Freakonomics Radio - 206. Ten Years of Freakonomics

Episode Date: May 14, 2015

Dubner and Levitt are live onstage at the 92nd Street Y in New York to celebrate their new book "When to Rob a Bank" -- and a decade of working together.

you're rolling hey levin dubner you nervous no i'm not nervous we've done this before what what have we done before we have gone on stage together with a moderator who has the fate of this show in her hands. Tell the people where we are, what we're doing, and why. We're at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and we are bringing our new book, Winderaba Bank, into the public spectacle. Does that make any sense? Yeah, that's good.

I don't think that's a real idiom, but I like how you kind of pretended it was one and just went with it. That's good. And it's May 5th, 2015. Pub day. So this is the day that the book is coming out. And we're in a green room, which is actually green. We're ready to start. Okay, let's do it.

Tell me what you're about to do. We are lurking in the wings of the 92nd Street Y as the introducer introduces the moderator, and then the moderator will introduce us, and then we'll go out there and talk. Are you excited? Yeah, it's going to be fun. He just called us distinguished guests.

You said you had a man crush on us. This is getting crazy. I don't think anyone's ever said they had a man crush on me before. Not true. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to our moderator and our distinguished guests. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Steve Levitt and I just put out a new book called When to Rob a Bank.

It's a collection of the best writing from our blog, 10 years worth. As part of the book tour, we were invited to speak at the 92nd Street Y in New York, which is one of my favorite cultural institutions in the world, partly because I live in New York, but mostly because over the years, the Y has hosted a who's who of artists, politicians, intellectuals, and now even us. The event was called The Best of Freakonomics and the moderator was the great Faith Saley.

You may know her from public radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me or from CBS Sunday Morning. She's also working on her first book. Faith got the evening started by offering up a summary of Freakonomics that was better than anything we could have come up with. Let's kind of just in broad strokes do a little refresher about what Freakonomics kind of means. If you don't already know that a lot of drug dealers live with their mothers, if you named your daughter Olivia and are shocked to find out that seven other girls in her class are named Olivia, right? If you don't know why David Lee Roth didn't want any brown M&Ms in his backstage dressing room, then you need to go back to their books. Freakonomics is a way of looking at the world, right?

It's bucking conventional wisdom, or at least being skeptical of it. It's following data, right? And not trying to mold it, not trying to put order on it and tell it to behave. And saying, I don't know. You guys like to say that a lot. Often.

Well, I don't know. You guys like to say that a lot. Often. And I don't know how often, but yeah. And then from, from your penultimate book, Think Like a Freak, you talk a lot about being childlike. You just use penultimate in a sentence. I've never heard that. You did it really, really well. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So on the childlike note, I just want to read this description of Levitt. This is from Time Magazine. Imagine a whip-smart economist with a sprawling imagination. Now imagine he's nine years old and wants to know everything.

That's the basic profile of Stephen Levitt. What's the average age of Dubner, would you say? I think Dubner's about 17. Oh, so you're like the elder in this? Yeah, don't you? You think you're younger? Younger than you? Yeah. I do feel I'm more responsible than you somehow.

You have more of a plan. I have more of a plan. You worry more. It's not that you're childlike in the way that you're reckless necessarily, but childlike in the way that a child can be oblivious because he or she is so enmeshed in the thinking like you'll be like thinking or having a conversation on a phone in a place where it is just inappropriate in every way to do what you're doing and you just have no idea and therefore it becomes like not inappropriate uh i remember we

were riding a train you're one of the first people to remember the train yeah and and he's having this phone conversation literally as if there's no one else in the world which is like a sign of focus or some oblivion and uh but i think that that you know i realized a long time ago when you write about or with people who do unusual things right so like So like, Levitt is an unusual scholar. A lot of the people that we've written about in our books are similarly unusual scholars or researchers. Sudhir Venkatesh comes to mind,

