Stephen Dubner, live on stage, mixes it up with outbound mayor London Breed, and asks economists whether A.I. can be “human-centered” and if Tang is a gateway drug….
Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify…
…new runways and introduce new technologies is most accurately measured in decades. Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group: This summer, as Virgin America launched, I was asked…
Stephen Dubner’s conversation with the Facebook founder and C.E.O., recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.”…
How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to the market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on “dream patients” who aren’t representative of…
Boosters say blockchain technology will usher in a brave new era of decentralization. Are they right — and would it be a dream or a nightmare? (Part 3 of “What…
…responses to some of your questions. A Billion Wicked Thoughts Freakonomics Q&A By Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam Since we’ve written a book offering new ideas about a very intimate…
Most industries have become more productive over time. But not construction! We identify the causes — and possible solutions. (Can you say … “prefab”?)…
Annamaria Lusardi, whose ground-breaking research on financial literacy has been featured here several times, has put out a new working paper (with co-authors Pierre-Carl Michaud and Olivia S. Mitchell) that…
…Council of Economic Advisers chairmen discuss the role of financial illiteracy in the recession. And economist Annamaria Lusardi and legal scholar Lauren Willis offer their solutions to the problem. Two…
Annamaria Lusardi has been researching financial literacy for years. She has co-authored a new working paper (abstract; PDF) with Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Rob Alessie, and Maarten van Rooij called “How Financially…
…by and chat with so many of the economists whose work I admire: Levitt, of course (who gave a bundle of papers, most of them new and some quite interesting),…
Annamaria Lusardi, one of the leading academic lights of financial literacy, has begun a new Financial Literacy Center “to develop and test innovative programs to improve financial literacy and promote…
We blogged a while back about the sad state of financial literacy in this country. This has been diligently investigated by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, who insert a…
Not long ago, I wrote about the sad state of financial literacy in the U.S., and how some people, like Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth, are proposing widespread education to fix…
How does comparing yourself to others affect your well-being? What do you do when there’s no one left to blame? And should we all just move to Finland?…
The union that represents N.F.L. players conducted their first-ever survey of workplace conditions, and issued a report card to all 32 teams. What did the survey reveal? Clogged showers, rats…
…the machines. He also knows how to foil an eavesdropping Alexa and how to guard your online footprint. The big news, he says, is that the A.I. bubble is bursting….
The environmentalists say we’re doomed if we don’t drastically reduce consumption. The technologists say that human ingenuity can solve just about any problem. A debate that’s been around for decades…
How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on “dream patients” who aren’t representative of a…
After a huge false start, electric cars are finally about to flourish. We speak with a technology historian about this all-too-common story, and what it means for innovation everywhere….
Three university presidents try to answer our listeners’ questions. The result? Not much pomp and a whole lot of circumstance.
…the following scenario: home prices did not fall at all last year, but one day you took $18,000 out of the bank to pay cash for a new car, and…
Is it O.K. to bother people for a good cause? Why do people donate to charity in the first place? And do those personalized address labels actually make people get…
Owen Flanagan’s newest book details his 20-year dependence on alcohol and pills — and outlines his research on what addiction can tell us about the nature of consciousness….
Flying in the U.S. is still exceptionally safe, but the system relies on outdated tech and is under tremendous strain. Six experts tell us how it got this way and…
Celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli joins us to co-host an evening of delicious fact-finding: where a trillion oysters went, whether a soda tax can work, and how beer helped build an…
When Stephen Dubner learned that Dallas–Fort Worth will soon overtake Chicago as the third-biggest metro area in the U.S., he got on a plane to find out why. Despite getting…
…even more to the point, who is to say what is new, and what is merely old wine in a new bottle, or the same car with a new tail-fin?…
Artificial intelligence, we’ve been told, will destroy humankind. No, wait — it will usher in a new age of human flourishing! Guest host Adam Davidson (co-founder of Planet Money) sorts…
