Season 7, Episode 49 Clever ways to not waste our waste, and there’s a nasty secret about hot-button topics like global warming: knowledge is not always power. To find out more, check out the podcasts from which this hour was drawn: “Weird Recycling” and “The Truth Is Out There…Isn’t It?”
The bad news: roughly 70 percent of Americans are financially illiterate. The good news: all the important stuff can fit on one index card. Here’s how to become your own financial superhero.
Season 7, Episode 4 The bad news: roughly 70 percent of Americans are financially illiterate. The good news: all the important stuff can fit on one index card. This week on Freakonomics Radio: how to become your own financial superhero. Plus: Stephen J. Dubner brings you the tale of the $15 tomato. To find out more, […]
The bad news: roughly 70 percent of Americans are financially illiterate. The good news: all the important stuff can fit on one index card. Here’s how to become your own financial superhero.
Season 3, Episode 3
Until not so long ago, chicken feet were essentially waste material. Now they provide enough money to keep U.S. chicken producers in the black -- by exporting 300,000 metric tons of chicken “paws” to China and Hong Kong each year. In the first part of this hour-long episode of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner explores this and other examples of weird recycling. We hear the story of a Cleveland non-profit called MedWish, which ships unused or outdated hospital equipment to hospitals in poor countries around the world. We also hear Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myhrvold describe a new nuclear-power reactor that runs on radioactive waste.
Our latest podcast is called "What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?" (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) It explores the idea that most problems are solved by more education -- except when they're not.
You'll hear Michael Langberg, chief medical officer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, talk about why doctors there (and elsewhere) routinely fail to wash their hands despite the evidence suggesting they must:
LANGBERG: There’s something in the human condition that somehow disconnects what is really good evidence from personal choice and habit. And I don’t know why that is. I’m not a psychiatrist; my field is internal medicine. I just have the observation. Physicians are no different.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “The Truth Is Out There…Isn’t It?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) In it, we try to answer a few fundamental questions: how do we know that what we believe is true? How do we decide which information to trust? And how do we quantify risk -- from climate change to personal investments?
The program begins with Stephen Greenspan, a psychologist and an expert on “social incompetence” and gullibility. He knows from personal experience that even the smartest people can be duped into bad risk assessments, especially on the advice of people they trust.