this guy who Levitt worked with a lot, who did research on drug dealers and other stuff. And you realize that when people do very unusual things, particularly for a living, that we really appreciate, we can't also then turn it around and just say, but I want them to be exactly normal in every other way, right? The things that make people extraordinary almost inherently dictate that they're going to be kind of not normal in the way that we think are normal people. So rather than say, well, I love that guy's work, but he's really weird in this way or whatnot, I like to just think of them as these

are unusual people, and we appreciate the upside, and we kind of, you know, the other oblivious part, it's cool. We just live with it. Well, you're a great thinker and talented in your own right. Thank you very much. Nice of you to say. Are Levitt, is Dubner not normal in meaningful ways? No, I think he's pretty normal. I would say Dubner, he has an amazing touch for listening and getting people to talk about things they wouldn't talk to anyone else about. And it's a really hard thing, and not many people can do it. But if you're just in a very puppy-dog-ish way, you get excited about what people have to say.

And I think that's a great infectious quality. And that's kind of childlike, too. Can you guys talk about what you mean when you suggest that we all, to think like a freak, that we use childlike minds? Me or you? Me? So I would, I mean, there's a sense in which society pins us down and tells us the way,

like there's things you're supposed to do and not supposed to do. And you think a lot about the other person. And you learn not to follow the thing that interests you or the joy and live for the moment. I mean, a lot of pressure, I think. And, like, you know, I wrote this paper about abortion and crime. And it was a long time ago, in the 90s.

And my co-author was John Donahue. And after it became controversial, he was very upset. He said, I don't get invited to parties anymore. People are so upset at what we wrote in that said, I don't get invited to parties anymore. People are so upset at what we wrote in that paper, I don't get invited to parties. And he thought that was bad. And I think if you live in a world where you care about whether you get invited to parties,

then you have a hard time being true to what you want to be. And I think we've kind of adopted the stance that we don't care if we get invited to parties. And we're lucky, you know, we're lucky enough to have a platform and the freedom to, like, not have real jobs and pursue what we love. And that's a, I don't know,

that's a wonderful thing to have. And I think we just live in it and don't worry about it. What do you think? Yeah, I agree with you. I think the other thing of thinking like a child that's valuable to me, at least, is that when you have kids,

like my kids are 14 and 13 now, and especially when they're younger, children are always asking these questions that seem outlandish and outrageous and ridiculous and maybe even worthless a lot, right? But then some of them are just the kind of questions that a very curious mind has when you're trying to figure out

the way the world works and what a system is. But then that kind of gets beaten out of us as we get older. But that true, true curiosity about trying to figure out how things really work rather than just say, oh, I guess that's because everybody says it's the way it is. So that's the part of the child-likeness

that I like to carry forth. I think that we can inspire other people to carry forth. It's also just a lot more fun to be around people who have, whether it's, you know, an infectious curiosity or a genuine interest in learning how things work rather than accepting what gets fed. That's the fun. And then figuring out stuff on your own, too, the way kids will muck around to try to put together something. You know, to have a question one day about, you know, hey, where'd all the hitchhikers go? Or, hey, I wonder, you know, why when you go to Norway, this tiny country, there are more Teslas, these $90,000 cars being driven in Norway than anywhere else on earth except for the United States. And you just walk around, ask these ridiculous questions, but then some of them are worth following,

and then you find a way to follow them and get data and talk to smart people, and you solve a little riddle. And just what you said, where did all the hitchhikers go? Are you working on this? We did that one, yeah. We did a podcast on that. So it turns out that, as best as we can tell, media coverage of hitchhiker violence or violence against hitchhikers, but sometimes by hitchhikers, was one of those classic, like, shark attacks

where it happened a few times, but not that much, but it was blown totally out of proportion. So everybody got scared. Everybody thought that hitchhiking was basically a fatal practice. If you hitchhike, you will die, which is not the case. But then additionally, the economic part of it was transportation became a lot cheaper. Cars got to be better over time, which meant they lasted longer, which meant that rather than have a family where there was no second car, there might be a 15-year-old car that before would have been not running and now gets handed off,

