumer hands over his debit card to the barista, not knowing his account only has a dollar left. Later, the bank nails him with a hefty overdraft fee, raising the cost of the $3 latte to $38.

People may have thought this villain was vanquished in 2010, when new banking rules went into effect. Not quite. Banks can still charge the fees. They just have to get clients to opt-in.

“What is marketed as overdraft protection can in some instances put consumers at greater risk of harm,” says CFPB director Rich Cordray.

The CFPB study found fees and policies can vary widely among banks, meaning some consumers end up paying way more. The findings underscore the importance of shopping around, reading fine print and keeping track of account balances. Or else, that $38 latte will keep terrorizing bank accounts.

Mark Garrison: Like a slasher movie villain, an old banking boogieman just won’t die. Tom Feltner is with Consumer Federation of America.

Tom Feltner: We can see fees as high as $35, even for a $2-3 cup of coffee.

That’s right, the $38 latte lives, and still haunts our pocketbooks. You hand over your card to the barista, not knowing your account only has a dollar left. Later, the bank nails you with a hefty overdraft fee. You may have thought this villain was vanquished in 2010, when new banking rules went into effect. Not quite. Banks can still charge the fees. They just have to get you to opt-in.

Rich Cordray: What is marketed as overdraft protection can in some instances put consumers at greater risk of harm.

CFPB director Rich Cordray says fees and policies vary widely among banks, meaning some consumers end up paying way more. So shop around, read the fine print and keep track of your balance. Or else, that $38 latte will terrorize your bank account. In New York, I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.

Opting into your bank’s overdraft protection could leave you paying higher fees and make your account more likely to be shut down, according to a new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Right now, if you’re a farmer and you buy crop insurance, the government pays about 60 percent of your premium no matter how much money you make. The Senate bill says, if you have adjusted gross income over $750,000, the government will chop your crop insurance subsidy by 15 percent.

A big part of the consumer economy is, of course, big business. And big business, in today's world, increasingly relies on the idea of growing shareholder value. Lynn Stout is a professor at Cornell Law School and the author of "The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public." She's quick to point out that while we might view "shareholder value" as an essential part of capitalism today, it wasn't always that way.

“Do you want fries with that?”

“Would you like to add shrimp to that salad?”

“Let me tell you about our extended warranty.”

“Oh, and how about a new tie to go with the shirt?”

Suggestive selling, upselling, cross-selling. Call it what you want, but they’re all about one thing.  Bueinsses making more money.

Yeah, it’s annoying. Sometimes you feel like slugging the kid at the movie concession stand when he tries to sell you that over-sized pretzel you didn’t ask for. But marketing folks say upselling is simply the price we pay for our consumer-sales-driven economy.

“Clearly, business is becoming more competitive,” says Sunil Gupta, head of marketing at the Harvard Business School. “As a result, the cost of acquiring new customers is going up very, very high. So a company says, 'Okay, I have you as a customer and it’s easier to sell more things to you than to go look for a new customer.'”

Easier and cheaper. In some industries, seven times cheaper. Besides, when you’re selling a more expensive product, it usually has a higher profit margin. And selling a lot of different products to the same customer buys their loyalty, so the research says. Has your car insurer been trying to sell you life and home insurance, too? Natch.

Companies are also getting smarter about extracting more from every consumer. They have more personal and sales data on us than ever before, thanks to technology. But the bottom line is that there’s crazy pressure on companies from Wall Street and shareholders for more profits.

“Wall Street is always looking for growth,” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn. “In order to grow, you have to get people to buy more.”

Kahn sees upselling as a good thing, especially when companies use the data they collect on you to customize their upselling.

“Companies are investing in you to learn what you want," she says. "So, the things they either try to upsell or cross sell to you should be things that you want.”

Are they? Share your most outrageous, surprising, or delightful upselling experience. (And let us know how many times you say yes to the fries.)

Techies have descended on San Francisco for Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Yesterday the company unveiled a new music streaming service, a new look for its mobile operating system, and a new line of MacBook Air laptops.

CNET's Molly Wood joins Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson to share her thoughts on the latest.

Residents of Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and beyond are still wading through high waters today. Severe flooding has led to the deaths of at least 24 people.

The BBC's Steve Evans joins Marketplace Morning Report host David Branccio from Berlin with the latest.

As news broke last week about NSA collection of phone records and online data, I started following a Twitter account called Nothing To Hide. The account has been retweeting people talking about how they don't care if the government, Obama, or the NSA, is spying on their online activity.

