What's the Best Way to Deliver Food Aid?
(Photo: Feed My Starving Children) The question of how best to deliver food aid is a controversial one. In recent years, economists like Dean Karlan and Ed Glaeser have suggested…
(Photo: Feed My Starving Children) The question of how best to deliver food aid is a controversial one. In recent years, economists like Dean Karlan and Ed Glaeser have suggested…
Researchers are trying to figure out who gets bored — and why — and what it means for ourselves and the economy. But maybe there’s an upside to boredom?
The “molecular gastronomy” movement — which gets a bump in visibility next month with the publication of the mammoth cookbook “Modernist Cuisine” — is all about bringing more science into…
What do a computer hacker, an Indiana farm boy, and Napoleon Bonaparte have in common? The past, present, and future of food science.
When you want to get rid of a nasty pest, one obvious solution comes to mind: just offer a cash reward. But be careful — because nothing backfires quite like…
Also: why do we hoard? (Rebroadcast From Ep. 28)…
Ecologist Suzanne Simard studies the relationships between trees in a forest: they talk to each other, punish each other, and depend on each other. What can we learn from them?
In the final episode of our whale series, we learn about fecal plumes, shipping noise, and why Moby-Dick is still worth reading. (Part 3 of “Everything You Never Knew About…
Need help accessing your private RSS feeds? Simply add them to your favorite podcast app via your Account Page. 1 Go to https://freakonomics.com/content. If you are not automatically recognized, enter…
Physicist Helen Czerski loves to explain how the world works. She talks with Steve about studying bubbles, setting off explosives, and how ocean waves have changed the course of history….
When a zoo needs an elephant, or finds itself with three surplus penguins, it doesn’t buy or sell the animals — it asks around. Zachary Crockett rattles the cages….
When the computer scientist Ben Zhao learned that artists were having their work stolen by A.I. models, he invented a tool to thwart the machines. He also knows how to…
Even with a new rat czar, an arsenal of poisons, and a fleet of new garbage trucks, it won’t be easy — because, at root, the enemy is us. (Part…
To most people, the rat is vile and villainous. But not to everyone! We hear from a scientist who befriended rats and another who worked with them in the lab…
The Freakonomics blog is now available on the New York Times‘s mobile site, which offers a full (yes, full) text feed of each day’s newspaper stories and blog posts in…
One of the most storied (and valuable) sports franchises in the world had fallen far. So they decided to do a full reboot — and it worked: this week, they…
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…
Dubner and his Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt answer your questions about crime, traffic, real-estate agents, the Ph.D. glut, and how to not get eaten by a bear.
There are all kinds of civics-class answers to that question. But how true are they? Could it be that we like to read about war, politics, and miscellaneous heartbreak simply…
What do you do when smart people keep making stupid mistakes? And: are we a nation of financial illiterates? This is a “mashupdate” of “Is America Ready for a “No-Lose…
Nobel laureate, bestselling author, and groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman is also a friend and former business partner of Steve’s. In discussing Danny’s new book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,…
The San Francisco 49ers, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, also used to be one of the best. But they’ve been losing lately — a lot…
The prisoner’s dilemma is a classic game-theory problem. Robert, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has spent his career studying it — and the ways humans can cooperate,…
Harvard economist Raj Chetty uses tax data to study inequality, kid success, and social mobility. He explains why you should be careful when choosing your grade school teachers — and…
Former professional poker player Annie Duke has a new book on Steve’s favorite subject: quitting. They talk about why quitting is so hard, how to do it sooner, and why…
How can we distinguish between laziness and patience? Why do people do crossword puzzles? And how is Angie like a combination of a quantum computer and a Sherman tank? Take…
He was handed the keys to the global economy just as it started heading off a cliff. Fortunately, he’d seen this movie before.
Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, EatWith, and other companies in the “sharing economy” are practically daring government regulators to shut them down. The regulators are happy to comply.
There ain’t no such thing as a free parking spot. Somebody has to pay for it — and that somebody is everybody.
When Freakonomics co-authors Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner first met, one of them hated the other. Two decades later, Levitt grills Dubner about asking questions, growing the pie, and what…