and transportation overall handed off and transportation overall became better and cheaper. And so there wasn't so much need. And now, of course, we might be on the cusp of what would have been a hitchhiker renaissance, but now we have Uber instead, which is essentially paid hitchhiking. That's cool. Do you guys walk through your lives coming up with these questions all the time? Is it second nature to you now in a way that it probably wasn't before free economics became a thing? Yeah, I don't think we're very different than we were before. Do you? Well, you know, I think the one thing that, so once I came to graduate school, really in academics, you get rewarded for having these ideas. And so I put a lot more investment. I walked around and for years years still I looked at every single thing and I would say how could I turn that into an academic paper

and then what what's interesting in light of our new book is that the blog the the good and bad thing about the blog I mean it took a lot of effort yeah but it it forced you I felt an obligation to maybe three or four times a week write something okay so desperately uh it puts you in the mind frame of okay is there anything in the world that's halfway interesting that i can somehow turn into a blog post and so it of all the things we've ever done i think the blog is the thing which most warps you into always being alert always listening to what the world has to say but i would argue that's what any journalist, or not any journalist, but most journalists do. I mean, you're constantly trying to observe the world and see what looks a little out

of place or a little unexplored, a little interesting. Like, I remember one of my very, very favorite days as a writer was when I was first here after I went to graduate school here, and I was writing for New York Magazine. I would write these short front of the book pieces in this section that was then called Fast Track. And basically, the only way I could get in the magazine was to come up with an idea, then write it, then pitch it and write it.

So all I did basically was walk around the city or whatever, looking for things that were interesting. I remember this one day in this neighborhood, actually, where I came up with what turned out to be three pieces in one Saturday afternoon wandering around, and my favorite of them was like a totally childlike inquiry that, I guess, I don't know whether it was good or not, I liked it, and it was basically, I was at the Metropolitan Museum, I think probably on the outside first, where there's the big fountain that's now been redone, and then you go inside to the Temple of Dender.

And that's not a fountain, but it's a big reflecting pool. And, you know, people throw their coins in a fountain. And it's the Metropolitan Museum. People come from all over the world. And you look down, and there's all these coins. And I thought, I wonder what happens to those coins. Like, who does what with them? First of all, if you just leave them in there, they're going to pile up.

And it won't be a fountain anymore. It'll just be a big pile of wet coins. So I went to them and said, I would like to, you know, find out what you do. And it turned out that there was a guy at the Met whose job on Monday, which I think was their dark day, his job was to clean out the coins from the fountains and the Temple of Dender. So I basically spent the day with him in big you know muckety muck muck muck boots and he would sweep them all up and collect them and then they'd take them downstairs they put them on these big screens and wash them and then you have the problem that you have all this currency from like a hundred countries which is worth basically nothing but they went to the trouble to collate it and bring it to a bank and turn it in and get it and convert it into money for, you know,

the Met operating fund. To me, that was like, that was a fun thing to do. That's like, you know, if somebody is going to pay me $200 to write that article, I'm going to write that article every time. And for me, the best part is as a writer, then every time I walk by the Met ever again, I'm going to have that memory. And so to me, the act of writing is kind of a way to, just as with travel, as with conversation, all the things we do to make life larger and bigger and better, it's to create memories to make life, you know, a little richer, a little warmer.

When I have my kids, we walk by the Met, I'll tell them, you know what happens to the coins in there? Let me tell you what happens to the coins in there. So that's, you know, that's all I do. How much did the guy steal? what kind of car did he drive did you drive a he did not drive a car to work he took he did not drive a tesla he took the subway to work so i guess he wasn't doing a very good job of uh recognizing the high value coins how much did you steal we're recording i think that's part of the

amazing thing that you guys pull off is like these very everyday could be considered mundane questions once you articulate them and once they come from somebody like you who are now experts, everyone, you know that's a great question, like your book, why does KFC run out of chicken?

or why? I already heard from KFC. Did you see that email? What happened? So what happened? Yeah, what happened? Well, you should describe the post. You should describe what you wrote.