Here's an example: "Honestly? Well, yes, privacy is nice, but I have nothing to hide, so they can snoop all they like."

Whether or not you agree with this Tweet, it is representative. A lot of people in the U.S. don't seem very worried that the government might be culling through their data.

"When it's in the context of terrorism investigations, the public is willing to give the government a fair amount of leeway," says Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Dimock says people have been fine with giving up some privacy to stay safe for years.

"We haven't seen any shift in opposition to this over the past 10 years," he says. "Americans feel about the same way about this today as they did in 2002, within months of the 9/11 attacks."

Some argue what really scares people about surveillance programs like PRISM isn’t government control. Instead it’s more about being discovered by the neighbors.

"We are implicitly embarrassed about the stuff that we do because we are all weirdos online," says Kyle Wagner, who wrote a piece for Gizmodo on this topic. "The underlying fear is that someday it's going to be public knowledge what I've been doing on the Internet and I will be shamed for the rest of my life."

Wagner says the government doesn't really care what you're doing day to day, unless of course, you're breaking the law.

Tell us what you think: Do you care if the government knows who you're talking to on Facebook and when? Whom you're emailing? If so, why? If not, why not?

Right now, if you’re a farmer and you buy crop insurance, the government pays about 60 percent of your premium no matter how much money you make. The Senate bill says, if you have adjusted gross income over $750,000, the government will chop your crop insurance subsidy by 15 percent.

“It starts to apply the same sorts of limits to crop insurance subsidies that we have traditionally applied to other farm subsidies," says Scott Faber, a lobbyist with the Environmental Working Group.    

Harwood Schaffer, a farm policy researcher at the University of Tennessee, worries the means testing could lead some farmers to go without insurance. 

“So yeah, there are people that are big enough and have enough assets to carry them through," he says.  "And at some level they will go bare.”

Or Schaffer says they could decide not to shake off their insurance coverage. And reorganize their farms so they fall below the $750,000 income limit. There is nothing in the Senate bill to prevent that -- and by the way, there is no means testing at all in the farm bill being considered by the House. 

“Do you want fries with that?”

“Would you like to add shrimp to that salad?” 

“Let me tell you about our extended warranty.”  

“Oh, and how about a new tie to go with the shirt?”

Suggestive selling, upselling, cross-selling. Call it what you want, but they’re all about one thing.  Bueinsses making more money.

Yeah, it’s annoying. Sometimes you feel like slugging the kid at the movie concession stand when he tries to sell you that over-sized pretzel you didn’t ask for. But marketing folks say upselling is simply the price we pay for our consumer-sales-driven economy.   

“Clearly, business is becoming more competitive,” says Sunil Gupta, head of marketing at the Harvard Business School. “As a result, the cost of acquiring new customers is going up very, very high. So a company says, 'Okay, I have you as a customer and it’s easier to sell more things to you than to go look for a new customer.'”

Easier and cheaper. In some industries, seven times cheaper. Besides, when you’re selling a more expensive product, it usually has a higher profit margin. And selling a lot of different products to the same customer buys their loyalty, so the research says. Has your car insurer been trying to sell you life and home insurance, too? Natch.

 Can we afford the consumer economy? Marketplace explores how we consume, what we get from it, what it costs and whether we can keep it up. 

Explore the whole series and play the game.

Companies are also getting smarter about extracting more from every consumer. They have more personal and sales data on us than ever before, thanks to technology. But the bottom line is that there’s crazy pressure on companies from Wall Street and shareholders for more profits.

“Wall Street is always looking for growth,” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn. “In order to grow, you have to get people to buy more.”

Kahn sees upselling as a good thing, especially when companies use the data they collect on you to customize their upselling. 

“Companies are investing in you to learn what you want," she says. "So, the things they either try to upsell or cross sell to you should be things that you want.”

Are they? Share your most outrageous, surprising, or delightful upselling experience. (And let us know how many times you say yes to the fries.)

A big part of the consumer economy is, of course, big business. And big business, in today's world, increasingly relies on the idea of growing shareholder value.

Lynn Stout is a professor at Cornell Law School and the author of "The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public." She's quick to point out that while we might view "shareholder value" as an essential part of capitalism today, it wasn't always that way.

"This is a kind of new idea that was actually invented by professors," she says. "Historically, it's not been what capitalism is all about." The idea can be traced back to the writings of Milton Friedman in an article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1970, "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits."

