How About a Free Market for College Athletes?
In 2010, CBS and Turner Broadcasting agreed to pay $10.8 billion to broadcast the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from 2011 to 2024. As a result of this contract, fans of…
In 2010, CBS and Turner Broadcasting agreed to pay $10.8 billion to broadcast the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from 2011 to 2024. As a result of this contract, fans of…
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…
Does Las Vegas increase your risk of suicide? A researcher embeds himself in the city where Americans are most likely to kill themselves.
…by amounts far greater than any possible revenue gains. Tobacco taxes only cover about 20 percent of tobacco-related costs, and alcohol taxes only cover about 10 percent of alcohol-related costs….
Our podcast “Government Employees Gone Wild” was about The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, a guide published by the U.S. Department of Defense that details the true stories of big screw-ups…
It’s an acutely haphazard way of paying workers, and yet it keeps expanding. We dig into the data to find out why.
In 2016, David Cameron held a referendum on whether the U.K. should stay in the European Union. A longtime Euroskeptic, he nevertheless led the Remain campaign. So what did Cameron…
The restaurant business model is warped: kitchen wages are too low to hire cooks, while diners are put in charge of paying the waitstaff. So what happens if you eliminate…
The restaurant business model is warped: kitchen wages are too low to hire cooks, while diners are put in charge of paying the waitstaff. So what happens if you eliminate…
Broadway operates on a winner-take-most business model. A runaway hit like Stereophonic — which just won five Tony Awards — will create a few big winners. But even the stars…
It’s a haphazard way of paying workers, and yet it keeps expanding. With federal tax policy shifting in a pro-tip direction, we revisit an episode from 2019 to find out…
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz combs through mountains of information to find advice for everyday life….
Museums are purging their collections of looted treasures. Can they also get something in return? And what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century? (Part 3…
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,…
Big investors are buying up local veterinary practices (and pretty much everything else). What does this mean for scruffy little Max* — and for the U.S. economy? (Part 1 of…
The world’s great museums are full of art and artifacts that were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm. Now there’s a push to return these works to…
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…
Advertisers have always been adept at manipulating our emotions. Now they’re using behavioral economics to get even better.
He’s the award-winning author of hugely popular books like Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; and Upheaval. But Jared actually started his varied career as an expert on gallbladders and birds….
Boys and men are trending downward in education, employment, and mental health. Richard Reeves, author of the book Of Boys and Men, has some solutions that don’t come at the…
What happens when a public health researcher deep in coal country argues that mountaintop mining endangers the entire community? Hint: it doesn’t go very well.
We explore votes for English, Indonesian and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve…
A conversation with former Major League Baseball player and current E.S.P.N. analyst Mark Teixeira, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
Nobel laureate, bestselling author, and groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman died in March. In 2021 he talked with Steve Levitt — his friend and former business partner — about his book…
Nobel laureate, bestselling author, and groundbreaking psychologist Daniel Kahneman died in March. In 2021 he talked with Steve Levitt — his friend and former business partner — about his book…
Bapu Jena was already a double threat: a doctor who is also an economist. Now he’s a podcast host too. In this sneak preview of the Freakonomics Radio Network’s newest…
Every language has its taboo words (which many people use all the time). But the list of forbidden words is always changing — and those changes tell us some surprising…
Executives shell out millions of dollars for the privilege of flying private — but that convenience comes at a steep cost to the rest of us. Zachary Crockett prepares for…
Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li had a wild idea: download one billion images from the internet and teach a computer to recognize them. She ended up advancing the state of artificial…
…believe in. So, my rule is: Don’t sign anything. Having your name attached to something you don’t believe in is far worse than not having your name attached something you…