Yeah, so I've always loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. You're old school if you call it Kentucky Fried Chicken, by the way. Yeah, KFC, yeah. Because it goes back to a story, because my parents, even though we weren't particularly poor acted like we were incredibly poor and so literally once a year they would splurge and we would get to go to what was then called Kentucky fried chicken and that was the big the big event in our house so I've always I think because of that restriction of the amount I was able to have I've always pined for Kentucky Fried Chicken. But my customer service experiences have been incredibly bad, like consistently running out of chicken. And you think it seems like a strange thing.

It's KFC. They only make service chicken, and they don't have chicken. Wait, you'd go once a year? And more than once a year, they would run out of chicken on the day you were there? No, I used to go once a year. Now I'm an adult. I can do whatever I want. I go all the time.

Right. out of chicken on the day you were there. No, I used to go once a year. Now I'm an adult. I can do whatever I want. I go all the time. And so at some point we were thinking about calling the book, you know, Why Does KFC Run Out of Chicken? But anyway, I didn't read the email. What happened? The email said I see you have a book coming out. This was a week or two ago. And I see that in the promotional material

it says something about why does KFC always run out of chicken? And I'd like to know what your experience has been and why you felt it was necessary to write that. But it was written in a very sweet way somehow, even though it was threatening. And so I sent the fellow a link to the original blog post. And I said, it's as simple as this. Levitt goes to KFC to get chicken and there isn't enough chicken. I don't know. I guess you could sue him for that,

but, you know, it's kind of your fault. And then, but then he wrote back, I thought this was great, you know, corporate communication. He wrote back and said something like, I'm sorry to hear you had that experience. We're a company that really tries our hardest. And if you're ever in the neighborhood

of wherever they are, do you know where they are? Indiana, Illinois, somewhere. Kentucky, maybe. That might be it. Said if you're ever in the neighborhood, we'd love you to stop in and we'll show you how we hand bread our chicken and give it that fantastic taste. So we got to go to Kentucky plainly, or at least you do. And did you find out why they run out of chicken? No, I mean I hypothesized it's an interesting thing, if you go to a McDonald's just look around, there are people working I mean there's often

20 people crammed in working McDonald's and just the next time if you were a kind of person who does this, when you go into KFC, look at how many people are there and there's usually like two or three and I think it was somehow a corporate choice. I don't think it's, I mean, part of it's about the production function and you put the chicken in and you let it sit

as opposed to you put a lot of sauce and stuff on top. But I think that's part of it. They've just made a choice to be bad. You also. But economists, you laugh at that, but economists think it's fine. They're just trying to figure out how to maximize their profits. But the other thing which I think is maybe more dangerous than what I just said is that their clientele is much poorer, I think, on average than other fast food. And I think that income is associated with quality of service.

So I spent a year living in Palo Alto by Stanford. And the quality of service you got was absolutely unbelievable at every place. And I just came to believe it was because everyone is so rich. And when people are rich, they're... I don't know if they're willing to pay for them, but they appreciate where they have different preferences. But I think rich people get really good service. So KFC has again decided to provide bad service

because it's not what their customers are buying. I mean, I don't know if it's true, but that's certainly been my impression. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, does Levitt regret anything he wrote on the Freakonomics blog all those years? The one that I only fake regret, that I pretend to regret, but I don't really, is the... And have we actually changed the world in any way, no matter how small? So do you remember dog poop DNA?

Yes, very well. Do you remember dog poop DNA? Please tell us. Before the penny, his obsession with dog food. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Steve Levitt and I were up on stage at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, just minding our own business,

when this busybody named Faith Saley started asking us all these questions. This book is a collection of blog posts, right? A lot of them are elliptical, and you pose pose questions and you hypothesize but there aren't a lot of firm answers are there questions that haunt you like what's what's the one question that you wish you could just have a empirically solid answer to my question is what makes people happy there's a blog post in here about why are women so unhappy yeah yeah and and that was that's haunting me but um but what what makes people happy and how do you pursue that question in a freakonomics way well there's a big happiness literature um or hedonics literature as it's called and uh it's but it's