In the golden age of large public corporations, Stout says, businesses were not merely in business to make a profit, but also to fulfill other goals like building great products and providing livelihoods for employees.

But what's so wrong with companies trying to turn a profit?

Stout says this kind of singular focus on driving the stock price can lead companies to make decisions that benefit them only in the short-term -- and could be disastrous down the line.

When it comes to cost-cutting measures by companies, consumers are often the most affected. Take the example of an airline: when the company decides not to invest in repairs or infrastructure, airplane ticket buyers are the ones left waiting on the runway for maintenence to fix the plane.

"When managers are focusing on share price, it's very hard for companies to actually be innovative," Stout argues. "The second problem that short-termism imposes on consumers is that, obviously, when they're trying to cut costs...they're not going to invest in their employees; they're not going to invest in customer support, they're not going to invest in improving their products the way they should."

Worrying about the entire value of a company, and thinking long-term, doesn't just benefit the customer -- it helps the company as well.

"The life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company has declined from 75 years (back at the beginning of the century) to less than 15 years today," Stout says. "I think that's a pretty obvious symptom of what happens when you're pressuring managers to get that share price up at all costs even if it means taking on enormous risks and not planning for the future."

 Can we afford the consumer economy? Marketplace explores how we consume, what we get from it, what it costs and whether we can keep it up. 

Explore the whole series and play the game.

In today's consumer economy, businesses feel shareholders' pressure to make higher profits in the short term. That could mean more intense selling on the sales floor, or moving jobs to countries with lower wages. But what are the consequences -- and use -- five or ten years down the line?

Unilever is the third largest consumer goods company in the world, making everything from Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey to Dove body wash. And it has the second biggest advertising budget. It sells goods to two billion people  every day, and its products are in seven out of ten households around the world.

In selling all those products, Unilever CEO Paul Polman has something else in mind. He criticizes what he calls "mindless consumption" -- the kind that many of us are used to these days. And he's taken steps to get not just his business, but other major corporations, on a better path.

 Can we afford the consumer economy? Marketplace explores how we consume, what we get from it, what it costs and whether we can keep it up. 

Explore the whole series and play the game.

Looking beyond quarterly reporting

Polman sees a lot of dangers lurking around the corners for businesses that increasingly worry only about pleasing shareholders every 90 days, with their quarterly reports.

"I saw a recent survey in the U.S. that 75 percent of the CEOs were willing to postpone the right decisions if it would affect their quarterly reporting, and that cannot be healthy for the long-term of the business," Polman points out.

He lists the ever-shortening tenure of CEOs as one major challenge for companies in today's global economy. He's been at Unilever for four-and-a-half years -- longer than many peers at other major corporations.

After taking the helm, Polman immediately got to work developing a better, more sustainable culture around the office. That included putting an end to quarterly reporting and changing the company's compensation system accordingly.

"We had to create the right environment so that people would start to think about the longer term," he says. "What we have seen is that discussions with our financial community have become a little bit more strategic. The decisions in the company are a little bit more long-term."

Still, he stresses that the changes don't mean that the short-term performance should suffer. "We've seen our share price more than double over the last four years, and our growth accelerate," Polman says. "So if you explain it well why you do these things, more and more shareholders are behind it."

What does he say to those who continue to argue in favor of shareholder value?

"We know it's very easy to optimize -- short-term -- the share price," he admits. "But lives of businesses are getting shorter and shorter, and yet society needs them more and more. Nine out of ten people in this world depend on businesses, and I think it's in all of our interests to create healthy institutions... You cannot get a successful, healthy business model if you also don't create a healthy environment. Business has a hard time succeeding in societies that fail."

Change comes when big companies work together

Beyond trying to change corporate culture itself, Polman is involved in a number of other sustainability initiatives.

"Most of the activity that actually touches society is happening in the supply chain," says Polman, "and that's why we take responsibility from sustainable sourcing to sustainable living." The company looks to find materials from sustainable sources, but then also looks to encourage sustainable choices on the consumer end.

There are some jobs too big for even Unilever to handle alone, and Polman works with several other companies on certain initiatives.

"To really get the meaningful differences that we're looking for, it requires more than any individual can achieve," Polman says. "What we're now dealing with are enormous challenges of poverty or climate change; sustainable growth in its broadest sense; equality... That requires a broader level of partnerships."

