Freakonomics Radio

By Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Society & Culture

What's Freakonomics Radio about?

Discover the hidden side of everything with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. Special features include series like “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.” as well as a live game show, “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.”

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436. Forget Everything You ...

10.22.2020

As beloved and familiar as they are, we rarely stop to consider life from the dog’s point of view. That stops now. In this latest installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we discuss Inside of a Dog with the ...

Freakonomics Radio episodes:

10.22.2020 436. Forget Everything You Know About Your Dog As beloved and familiar as they are, we rarely stop to consider life from the dog’s point of view. That stops now. In this latest installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we discuss Inside of a Dog with the ...
10.15.2020 435. Why Are Cities (Still) So Expensive? It isn’t just supply and demand. We look at the complicated history and skewed incentives that make “affordable housing” more punch line than reality in cities from New York and San Francisco to Flint, Michigan (!).
10.08.2020 434. Is New York City Over? The pandemic has hit America's biggest city particularly hard. Amidst a deep fiscal hole, rising homicides, and a flight to the suburbs, some people think the city is heading back to the bad old 1970s. We look at the history ...
10.03.2020 “Don’t Neglect the Thing That Makes You Weird” \| People I (Mostly) Admire: Ken Jennings It was only in his late twenties that America’s favorite brainiac began to seriously embrace his love of trivia. Now he holds the “Greatest of All Time” title on Jeopardy! Steve Levitt digs into how he trained for the show, ...
10.01.2020 433. How Are Psychedelics and Other Party Drugs Changing Psychiatry? Three leading researchers from the Mount Sinai Health System discuss how ketamine, cannabis, and ecstasy are being used (or studied) to treat everything from severe depression to addiction to PTSD. We discuss the upsides, downsides, and regulatory puzzles.
09.24.2020 432. When Your Safety Becomes My Danger The families of U.S. troops killed and wounded in Afghanistan are suing several companies that did reconstruction there. Why? These companies, they say, paid the Taliban protection money, which gave them the funding — and opportunity — to attack U.S. ...
09.19.2020 “One Does Not Know Where an Insight Will Come From” \| People I (Mostly) Admire: Kerwin Charles The dean of Yale’s School of Management grew up in a small village in Guyana. During his unlikely journey, he has researched video-gaming habits, communicable disease, and why so many African-Americans haven’t had the kind of success he’s had. Steve ...
09.17.2020 Does Anyone Really Know What Socialism Is? (Ep. 408 Rebroadcast) Trump says it would destroy us. Biden needs the voters who support it (especially the Bernie voters). The majority of millennials would like it to replace capitalism. But what is “it”? We bring in the economists to sort things out ...
09.12.2020 What if Your Company Had No Rules? Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings came to believe that corporate rules can kill creativity and innovation. In this latest edition of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, guest host Maria Konnikova talks to Hastings about his new book, No Rules Rules, and ...
09.10.2020 431. Why Can’t Schools Get What the N.F.L. Has? Thanks to daily Covid testing and regimented protocols, the new football season is underway. Meanwhile, most teachers, students, and parents are essentially waiting for the storm to pass. And school isn’t even a contact sport (usually).
09.05.2020 "I Started Crying When I Realized How Beautiful the Universe Is” \| People I (Mostly) Admire Ep. 2: Mayim Bialik She’s best known for playing neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, but the award-winning actress has a rich life outside of her acting career, as a teacher, mother — and a real-life neuroscientist. Steve Levitt tries to ...
09.03.2020 America’s Hidden Duopoly (Ep. 356 Rebroadcast) We all know our political system is “broken” — but what if that’s not true? Some say the Republicans and Democrats constitute a wildly successful industry that has colluded to kill off competition, stifle reform, and drive the country apart. ...
08.27.2020 430. Will a Covid-19 Vaccine Change the Future of Medical Research? We explore the science, scalability, and (of course) economics surrounding the global vaccine race. Guests include the chief medical officer of the first U.S. firm to go to Phase 3 trials with a vaccine candidate; a former F.D.A. commissioner who’s ...