very unsatisfying because those are the kind of data that well i don't know i should i'd be curious to know what you have to say levitt because you know data is great and there are limitations of data and so if you want to know something like what makes a given person or a given population happy or satisfied it's not as simple as asking them because people say kind of what they might feel at the moment and not feel a different moment they may say what they think you want them to say or what you want to hear so i don't know if you could get hold of or commission any data possible and or invade privacy in any way possible to find out what makes people truly satisfied and happy what would you do yeah i mean it's such a hard question because when people respond to those surveys there's a tremendous equilibration over

time so when something good happens to you you go from being a seven on a scale of one to ten to a nine and then somehow you always end up at seven again um and the psychologists have done these studies where they take people who win the lottery and people who have um you know have become paraplegic from diving accidents. And after a couple of years, they're all saying seven. I mean, it's just everybody, everyone always equilibrates. But you kind of know that if you went back in time, well, sometimes the lottery went,

so I wish I didn't win the lottery. But it's super confusing to figure out how you sort out what I think is a strong evolutionary tendency to figure out whatever situation you're in I think is a strong evolutionary tendency to like figure out whatever situation you're in you're reasonably happy with it not too happy because you're not if you're too happy you don't work hard enough to to to make your situation better but if you're too upset you can't can't deal with it I mean what I did do I mean the probably the the one of the strangest studies ever did but one of the ones I liked the best was very much aimed at the idea of happiness. And Dubner had an idea for a podcast, which I thought at the time was completely and

totally ridiculous, which was about the upside of quitting. And so with essentially no evidence or data in any way, shape, or form, except a belief, Dubner did this podcast in which he implored people to quit much more than they did and um and what was crazy is that people just people just wrote hundreds of people wrote and said oh my god i just quit it's the greatest thing that ever happened to me and i'm divorced thank you and um and tons of people did that i mean even and so what they were quitting jobs quitting marriages everything quitting everything. And so after that, I mean, it was such an, I had just a flash at some moment, and I said, wow,

if people listen to us, we can actually start to answer interesting questions. And so, riding on the back of that, we set up a webpage. We called it Freakonomic Experiments, and we said to anyone who had a hard decision that they were having trouble making they should come to our web page and we kind of give them advice about how to make their decision uh with the ultimate hope that at the end of all our advice

they were still as confused as they were when they got there in which case we would solve their problem by we would flip a virtual coin and it would flip on the screen and it would either come up heads or tails and then we would say if it comes up heads you got to promise us that you'll quit whatever you you know you'll quit your job and if it comes up tails you got to promise us you'll keep your job okay people we couldn't act because of um you know the rules of stuff about human subjects and introducing you know irbs we couldn't compel people to keep their jobs but we hoped that we could put enough pressure on them moral pressure and scientific need that they would do it. And the amazing thing is we had this crazy

idea, we built this webpage, we publicized it, and by the time we got to writing the book, so 25,000 people had come and flipped these coins. And so what's needed, so you can just look at all the people who got heads, say, if it came to quitting a job, and it turned

out of the people who got heads, say, if it came to quitting a job. And it turned out of the people who got heads saying you should quit your job, maybe 40% of them quit their jobs. And of the people who got tails, which says stay at your job, only maybe 20% of those people quit their jobs. So we actually influenced something like 20% of the people who came to our webpage

actually did something different because of the coin tails. So then we waited six months, we surveyed people, and we asked them how happy they were. And so the comparison is really just a comparison of, did you get heads or did you get tails when you came to the Freakonomics website? And the amazing thing is the people who got heads on almost every different question we asked, the people who got heads said they were happier six months later than the people

who got tails. And those people had quit a lot more. And just to make sure it wasn't just people saying what we wanted to hear, we also asked people to give us a third party, some friend of theirs, some trusted friend, who would help them stick to their decision. And then we would ask those people, and they also would report that the people who got heads

were happier than the people who got tails. And so for me, it was one of the neatest things about... So as an academic, I just... I'm not very mathematical. I'm not very technical. There's all sorts of things I can't do. But I've always liked to explore interesting ideas. And this was the one time when we were able to put together the uniqueness of what we do and our reach and our ability

to actually, through social media, talk to people, to answer a question that no one else could answer, because we had a way to get thousands and thousands of people to divorce their husbands and quit their jobs and not have babies or have babies, and, and so for me, that, in some ways, that was the, the most fun project I think I've ever done, because it answers such a fundamental question, which, which I think there's never been good academic research before, and we just come up with a basic truth, which is, when you're not sure what to do, you should quit. I think

this is what the data tell us. They say you should just, if you can't decide, it means you should have quit already. And you should just quit right away. Should we go now? Well, you know, this evening is billed as the best of Freakonomics. That was the best. I know, which I feel like is more pressure on me than you.