Take the example of ice cream: Unilever handles brands like Ben & Jerry's, Breyer's and Magnum. In moving to natural refrigerants for display cases, Coca-Cola and Nestle joined a coalition with Unilever to convert the market at a global level.

"It needs a tipping point; no individual company can do that alone," Polman adds.

A similar effort is aims at ending illegal deforestation. Unilever and other companies "made a commitment not to sell anything anymore from illegal deforestation by the year 2020 -- soy, paper, pulp, beef, palm oil. And if a big association representing $3-4 trillion of consumer sales makes that commitment, it sends a very strong signal into the whole value chain," he says.

The role of business going forward

How can you reconcile the business of business -- namely, making a profit -- with all of these sustainability goals? Polman says that capitalism is still a great system, but it needs to be able to adapt.

"What we've created here is an enormous force to lift people out of poverty," Polman points out. "But at the same time, we haven't figured out how to do that without incurring these enormous levels of government or private debt; overconsumption; and frankly, leaving too many people behind. You cannot say that the system properly works if there are over a billion people going to bed hungry."

Businesses may be some of the best forces at enacting the kind of change we need, he adds.

"Increasingly with governments being gridlocked, the need for change increasingly has to come from responsible business. If businesses understand that, they'll have a bright future. If businesses don't understand that, I think the consumer will increasingly vote them out of business."

This final note on the way out: A punctuation mark of sorts on the Edward Snowden news of the day.

Google -- one of the companies named in the files Snowden has confessed to leaking -- has officially asked the government for permission to reveal details of the data requests it gets from the government. As of right now, it's not allowed to even acknowledge those requests, let alone how many of them there are and for what kind of data.

Google -- and pretty much all the other companies, too -- say they share far less data with the government than they're being accused of.

There’s news out today of a couple of big companies filing for bankruptcy, including the largest private U.S. envelope maker, known as National Envelope, and a company that makes batteries, Exide Technologies. 

Overall, though, business bankruptcies are actually way down right now, in part thanks to record low interest rates on loans. Companies facing big debts can often avoid bankruptcy by borrowing their way out of trouble. So for those companies that are  still going bankrupt, we had to ask: Why? 

David Skeel teaches bankruptcy law at University of Pennsylvania. Skeel’s self-proclaimed goal in life is to “persuade people that bankruptcy is actually incredibly interesting.”

(He is aware that so far relatively few humans share this view though. “We're still small, but we're growing,” he told me of the bankruptcy-is-actually-interesting camp.)

Part of what makes bankruptcy so interesting, Skeel says, is that it’s about failing. Who doesn't like watching that? (See: the popularity of American Idol in general, especially moments like this one.)

The failure has to be pretty whopping when it comes to larger companies that have been around for a while, but are now filing for Chapter 11, says Skeel.

“With a big established firm it’s not hard to get funding right now, and so you're not likely to end up in bankruptcy unless you've got real problems with your business,” he says. Problems that “make lenders skeptical.”

In some cases, the problem can be with a particular company that has taken a wrong turn, like making a gamble on a new technology that either isn’t the right technology, or is ahead of its time. That’s what happened to a lot of companies in the fiber-optic industry in the early 2000s.

In other cases, it's the whole industry that's got problems, says Skeel. Like Kodak and film, or that envelope maker. How many envelopes have you dropped in the mail box lately?

Then there's the solar industry. It's also seen a boom in bankruptcies, now that rates for conventional energy have dropped, and the government stimulus money that helped jump-start solar has dried up. 

As for all the companies that are avoiding bankruptcy right now with cheap loans, they shouldn't be gloating, says Stephen Lubben, a professor of bankruptcy law at Seton Hall Law School. “If they're able to refinance and put off addressing real problems with the business, they may just be putting off their pain to a later date,” Lubben says.  By 2017, a lot of companies will be facing maturities on their debt, and by then the interest rates may be a lot higher than they are now, Lubben warns. 

So although we have low bankruptcy rate right now, Lubben says “We may have to face the music on this.” 

Waze, which has reportedly been acquired by Google, is basically a GPS app. Punch in your destination and it gives turn-by-turn directions.

What makes Waze stand out is that it gives real-time traffic information by asking users to volunteer their locations, said Chris Silva, an analyst at the Altimeter Group.

Let’s say Waze notices you’re going five miles an hour on the freeway.

“It’ll actually ask me, 'hey are you in traffic, report your traffic status now,'” Silva says. “If I see an accident or a speed trap I can report that information and it all gets compiled in a database.”

