Introducing the Freakonomics Podcast Archive
When we began our Freakonomics Radio podcast back in early 2010, it was something between a lark and an experiment. But we have produced 75 episodes by now, so it seemed time to gather all the episodes in one place. Here’s our new Freakonomics Podcast Archive, color-coded for your convenience to denote our three types of content: original podcasts (usually between 20 and 30 minutes long); our regular Marketplace segments (5 or 6 minutes long); and our 1-hour specials that air on public-radio stations across the country. Among our most popular podcasts to date: “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” and “How Much Does the President of the U.S. Really Matter?”
You can of course subscribe via iTunes (where Freakonomics Radio occasionally hits the No. 1 ranking) or listen via our RSS feed.
Hope you enjoy; feedback welcome.
Latest Posts
Hope and Poverty
Is there a role for hope in poverty alleviation programs? According to a recent speech by economist Esther Duflo, there is. Duflo looked at a BRAC program in West Bengal; program participants were given a “small productive asset” (a cow, a goat, or some chickens) and a small stipend to encourage participants not to immediately eat the animal. The results were significant:
Read More »Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the BRAC programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).
How Does It Feel to Get Booed?
If you remember our podcast “Boo…Who?” (which was included in the hour-long special “Show and Yell“), you’ll know we love the topic of booing. David Herman, our sound engineer at Freakonomics Radio, experienced some first-hand booing last week. He wrote it up as a guest post:
How Does It Feel to Get Booed?
By David Herman
Last weekend, I visited the Bell House in Brooklyn to hear the Budos Band, an afrobeat-inspired 10-piece instrumental group from Staten Island. According to the venue’s online ticket page, the show was slated to start at 9:00 PM. But 9:00 came and went, and then 10:00… 10:30… Granted, I’ve come to accept that no band will ever go on less than 30 minutes late, but this seemed to be pushing the bounds of good taste.
At about 10:45, the band made its way onstage from the wings. The (sold-out) house was packed with around 300 people, each of whom had paid $15 plus drinks. So as soon as the group got into position, almost two hours late, what happened?
“BOOOOOO!” Read More »
The Advantages of Looking “Trustworthy”
We’ve blogged before about the many advantages of being beautiful. New research indicates that looking “trustworthy” carries some benefits as well:
In a paper recently published in the PLoS One journal, researchers from Warwick Business School, the University College London and Dartmouth College, USA, carried out a series of experiments to see if people made decisions to trust others based on their faces.
They found people are more likely to invest money in someone whose face is generally perceived as trustworthy, even when they are given negative information about this person’s reputation.
“Trustworthiness is one of the most important traits for social and economic interactions and our study examines whether people take potentially costly actions in line with their face-based trustworthiness judgments,” said Dr. Chris Olivola, one of the study’s authors. ”It seems we are still willing to go with our own instincts about whether we think someone looks like we can trust them.”
Now the only trick is for people who aren’t in fact trustworthy at all to appear as if they are. Or, as it’s been said before: Once you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.
(HT: Naked Capitalism)
The Economics of Busking
Equilibration in a competitive or monopolistically competitive market is slow. It takes time for new businesses to perceive excess profits and to enter the market. But not always.
Like many major European venues, the Plaza Mayor in Madrid has many buskers operating. One busker had a particularly clever shtick: Dressed up like an infant in a stroller, he would squeal and squawk, especially whenever someone put money his jar. Many kids, and even this adult, did exactly that. In the 5 minutes I watched at least 10 people gave him something. BUT: Near the end of that time, other buskers, who had been observing him, moved their routines closer to his. His flow of customers diminished, with some going to the other, now nearby buskers. He still was attracting more money than the others, but his excess profits had been reduced by the new competition.
The Best Third-Grade Teacher Ever
One of the most important economic issues we face today is how much to spend on education, both individually and as a society. As tax revenues decline due to demographic changes and deteriorating business conditions, municipalities have to make tough choices about which programs to cut, and education is often an early victim. Because we don’t yet have good measures of all the future benefits produced by better education today, school programs are easy targets for cost-cutting measures, especially in lower-income regions where parents are focused on meeting more basic needs and less likely to put up a fight. But experiments like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone hint at the enormous impact that early educational support can have on lifetime achievement.
I have my own example: Mrs. Ficalora, the best third-grade teacher ever. Read More »
Raising Money to Teach Math
A reader named Karim Kai Ani writes:
Read More »Guy walks into a bar and says, “We’ve got this math curriculum that everyone is saying is the bomb (a dangerous thing to say when you have my name, but go with me), and we’re Kickstarting a video series to offer teachers a new vision of what it means to teach math.”
And the waitress says, “You should see if the dudes from Freakonomics would tweet about it. Didn’t they mention Mathalicious on their blog once?”
Mike Brown Vs. Mike Brown
Thanks to @PE_Mulroe via Twitter, here’s a story from the (Northwest Indiana) Post-Tribune that combines two of our favorite topics: elections and first names. It’s called “A Tale of Two Mike Browns in Lake County Politics”:
Read More »Did Mike Brown, the candidate for recorder, intentionally run on the name recognition earned by former recorder and Lake County Clerk Mike Brown?
The candidate says no. Incumbent Recorder Michelle Fajman and party boss Tom McDermott Jr. say yes. And the clerk with the same name? Well, as someone who backed Fajman in the election, he’s just sorry if anyone cast a ballot without knowing who was who.
Pushing My Luck on the Preakness
The dangerous thing about gambling is that you happen to win sometimes just by chance. The gambler is quick to take credit for successes, but can always find some external factor to blame for losses.
Case in point: my Kentucky Derby picks. I picked three horses out of twenty starters: one to win, one to place, and one to show. The horse I picked to win had some terrible luck, hurting his ankle and eventually finishing 19th.
The horse I picked for second, I’ll Have Another, ended up winning the race. Bodemeister, my third-place pick, finished second. A two dollar exacta-box on my top three horses would have cost $12 and would have returned $306.
I also picked a horse to finish last, Daddy Long Legs, and he indeed finished dead last.
So, like the gambler I am, I take credit for the good outcomes, and write off my horse finishing 19th as merely bad luck.
And, of course, that means I will push my luck on the Preakness, which goes off today.
I wish I had more exciting picks, but this time my algorithm likes the two favorites, Bodemeister and I’ll Have Another. For third, I’d go with Optimizer.
How Will Rio’s Arrest Bounty Play Out?
An interesting e-mail from a reader:
Read More »Hello. My name is Thiago, and I am writing from Brazil. I always read freakonomics posts thru my rss reader and I saw a news today that inspired me to write to you.
Rio de Janeiro’s police started a new policy to incentivize cops to arrest the most wanted drug dealers. The prize: 15 days off and one weekend in a beautiful island at Angra dos Reis with all costs included.I wondered if this incentive will have a positive effect, whereas there are bad cops who are bribed by drug dealers. What if these bad officers began to been rewarded by drug dealer with tickets to Disney instead of arrest them?
When Graffiti Strikes Back
We’ve written a few times about what we call reverse incentives: comedian and activist Dick Gregory‘s use of the N word; Planned Parenthood turning abortion protestors into a fund-raising scheme; and the “pledge-a-picket” drive.
The latest instance comes from fashion designer Marc Jacobs. It began when the graffiti artist Kidult vandalized Jacobs’s SoHo shop by scrawling “ART” across the storefront. A Twitter war followed, but Jacobs wasn’t done. As The New York Observer reports: Read More »
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