08.22.2020 Introducing “People I (Mostly) Admire" A new interview show with host Steve Levitt. Today he speaks with the Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker. By cataloging the steady march of human progress, the self-declared “polite Canadian” has managed to enrage people on opposite ends of ...
08.20.2020 The Economics of Sports Gambling (Ep. 388 Rebroadcast) What happens when tens of millions of fantasy-sports players are suddenly able to bet real money on real games? We’re about to find out. A recent Supreme Court decision has cleared the way to bring an estimated $300 billion in ...
08.13.2020 429. Is Economic Growth the Wrong Goal? The endless pursuit of G.D.P., argues the economist Kate Raworth, shortchanges too many people and also trashes the planet. Economic theory, she says, “needs to be rewritten” — and Raworth has tried, in a book called Doughnut Economics. It has ...
08.06.2020 How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Ep. 386 Rebroadcast) Aisle upon aisle of fresh produce, cheap meat, and sugary cereal — a delicious embodiment of free-market capitalism, right? Not quite. The supermarket was in fact the endpoint of the U.S. government’s battle for agricultural abundance against the U.S.S.R. Our ...
07.30.2020 428. The Simple Economics of Saving the Amazon Rain Forest Everyone agrees that massive deforestation is an environmental disaster. But most of the standard solutions — scolding the Brazilians, invoking universal morality — ignore the one solution that might actually work
07.23.2020 427. The Pros and Cons of Reparations Most Americans agree that racial discrimination has been, and remains, a big problem. But that is where the agreement ends.
07.16.2020 426. Should America (and FIFA) Pay Reparations? The racial wealth gap in the U.S. is massive. We explore the causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Also: another story of discrimination and economic disparity, this one perpetrated by an international sporting authority. The first of a two-part series.
07.09.2020 425. Remembrance of Economic Crises Past Christina Romer was a top White House economist during the Great Recession. As a researcher, she specializes in the Great Depression. She tells us what those disasters can (and can’t) teach us about the Covid crash.
07.02.2020 424. How to Make Your Own Luck Before she decided to become a poker pro, Maria Konnikova didn’t know how many cards are in a deck. But she did have a Ph.D. in psychology, a brilliant coach, and a burning desire to know whether life is driven ...
06.25.2020 423. The Doctor Will Zoom You Now Thanks to the pandemic, the telehealth revolution we’ve been promised for decades has finally arrived. Will it stick? Will it cut costs — and improve outcomes? We ring up two doctors and, of course, an economist to find out.
06.18.2020 422. Introducing "No Stupid Questions" In this new addition to the Freakonomics Radio Network, co-hosts Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth discuss the relationship between age and happiness. Also: does all creativity come from pain? New episodes of "No Stupid Questions" are released every Sunday evening ...
06.11.2020 421. How to Prevent Another Great Depression Millions and millions are out of work, with some jobs never coming back. We speak with four economists — and one former presidential candidate — about the best policy options and the lessons (good and bad) from the past.
06.04.2020 420. Which Jobs Will Come Back, and When? Covid-19 is the biggest job killer in a century. As the lockdown eases, what does re-employment look like? Who will be first and who last? Which sectors will surge and which will disappear? Welcome to the Great Labor Reallocation of ...
05.28.2020 How to Make Meetings Less Terrible (Ep. 389 Rebroadcast) In the U.S. alone, we hold 55 million meetings a day. Most of them are woefully unproductive, and tyrannize our offices. The revolution begins now — with better agendas, smaller invite lists, and an embrace of healthy conflict.
05.21.2020 419. 68 Ways to Be Better at Life The accidental futurist Kevin Kelly on why enthusiasm beats intelligence, how to really listen, and why the solution to bad technology is more technology.
05.14.2020 418. What Will College Look Like in the Fall (and Beyond)? Three university presidents try to answer our listeners’ questions. The result? Not much pomp and a whole lot of circumstance.
05.07.2020 417. Reasons to Be Cheerful Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?
04.30.2020 416. How Do You Reopen a Country? We speak with a governor, a former C.D.C. director, a pandemic forecaster, a hard-charging pharmacist, and a pair of economists — who say it’s all about the incentives. (Pandemillions, anyone?)