That database gets shared with the other Waze users. This fact is what makes Waze's form of gathering data, crowdsourcing, different than ... oh, the kind of gathering involved in PRISM. 

For one thing, the process is transparent, said Andreas Weigend, who directs the Social Data Lab at Stanford. He adds that users have to feel like they’re getting something useful back.

“People understand in order to get real-time traffic information, you need to give information,” Weigend said.  

It’s that give and take Google is trying to get more of, which is one reason it’s interested in Waze. Google wants to make its map more social by getting users to contribute information about what restaurants they like and where their meeting friends. Then Google can sell ads against it.

Altimeter’s Chris Silva says that the news of PRISM and Google’s involvement in turning over data to the government might put a chill on Waze’s crowdsourcing efforts.

“When they come under the Google umbrella, I think for a certain portion of users, they may start wondering well where does this data end up?” he said. If under Google’s watch, Waze users might get more watching than they signed up for.

We continue to learn more about the scope of the U.S. government’s data collection efforts. According to The Wall Street Journal, the NSA, National Security Agency, has relied on technology developed in the private sector to sift through information it’s collected. 

The government’s been using something called Apache Hadoop, The Journal reports, an open-source software runs circles around what the government’s got in house. The people who developed Hadoop call it software for “scalable, distributed computing.”

Garth Gibson, a computer scientist at Carnegie Melon, says it’s used “to process a huge amount of data in a relatively short period of time using a lot of computing resources.”

Hadoop takes the data and breaks it into smaller pieces, so thousands of computers can split up the workload. It’s part of Yahoo!’s search engine, it’s behind Facebook’s social network and now the government can use it for surveillance and to find patterns.

Amy Apon chairs the division of computer science at Clemson University. She says to think of Hadoop like a gas station. “They have rows and rows of gas pumps, and lots of cars can pull in and get gas at the same time.” More computers means more efficiency.

The government relies on Hadoop and systems like it because they work well, they’ve been improved over time, and they’re not that expensive.

“The government wants to use the most cost-effective technology it can to accomplish its goals,” says tech analyst Carl Howe, with the Yankee Group. “I mean, it’s no different than any other business.”

But the government is not leading the way here. According to Ken Birman, the N. Rama Rao Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, companies that have developed “distributed computing” programs like Hadoop have an edge. They have used open-source to collaborate, and they have outspent the government on innovation.

“All that investment has created a very powerful technology base,” he says. One the government just can’t match.

You remember the summer reading list? If you live in certain parts of the country, you probably do. That photocopied list of books assigned by a teacher - with instructions to read one, two, or, if your teacher was tough, the entire list. 

On the Wealth and Poverty desk, we wondered whether children who go to public schools in lower-income areas are assigned markedly different books than children who live in higher-income school districts.

It turns out the answer isn't easy to find. There are no national standards for summer reading, which means that every school and/or school district in the country handles the issue differently. Some schools make their own lists, some choose from a pre-approved district-wide list and others have no reading lists at all.

So here’s a sampling of what we found -- with two caveats. First, this is an unscientific survey. Many teachers are off on summer vacation, so we relied largely on reading lists that schools and districts posted on the internet. It would have been wonderful to look at every school in the nation, but we didn't have nearly enough time for that. Secondly, we're not judging books. We're not pitting John Grisham against Dave Eggers and we're not making value judgements about what schools assign. We're just seeing if we can spot differences...

Also, these are just part of the lists for schools, not the full list.

Darien, Connecticut (Median household income (2011): $193,000)

Darien's one of the wealthier areas in the country.

Summer reading list, which includes dozens, is broken down by categories: 

• Biography ("The Art of Power by John Meacham")
• Art ("Leonardo and the Last Supper" by Ross King)
• Contemporary Fiction ("Salvage the Bones" by Jessmyn Ward)
• Mystery ("The Bourne Identity," by Robert Ludlum)

Jackson Public School District in Mississippi (Median household income: $34,000)

Summer reading list is one required book for each grade.

• Seniors: John Grisham's "The Runaway Jury"
• 11th-graders: Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
• 10th-graders: Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees"

Yonkers Public Schools in New York (Median household income: $56,000)

Yonkers students have it tough. They are required to read four books over summer break (and maintain a reading log!).

