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Episode 105

Should You Give Kids an Allowance or Make Them Get Jobs?

How do kids learn about money? What’s the big problem with education? And who made Raiders of the Lost Ark?…

Episode 116

Women Are Not Men (Replay)

In many ways, the gender gap is closing. In others, not so much. And that’s not always a bad thing.

Episode 73

Turning Work into Play

How psychologist Dan Gilbert went from high school dropout to Harvard professor, found the secret of joy, and inspired Steve Levitt’s divorce….

PLUS

The Crime Nerd Behind UChicago’s Crime Lab

The economist Jens Ludwig on the culture of police departments, the politics of gun control, and why there’s no social progress without truth.

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Campus Crime Junk Stats?

The Education Life supplement in yesterday’s Times included an intriguing article simply called “Data” and subtitled “Law and Order.” It listed crime statistics for roughly 120 urban college campuses across…



Where Is All the Hard-Time Crime?

Despite the recession, the Associated Press reports, U.S. crime rates continue to fall in 2009 compared to last year. Sociologists and crime experts are citing the economic stimulus, people staying…



Global Warming Vs. Street Crime

…conscience: Earlier this year, Joplin, Mo., reported a 47% drop in crime since 2007, when it started adding or replacing more than 1,000 lights throughout the city to reduce crime….




Episode 46

Misadventures in Baby-Making

We are constantly wowed by new technologies and policies meant to make childbirth better. But beware the unintended consequences.



What Do You Do With Your Pennies?

…have gone on the record as saying that I try to avoid getting pennies whenever I can, and sometimes even throw them away. What do you do with your pennies?…



Finally, a Use for Pennies!

the new Standard Hotel in New York, the one straddling the High Line. The Standard tells us that it used 250 pennies per square foot, or 480,000 pennies in all….



Episode 206

Ten Years of Freakonomics

Dubner and Levitt are live onstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York to celebrate their new book “When to Rob a Bank” — and a decade of working…

Episode 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…

The Bright Side of Crime

for a well-lighted one. The New Yorker‘s David Owen explains: Lighting is effective in preventing crime mainly if it enables people to notice criminal activity as it’s taking place, and…



Do It Without Your Gun

crime. Particularly in inner city contexts, police sometimes have to make a trade off between preventing crime and limiting the consequences of bad behavior. For example — cops as well…




Episode 37

Sendhil Mullainathan Thinks Messing Around Is the Best Use of Your Time

He’s a professor of computation and behavioral science at the University of Chicago, MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, and author. Steve and Sendhil laugh their way through a conversation about the

‘The Today Show’

…So with crime, for instance, he saw that crime in the ‘9–in the early ’90s started to fall and fall and fall, no one could come up with all the



Does Military Service Lead to Crime?

…find offsetting impacts on nonviolent crime and hypothesize that “military service may not change an individual’s propensity to commit crime but instead may cause them to commit more-severe crimes involving…




Recession? Check. So Where's the Crime?

Now that New York City has been divested of its Wall Street riches and boomtime economy, it can go back to being a crime-infested war zone, right? Wrong. Violent crime



Crime in The Wilson Quarterly

In the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, there’s a “Crime and Punishment” section featuring Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig‘s “Economist’s Guide to Crime-Busting” (gated), which considers the most…



Crime as Elevation

What if crime were depicted as elevation? In San Francisco, prostitution would look like two enormous peaks on one side of the city. Doug McCune is the creator of the



Does the Highway Patrol Keep Us Safe?

…on crime rates, due to what’s called the “simultaneity” of causation. We might suppose police deter crime. But ironically, we often see lots of police in high-crime areas, not because…



Robert Reich Answers Your Labor Questions

Theoretically, the Treasury (along with the finance ministries of other major economic powers) could temporarily raise the value of the dollar by buying dollars. But this would only work temporarily….



Episode 181

Fixing the World, Bang-for-the-Buck Edition

A team of economists has been running the numbers on the U.N.’s development goals. They have a different view of how those billions of dollars should be spent.

Episode 14

Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?

They should! It’s a cardinal rule: more expensive items are supposed to be qualitatively better than their cheaper versions. But is that true for wine?

Episode 181

Fixing the World, Bang-for-the-Buck Edition (Replay)

A team of economists has been running the numbers on the U.N.’s development goals. They have a different view of how those billions of dollars should be spent.