Here’s the scene: a woman on New York’s Upper West Side walks into Le Pain Quotidien, a high-end café chain. She sits down, orders a salad. The salad arrives. The contents: a) leafy greens and b) an entire dead mouse. Two nearby customers, one of whom happened to be Stephen Dubner, saw the scene unfold.
No one wants to be called a quitter. And absolutely no one wants to be the guy who tells other people to quit … except maybe Stephen Dubner. Today on Marketplace, Dubner explains the virtues of quitting to Tess Vigeland, making the case that people don’t quit enough.
What if $10 could buy you a 50 percent increase in how much a child learned in a school year? On Marketplace today, Stephen J. Dubner reports on how two economists, Paul Glewwe (rhymes with ‘heavy’) and Albert Park, improved test scores by giving away $10 eyeglasses to schoolchildren with poor eyesight in China’s rural […]
The nation is facing pain on many fronts -- financial, governmental, personal. So what do we know about how to deal with it, sell it and forget it? We'll ask a doctor, a hockey player and a governor for their tips.
We here at Freakonomics Radio are connoisseurs of the repugnant idea. When the timid turn away in disgust, we inch closer. Why? Because hidden in the muck of repugnant ideas, sometimes at least, are brilliant solutions (and also, frankly, because we just can’t help ourselves). On the Freakonomics Radio year-end Marketplace segment, Stephen Dubner reports […]