Part of the summer reading list for a 10th grader:

• Michael Lewis' "The Blind Side"
• John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"
• Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (In Framingham High School in Masachusetts  "The Road" is a 12th grade summer read.)

Brookline High in Massachusetts (Median household income: $97,000)

Summer reading is recommended, not required.

Seniors choose from books like:

• "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," by Mohsin Hamid
• "Cutting for Stone," by Abraham Verghese
• Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin"

Worcester High in Massachusetts (Per capita income: around $46,000)

Reading is required, but not broken up by grade level.

Students choose three books from categories that include:

• Action/history ("Blackhawk Down," by Mark Bowden)
• Science fiction/fantasty (The Lord of the Rings series)
• Sports ("Friday Night Lights" by Buzz Bissinger)

Many schools across the country seem to assign mandatory summer reading only to students who are taking Advanced Placement classes. In Valdosta, Georgia where the median household income is around $31,000/year, AP students at Valdosta High must choose two books from a list that includes "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Richard Wright's "Native Son." But students who aren't in AP English aren't required to read -- it's only suggested that they do. Their list includes "The Fault in Our Stars," "The Girl of Fire and Thorns" by Rae Carson and "The Good Braider" by Terry Farish. 

Here's what we heard from a few teachers throughout the country. 

Teacher: Zanetta Robinson | 8th & 9th grade | Language Arts & English 

School: Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School in St. Petersburg

Reading list: As of this year, reading lists have been eliminated, but Ms. Robinson recommends students read high-interest narrative non-fiction like Thomas B. Allen's "Harriet Tubman, Secret Agent: How Daring Slaves and Free Blacks Spied for the Union During the Civil War," and "George Washington, Spymaster: How the Americans Outspied the British and Won the Civil War." 

Teacher: Jennifer Ochoa | 8th grade

School: Patria Mirabal Middle School in Washington Heights, New York City

Reading list: The school no longer has a summer reading list because educators found that kids weren't doing any of the reading. So, Ms. Ochoa (who admits she loves reading James Patterson at the beach to relax) recommends action-packed novels like S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," and the books of Walter Dean Myers, who writes about Harlem and Washington Heights -- areas her students are familiar with. 

We'd love to hear more from teachers, students and parents. If your district or school assigned a summer reading list that you'd like to share, feel free to pass it along! 

Think back -- way back -- to the days of Econ 101. The basic tenets of capitalism as we know them today were spelled out pretty clearly: supply and demand, division of labor, pursuit of self-interest. And if you strain a little more, you might just remember the man behind the theories: Adam Smith.

Written in 1776, "The Wealth of Nations" continues to be one of the most important economics books of all time. But do the lessons Smith spelled out in his text all those years ago still apply today?

P.J. O'Rourke has read and written extensively on the man and his books. He came up for air to give us a lesson in how Smith's ideas matter for consumers today -- and how they can't solve all of our problems.

"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer." "The Wealth Of Nations," Book IV Chapter VIII, v. ii, p. 660, para. 49.

The idea that the purpose of production is consumption wasn't a common thought at the time Smith was writing, points out O'Rourke.

"There was this idea that the purpose of production was to build up treasure... or something," he says. "The idea that it was for the sake of consumers just hadn't occured to the human brain before Adam Smith."

What he meant by "consumption," of course, isn't exactly what we think of as consumption today.

"By consumption, he really meant that the purpose of all production is to make something that's useful," argues O'Rourke. "He was not thinking about buying a whole mess of t-shirts from a shady factory in Bangladesh, or consumer electronics. The word had a different nuance at the time."

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." "The Wealth Of Nations," Book IV, Chapter II, p. 456, para. 9.

So, as the definition of consumption has evolved, can we still rely on Smith's thoughts about consumers to still be true? Can all of us pursuing our own self-interest really mean a greater common good?

"If you talk to most businessmen, they'll say that what they do is for the public good, but you know they're just greedy," says O'Rourke, "and consumers are just consuming for the sake of their own greed. But Smith pointed out that the system actually produces some very good things. And we wouldn't have any of those good things if we didn't have this system of pursuit of self-interest."

"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition...is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."  "The Wealth Of Nations," Book IV, Chapter V, Digression on the Corn Trade, p. 540, para. b 43.

As we all pursue our own self-interest in today's world, consumers pile on debt until they can't see past it. At the same time, businesses do what they need to do to continue to push those products onto consumers. We've come a long way from fulfilling a need, and into the territory of creating wants.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages." "The Wealth Of Nations," Book I, Chapter II, pp. 26-7, para 12.