04.27.2020 415. How Rahm Emanuel Would Run the World As a former top adviser to presidents Clinton and Obama, he believes in the power of the federal government. But as former mayor of Chicago, he says that cities are where real problems get solved — especially in the era ...
04.23.2020 414. Will Covid-19 Spark a Cold War (or Worse) With China? The U.S. spent the past few decades waiting for China to act like the global citizen it said it wanted to be. The waiting may be over.
04.16.2020 413. Who Gets the Ventilator? Should a nurse or doctor who gets sick treating Covid-19 patients have priority access to a potentially life-saving healthcare device? Americans aren’t used to rationing in medicine, but it’s time to think about it. We consult a lung specialist, a ...
04.09.2020 412. What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to Eat? Covid-19 has shocked our food-supply system like nothing in modern history. We examine the winners, the losers, the unintended consequences — and just how much toilet paper one household really needs.
04.02.2020 411. Is $2 Trillion the Right Medicine for a Sick Economy? Congress just passed the biggest aid package in modern history. We ask six former White House economic advisors and one U.S. Senator: Will it actually work? What are its best and worst features? Where does $2 trillion come from, and ...
03.26.2020 410. What Does Covid-19 Mean for Cities (and Marriages)? There are a lot of upsides to urban density — but viral contagion is not one of them. Also: a nationwide lockdown will show if familiarity really breeds contempt. And: how to help your neighbor.
03.19.2020 409. The Side Effects of Social Distancing In just a few weeks, the novel coronavirus has undone a century’s worth of our economic and social habits. What consequences will this have on our future — and is there a silver lining in this very black pandemic cloud?
03.12.2020 Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373 Rebroadcast) As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new ...
03.05.2020 408. Does Anyone Really Know What Socialism Is? Trump says it would destroy us. Sanders says it will save us. The majority of millennials would like it to replace capitalism. But what is “it”? We bring in the economists to sort things out and tell us what the ...
02.27.2020 407. Is There Really a “Loneliness Epidemic”? That’s what some health officials are saying, but the data aren’t so clear. We look into what’s known (and not known) about the prevalence and effects of loneliness — including the possible upsides.
02.20.2020 406. Can You Hear Me Now? When he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai announced that he was going to take a “weed whacker” to Obama-era regulations. So far, he’s kept his promise, and earned the internet’s ire for reversing the agency’s position ...
02.13.2020 405. Policymaking Is Not a Science (Yet) Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack the code?
02.06.2020 404. Does the President Matter as Much as You Think? We asked this same question nearly a decade ago. The answer then: probably not. But a lot has changed since then, and we’re three years into one of the most anomalous presidencies in American history. So once again we try ...
01.30.2020 How the San Francisco 49ers Stopped Being Losers (Ep. 350 Update) One of the most storied (and valuable) sports franchises in the world had fallen far. So they decided to do a full reboot — and it worked: this week, they are headed back to the Super Bowl. Before the 2018 ...
01.23.2020 403. The Opioid Tragedy, Part 2: “It’s Not a Death Sentence” One prescription drug is keeping some addicts from dying. So why isn’t it more widespread? A story of regulation, stigma, and the potentially fatal faith in abstinence.
01.16.2020 402. The Opioid Tragedy, Part 1: “We’ve Addicted an Entire Generation” How pharma greed, government subsidies, and a push to make pain the “fifth vital sign” kicked off a crisis that costs $80 billion a year and has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
01.09.2020 5 Psychology Terms You’re Probably Misusing (Ep. 334 Rebroadcast) We all like to throw around terms that describe human behavior — “bystander apathy” and “steep learning curve” and “hard-wired.” Most of the time, they don’t actually mean what we think they mean. But don’t worry — the experts are ...
01.02.2020 The Zero-Minute Workout (Ep. 383 Rebroadcast) There is strong evidence that exercise is wildly beneficial. There is even stronger evidence that most people hate to exercise. So if a pill could mimic the effects of working out, why wouldn’t we want to take it?
12.26.2019 401. How Many Prince Charleses Can There Be in One Room? In a special holiday episode, Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth take turns asking each other questions about charisma, wealth vs. intellect, and (of course) grit.

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