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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457. Is Dialysis a Test Cas...

04.08.2021

Kidney failure is such a catastrophic (and expensive) disease that Medicare covers treatment for anyone, regardless of age. Since Medicare reimbursement rates are fairly low, the dialysis industry had to find a way to tweak the system if they wanted ...

Freakonomics Radio episodes:

04.08.2021 457. Is Dialysis a Test Case of Medicare for All? Kidney failure is such a catastrophic (and expensive) disease that Medicare covers treatment for anyone, regardless of age. Since Medicare reimbursement rates are fairly low, the dialysis industry had to find a way to tweak the system if they wanted ...
04.01.2021 456. How to Fix the Hot Mess of U.S. Healthcare Medicine has evolved from a calling into an industry, adept at dispensing procedures and pills (and gigantic bills), but less good at actual health. Most reformers call for big, bold action. What happens if, instead, you think small?
03.25.2021 Policymaking Is Not a Science (Yet) (Ep. 405 Rebroadcast) 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?
03.21.2021 How Does New York City Keep Reinventing Itself? (Bonus) In a word: networks. Once it embraced information as its main currency, New York was able to climb out of a deep fiscal (and psychic) pit. Will that magic trick still work after Covid? In this installment of the Freakonomics ...
03.18.2021 455. Are You Ready for a Fresh Start? Behavioral scientists have been exploring if — and when — a psychological reset can lead to lasting change. We survey evidence from the London Underground, Major League Baseball, and New Year’s resolutions; we look at accidental fresh starts, forced fresh ...
03.11.2021 454. Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished? Americans are so accustomed to the standard intersection that we rarely consider how dangerous it can be — as well as costly, time-wasting, and polluting. Is it time to embrace the lowly, lovely roundabout?
03.04.2021 453. A Rescue Plan for Black America New York Times columnist Charles Blow argues that white supremacy in America will never fully recede, and that it’s time for Black people to do something radical about it. In The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, he urges ...
02.25.2021 Am I Boring You? (Ep. 225 Rebroadcast) Researchers are trying to figure out who gets bored — and why — and what it means for ourselves and the economy. But maybe there’s an upside to boredom?
02.18.2021 452. Jeff Immelt Knows He Let You Down Not so long ago, G.E. was the most valuable company in the world, a conglomerate that included everything from light bulbs and jet engines to financial services and The Apprentice. Now it’s selling off body parts to survive. What does ...
02.11.2021 451. Can I Ask You a Ridiculously Personal Question? Most of us are are afraid to ask sensitive questions about money, sex, politics, etc. New research shows this fear is largely unfounded. Time for some interesting conversations!
02.04.2021 450. How to Be Better at Death Caitlin Doughty is a mortician who would like to put herself out of business. Our corporate funeral industry, she argues, has made us forget how to offer our loved ones an authentic sendoff. Doughty is the author of Smoke Gets ...
01.28.2021 449. How to Fix the Incentives in Cancer Research For all the progress made in fighting cancer, it still kills 10 million people a year, and some types remain especially hard to detect and treat. Pancreatic cancer, for instance, is nearly always fatal. A new clinical-trial platform could change ...
01.21.2021 448. The Downside of Disgust It’s a powerful biological response that has preserved our species for millennia. But now it may be keeping us from pursuing strategies that would improve the environment, the economy, even our own health. So is it time to dial down ...
01.14.2021 447. How Much Do We Really Care About Children? They can’t vote or hire lobbyists. The policies we create to help them aren’t always so helpful. Consider the car seat: parents hate it, the safety data are unconvincing, and new evidence suggests an unintended consequence that is as anti-child ...
01.07.2021 446. “We Get All Our Great Stuff from Europe — Including Witch Hunting.” We’ve collected some of our favorite moments from People I (Mostly) Admire, the latest show from the Freakonomics Radio Network. Host Steve Levitt seeks advice from scientists and inventors, memory wizards and basketball champions — even his fellow economists. He ...
12.31.2020 Trust Me (Ep. 266 Rebroadcast) Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades — in part because our populations are more diverse. What can we do to fix ...
12.24.2020 445. Why Do We Seek Comfort in the Familiar? In this episode of No Stupid Questions — a Freakonomics Radio Network show launched earlier this year — Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth debate why we watch, read, and eat familiar things during a crisis, and if it might in ...
12.17.2020 444. How Do You Cure a Compassion Crisis? Patients in the U.S. healthcare system often feel they’re treated with a lack of empathy. Doctors and nurses have tragically high levels of burnout. Could fixing the first problem solve the second? And does the rest of society need more ...
12.10.2020 443. A Sneak Peek at Biden’s Top Economist The incoming president argues that the economy and the environment are deeply connected. This is reflected in his choice for National Economic Council director — Brian Deese, a climate-policy wonk and veteran of the no-drama-Obama era. But don’t mistake Deese’s ...
12.06.2020 PLAYBACK (2015): Could the Next Brooklyn Be ... Las Vegas?! Tony Hsieh, the longtime C.E.O. of Zappos, was an iconoclast and a dreamer. Five years ago, we sat down with him around a desert campfire to talk about those dreams. Hsieh died recently from injuries sustained in a house fire; ...
12.03.2020 442. Is it Too Late for General Motors to Go Electric? G.M. produces more than 20 times as many cars as Tesla, but Tesla is worth nearly 10 times as much. Mary Barra, the C.E.O. of G.M., is trying to fix that. We speak with her about the race toward an ...
11.26.2020 441. Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 2: Digital) Google and Facebook are worth a combined $2 trillion, with the vast majority of their revenue coming from advertising. In our previous episode, we learned that TV advertising is much less effective than the industry says. Is digital any better? ...
11.19.2020 440. Does Advertising Actually Work? (Part 1: TV) Companies around the world spend more than half-a-trillion dollars each year on ads. The ad industry swears by its efficacy — but a massive new study tells a different story.
11.12.2020 439. Please Get Your Noise Out of My Ears The modern world overwhelms us with sounds we didn’t ask for, like car alarms and cell-phone “halfalogues.” What does all this noise cost us in terms of productivity, health, and basic sanity?
11.05.2020 438. How to Succeed by Being Authentic (Hint: Carefully) John Mackey, the C.E.O. of Whole Foods, has learned the perils of speaking his mind. But he still says what he thinks about everything from “conscious leadership” to the behavioral roots of the obesity epidemic. He also argues for a ...
10.31.2020 Why the Left Had to Steal the Right’s Dark-Money Playbook The sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh spent years studying crack dealers, sex workers, and the offspring of billionaires. Then he wandered into an even stranger world: social media. He spent the past five years at Facebook and Twitter. Now that he’s back ...
10.29.2020 437. Many Businesses Thought They Were Insured for a Pandemic. They Weren’t. A fine reading of most policies for “business interruption” reveals that viral outbreaks aren’t covered. Some legislators are demanding that insurance firms pay up anyway. Is it time to rethink insurance entirely?
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.

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