But what's nice about reading this book, you get a sense of how personal you guys did get with your blog posts. I'm kind of talking in past tense, by the way, because you're not blogging like you used to, right? Blogs are, it's a little bit, I mean, it's funny. We kind of hit the heyday of blogs by mistake uh and blah you know we don't do it as much anymore in part because it's really hard to blog every day and also do all the other stuff we try to do so radio podcasting takes a lot

of writing you know writing academic papers theoretically takes a little bit of time. But also, I think the whole idea of blogging, I mean, it did go away. Not entirely. Why blog when you can tweet? Right? So between Twitter and Facebook, even though they're not really very good substitutes for blogging, and I miss it.

I mean, we mostly now use a blog to tell the world what we're doing on our radio show, which is a great use of it, and we write on there. But I kind of miss it. I kind of miss every morning waking up and saying, do I have anything worth saying, and going right there and publishing it. Because the whole idea of growing up as a journalist where there was a hierarchy and someone controlled the printing press, and below that were editors who controlled what went to the printing press. The whole notion of publishing yourself with a click of a button so that thousands of people could read it is incredibly intoxicating.

That's my favorite thing about the digital revolution, you know, writ small. Although you do say that you both blogged things that you came to regret. So what do you regret blogging about, Levitt? Most of it, probably it probably right in retrospect um the one that i only fake regret that i pretend to regret but i don't really um is the um is the first post so so we had just been blogging minding our own business and then we became a blog

for the new york times and um and definitely said we need something really good for the first day really good for the first day and really good for the first day. I know the perfect thing. And so I didn't really think very hard about it. And he's already talked about how oblivious I am. So I wrote this whole post about if I were a terrorist, how I would do a terrorist attack, laying out

the details of what I thought would be a great... You were only trying to help. Exactly, just trying to help. And then I asked the readers, because the most fun thing about it, the most rewarding thing about the blog was there was immediate feedback and we had such smart such interesting readers that you learned a lot and and so i thought look why don't i have all of the blog readers uh tell us their favorite ideas for terrorist attacks and how interesting would that be but it turned out just the opposite i mean i don't think hardly anyone put up good ideas about fighting terrorism everyone just attacked us and said yeah you're like are you incredibly stupid

are you a moron or you are evil or what what is your problem and i remember what you said is i can't be both right but i don't really regret because i actually the point i mean i think it was a really good point and then and then it's in the book it's in this book and then i responded a day or two later in which you know it's one of those incredibly obvious things where people are like how can you how can you be so unpatriotic and be telling the terrorists all the answers to which I said do you not think that the terrorists what do you think the terrorists do all day other than sit around and try and think of great ways to um to try to do a terrorist attack I mean and my idea about a terrorist attack was completely and totally obvious.

It was just playing off of what had happened in Washington, D.C., where those two guys drove around in El Camino and would kind of shoot at random every once in a while, and the entire city of Washington, D.C. shut down. So you can imagine if you had 20 of those, so the terrorists let loose 20 cars with people who, at pre-agreed times, were just going to drive across the entire U.S. and just shoot people,

and then just keep on driving. I mean, they'd be essentially impossible to stop. Every American would think, oh, my God, I'm going to be the next one to get shot. Every kid would be kept in there. They would completely shut down the entire country. And it's not like it takes a lot of imagination to do that, right? If you saw what happened in Washington, D.C., you'd know it was work. I mean, the real terrorists would never do that because it's not their style.