"What Adam Smith was trying to do was explain how economic progress happens," O'Rourke argues. "Adam Smith's huge failure was the fact that he did not foresee the industrial revolution."

Still, he understood that not everything capitalism produces is necessarily good. When it comes to the follies of the system, Smith saw the problems of debt in his own time, and what happens when banks collapse.

"As even the smartest among us has," adds O'Rourke, "he had his blind spots. So I wouldn't say that anything Adam Smith had to say has been superseded. But of course, a whole lot of situations have arisen that Adam Smith could not very well forsee all those years ago -- and we have to come with answers."

 Can we afford the consumer economy? Marketplace explores how we consume, what we get from it, what it costs and whether we can keep it up. 

Explore the whole series here.

This final note, spotted on the pages of the Drudge Report today.

Amazon has a special page that lists what it calls "Movers and Shakers:" books that had the biggest gains in sales over the past 24 hours.

Currently coming in at number 17, out of the zillions of books Amazon sells: 1984, by George Orwell, whence we get Orwellian and Big Brother.

Just to get it back to the news of the day, sales have doubled in the past day.

See, you can find business and economics in anything.

Increasingly, economists and other social scientists are identifying evidence of a "consumer arms race" -- that in order to keep up, many middle class Americans are shelling out cash for goods and services in order to keep up with the rich and almost-rich. Case in point: personal trainers for kids.

Tis the season for caps and gowns and college diplomas. For a lot of new graduates it's also time to start paying back those student loans. If you're wondering how long that might take, it depends on your profession. Want to pay off your student loans in about 6 years? Get a degree in advertising or marketing. But according to BankRate.com, if you become a librarian, plan on shelling out monthly payments for over two decades.

This week starts the big dance on immigration reform, when the Gang of Eight’s bipartisan bill comes to the Senate floor on Tuesday, June 11. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill would provide a path to work-permission -- and ultimately, citizenship -- for most of the undocumented. It would also provide more skilled foreign workers for American employers. Last week, Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas proposed an amendment that would more than double border-security spending in the current bill -- from $4.5 billion to $10 billion (an additional $1 billion each year for six years).

Google is reportedly acquiring the navigation company Waze for more than a billion dollars. The acquisition will further swell the pile of personal data Google collects and uses to serve ads. It also keeps the technology and talent of a hot company out of the hands of competitors in the increasingly important field of mapping.

Waze is a bit like a friend who warns you to skip a certain road because traffic’s a nightmare there today. More than just giving directions, Waze uses data from its more than 40 million app users to calculate the fastest routes. That’s a lot of data, and Google is happy to slurp it up so it can serve us more ads, further customized with our location and travel information.

“You could see this go into couponing. You could see it go into a wide variety of places,” says Babson College business professor Marty Anderson. “It’s not just about mapping where people are in cars.”

Buying Waze also keeps the app away from Google’s competitors. Facebook bid aggressively for it. Apple also wants to outmap Google.

“Google didn’t want Apple to have a hold of this,” says tech analyst Brian Proffitt, who teaches at Notre Dame’s business school.

After Apple’s disastrous launch of its own mapping app in September, CEO Tim Cook apologized. He even encouraged people to check out alternatives like Waze. Looks like Google was listening.

Mark Garrison: Waze is kinda like your friend warning you to skip a certain road because traffic’s a nightmare there today. It works like this: drivers share their location and other data. Waze uses it to find the fastest route. That’s a lot of data, and Google is happy to slurp it up so it can serve us more ads. Babson College professor Marty Anderson:

Marty Anderson: You could see this go into couponing. You could see it go into a wide variety of places. It’s not just about mapping where people are in cars.

Buying Waze also keeps it away from competitors. Facebook bid aggressively for it. Apple also wants to outmap Google. Tech analyst Brian Proffitt is with Notre Dame’s business school.

Brian Proffitt: Google just didn’t want Apple to have a hold of this.

After Apple’s disastrous launch of its own mapping app in September, CEO Tim Cook apologized. He even encouraged people to check out alternatives like Waze. Looks like Google was listening. I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.

Markets were up just a sliver this morning in early trading. Perhaps last Friday's jobs report had investors feeling sunny or the hope of continued Federal Reserve stimulus. Jim Dunigan, chief investment officer at PNC Wealth Management, joins Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio to discuss the latest twists and turns in market psychology.