If you’re a fan of behavioral economics on the radio, check out BBC Radio 4’s new weekly program The Human Zoo. It is hosted by Michael Blastland, a journalist, and Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick. Chater is also on the advisory board of the British Government’s Behavioral Insights Team (or “Nudge Unit”), which you heard about in the Freakonomics podcast “The Tax Man Nudgeth.” Human Zoo episodes are accompanied by online experiments.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Tax Man Nudgeth.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
The U.S. tax code is almost universally seen as onerous and overly complicated. There is always talk in Washington about serious reform — Michigan Reps. Dave Camp (R.) and Sander Levin (D.) are currently working on it — but, Washington being Washington, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.
So in this podcast we decided to take a look at the tax code we’re stuck with for now and see if there are some improvements, however marginal, that are worth thinking about. We start by discussing the “tax gap,” the huge portion of taxes that simply go uncollected for a variety of reasons. We once wrote about a clever man who helped close the gap a bit. In this episode, former White House economist Austan Goolsbee tells us why the government doesn’t try too hard to collect tax on all the cash that sloshes around the economy.
You’ll also hear from Dan Ariely, who has an idea for turning the act of paying taxes into a somewhat more satisfying civic duty.