Conventional programs tend to be expensive, onerous, and ineffective. Could something as simple (and cheap) as cognitive behavioral therapy do the trick? Also, can a Queen song, played backwards, improve your mind-reading skills? To find out more, check out the podcasts from which this hour was drawn: “‘It’s Fun to Smoke Marijuana’” and “Preventing Crime for Pennies […]
Jim Yong Kim has an unorthodox background for a World Bank president — and his reign has been just as unorthodox. He has just announced he’s stepping down, well before his term is over; we recorded this interview with him in 2015.
Season 7, Episode 5 This week on Freakonomics Radio: over 40 percent of U.S. births are to unmarried mothers, and the numbers are especially high among the less-educated. Why? One argument is that the decline in good manufacturing jobs led to a decline in “marriageable” men. Surely the fracking boom reversed that trend, right? Stephen J. Dubner investigates. […]
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How To Win A Nobel Prize" (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)
The gist: the Nobel selection process is famously secretive (and conducted in Swedish!) but we pry the lid off, at least a little bit.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Preventing Crime for Pennies on the Dollar” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)
Since its inception in 1944, the World Bank, a multilateral organization charged with financing the development of poor nations, has been led by macroeconomists, bankers, and government insiders. The White House’s 2012 nomination of President Jim Yong Kim -- a physician, anthropologist, and academic who used to advocate dismantling the Bank -- broke the mold. He is the focus of our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, "Hacking the World Bank." (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)
In less than three years, Kim has overhauled the Bank and laid out ambitious goals -- including a 2030 deadline to rescue the more than 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty. Kim is also -- along with the Bank’s chief economist Kaushik Basu -- eager to apply the insights of behavioral economics to development policy. That is the focus of Kim's conversation today with Stephen Dubner.
Our latest podcast is called “How to Think About Money, Choose Your Hometown, and Buy an Electric Toothbrush.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player in the post. You can also read the transcript below; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.) It’s another installment of our FREAK-quently Asked Questions, in which Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt answer questions from you, our readers and listeners.
Steve Reda, a 22-year-old in the Washington, D.C., area, asks if kids today are more careful using credit as opposed to cash. (It's a question that makes Dubner recall his salad days, back when he fell in love with economics and the "mental accounting" research done by Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.) This leads to a conversation about spending in general, which leads to Levitt’s counterintuitive advice for the youth of today (advice passed down from Milton Friedman to José Scheinkman and on to Levitt):
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “100 Ways to Fight Obesity.” (You can subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript; it includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)
Steve Levitt runs a consulting firm called The Greatest Good. It is occasionally hired by a philanthropist or foundation to look into societal problems. That's what happened recently, when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked The Greatest Good to put together a brainstorming session on childhood obesity. Stephen Dubner moderated the event. In this podcast, you get to be a fly on the wall as a dozen participants explore the biological, behavioral, political and economic angles of obesity.
When it comes to politics and media, the left argues that the right is more biased than the left while the right argues that the left is more biased than the right. Who’s right?
That's what we try to answer in our latest podcast, “How Biased Is Your Media?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) In a way, this episode is a follow-up to a podcast we put out a few months ago called "The Truth Is Out There, Isn't It?," which examined how we choose to believe what we believe about a variety of important issues. In this episode, we apply that same idea in a small-bore fashion, going after media bias.
Most people do what they can to avoid pain. That said, it's an inevitable part of life. So how do you deal with it?
That's the question we explore in our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast. We look into a few different kinds of pain, inflicted in different circumstances, to see what we can learn. The biggest takeaway: it's not necessarily how much something hurts; it's how you remember the pain.