Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast
That’s the question we ask in our latest podcast. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript here.) Anyone who has been around long enough can observe that hitchhiking numbers have plummeted. So Freakonomics Radio set out to find the numbers on thumbers and found … well, not much. Apparently hitchhiking never qualified as an important-enough mode of the transportation sector to generate heavy-duty empirical research.
So we take a whack at explaining the phenomenon. Here’s Levitt’s take:
Read More »LEVITT: Hitchhiking is a classic example of what an economist would call a matching market, where there’s a person who wants a ride, and there’s a person who’s willing to give a ride. There was some sort of equilibrium in which there was a set of people who wanted to hitchhike, and there was a set of people who were willing to pick them up. And somehow that equilibrium got destroyed. So the question is what happened to the equilibrium?
Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone? Full Transcript
This is a transcript of the Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?”
Stephen J. DUBNER: I was out in California not long ago and I saw somebody doing something that I hadn’t seen done in a long time – something I used to do, during college, out of necessity. What do you think it was? Go ahead, think about it. I posted this riddle on the Freakonomics blog. You want to hear some of the answers I got? Here you go: Eating ramen noodles … using a phone book … hanging wet laundry on a clothesline … inserting a floppy disk … All right, those are all perfectly fine answers. But not what I’m looking for.
DUBNER: Jason, what are we watching here?
Jason ZINOMAN: This is the beginning of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with these kids are going to visit a graveyard and they pick up a pretty scraggily looking hitchhiker.
DUBNER: Jason Zinoman is a theater critic for The New York Times, and the author of a book called Shock Value, about horror films of the 1970’s. So in this movie, a van full of teenagers decide, after some debate, to pick up a hitchhiker. He just got off his shift at the slaughterhouse – his face is streaked with blood, and he’s talking about bludgeoning cows to death. Read More »
Rules of The Game
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
Michael asked:
Read More »“The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there’s no telling what that idiot is going to do.”
Radio in Progress: Boo!
A few months ago we asked readers a basic question: “Do you boo?” Judging by the number (and nature) of comments the post solicited, the answer is yes. The question was asked as part of an upcoming Freakonomics Radio episode that’s all about booing. To borrow the words of one of our guests, writer Robert Lipsyte, we ask: Is booing verbal vandalism, or is it one of the last true expressions of democracy?
For the audience at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, it’s the latter. We recently visited for its talent showcase, Amateur Night. There, booing—and cheering—is a way of voting, to decide who advances to the next round of competition. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 