A Family of Gift-Maximizers
…you like to be a member of T.K.’s family? Do you find his stepfather’s buyouts clever or repugnant? And finally: if you had to buy T.K. a gift based on…
…you like to be a member of T.K.’s family? Do you find his stepfather’s buyouts clever or repugnant? And finally: if you had to buy T.K. a gift based on…
You might think that someone with a 50-50 chance of getting a fatal disease would want to know for sure — but you would be wrong. What does this say…
How many bottles of wine are regifted? What’s wrong with giving cash? And should Angela give her husband a subscription to the Sausage of the Month Club?
Freakonomics asks a dozen smart people for their best ideas. Get ready for a fat tax, a sugar ban, and a calorie-chomping tapeworm.
Gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna worries that humanity might not be ready for the technology she helped develop….
From a reader named William Haisley: I’m a weekly columnist for the Daily Collegian, the Penn State newspaper, where I currently attend law school. Today my column about why I…
Corporations and rich people donate billions to their favorite think tanks and foundations. Should we be grateful for their generosity — or suspicious of their motives?
After eight years and more than 300 episodes, it was time to either 1) quit, or 2) make the show bigger and better. We voted for number 2. Here’s a…
(Illustrator: Niklas Elmehed, Copyright: Nobel Media AB) Hearty congratulations to Harvard economist Al Roth (now at Stanford), whose work has been featured on many occasions here at the Freakonomics blog!…
Dubner and Levitt talk about fixing the post office, putting cameras in the classroom, and wearing hats.
Women hold fewer than one in 10 patents. Why? And what are we missing out on?
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…
Also: why don’t you need a license to become a parent?…
How did a freshly looted Egyptian antiquity end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why did it take Kim Kardashian to crack the case? And how much of what…
Turkey sex and chicken wings, selling souls and swapping organs, the power of the president and the price of wine: these are a few of our favorite things
In this episode, we speculate what would happen if economists got to run the world. Hear from a high-end call girl; an Estonian who ran his country according to the…
When the uncelebrated Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League, it wasn’t just the biggest underdog story in recent history. It was a sign of changing economics —…