It's not what they're trying to do. The terrorists are trying to send a message. It's theater in some sense. It's a show. And this is not theatrical. This is logistics. This is like the difference between working for Google and working for a trucking company. Like, when you graduate from college, you don't want to go work for a trucking company,

even if it is a really effective kind of thing. The problem that limits our ability to fight terrorists is that the people whose job to fight it don't know what they should be trying to fight. So they're usually fighting whatever happened the last time instead of thinking about the next time. And I thought, actually, it could be useful. I really think that on net, if a bunch of smart people

put out a bunch of ideas for terrorist attacks attacks the people whose job it is to fight it would have a much better shot at stopping the next one than sitting around in their own you know in the office at the caa trying to figure out what smart people would say do you have any regrets devner oh what i've written i somehow i spent way too much time writing about why we should kill the penny for some reason, right? So this goes back to my Metropolitan Museum of Art fountain date, of course. No, but, you know, I feel, I don't even want to waste your guys' ears right now for two minutes talking about it, but the fact that we still use a penny in this country is ridiculous. Can we agree? So, I mean, it's just inflation has rendered it useless. The only people

who really want the penny are people who are totally inert, who are just way too lazy to do anything, who are very nostalgic. It doesn't sound like you regret talking about this. Apparently, apparently I don't. Or people who are very nostalgic and love the penny and what it represents or who love Abraham Lincoln even though he's on the five dollar bill or if you happen to be one of the 15 people who work in the zinc lobby so it turns out that pennies are made mostly from zinc and it turns out that the zinc lobby is largely responsible for having kept the penny in circulation. But I hate big zinc. So, but I, this sounds so terrible, but I, when I get change from a store, I try to give the pennies back. And if they won't take them back,

then I just throw the pennies away. And I teach my children to throw away their pennies. And I'm going to say it right here, to throw away nickels too. Okay. And here's the argument made by Americans for Common Sense, C-E-N-T-S, which by the way, is aicans for common sense c-e-n-t-s which by the way is a front for the zinc lobby i'm not kidding okay so americans for common sense says well if you got rid of the penny what would all those school children do for their penny drives and i say teach them to collect like dollars that are actually worth some money okay and then I knew that I was really right when I saw that the standard hotel here in New York when they opened one of their floors in the hotel one of the bars was made of pennies and then I looked at the price you add up the price of what

each penny cost and it turns out that making a floor out of pennies was cheaper than the cheapest like tile, recycled wood, anything. Okay. So if they're that, so they're great for flooring, but for currency, not so good. So I kind of regret that because like I said, see, I can't stop. Here's a great question from the audience. What advice would you give each other if you didn't write books together? Like what advice would I give him who's actually him if he's an economist? If we didn't write books together? Presumably. Well, we wouldn't know each other. That's easy. Hey, buddy, get off the phone. How about let's just take out the second half of the sentence. What advice do you have for each other?

I think Dubner should move out of New York City, but he's doing just the opposite. Oh, really? Why should I move out of New York City? By the way, they're on my side. I know they are. Yes, why? Why?

Not that you should move out of New York City now, but you should be prepared to move out of New York City in the future. Is this a tax dodge? That sounds ominous. What's that, ominous? Yeah. No, New York City is a great place. It's just you are making all of these very expensive investments when it's quite possible to become a time when you don't want to be there.

I think you're totally wrong. Because I think the older I get, the better New York gets for me. Because there's nowhere else in the world I would want to live. My goal in life, as my children know, is to get to 100. That's just a thing I'm really into. Yeah, yeah, I really want to do it. You mean get to 100th Street on the east side or west? Years old, thank you.

So if there's any good medical advice out there, please let me know later. But to me, there is literally no place better in the world to get older and old than New York City, where you can actually still do stuff and be around people and, you know, if I need to mug. So I remember right after 9-11, so I'm the youngest of eight kids, and I'm the only one who lives in New York City. All my siblings, none of my siblings live in any city, really. And right after 9-11, they all called, of course, and very concerned. And, you know, we had one kid, Solomon was, I guess,

had just turned one year old, and it was obviously upsetting. We were all, thank God, safe, everything, but a lot of people we knew were involved, and it was scary, and you didn't know what came next. And all my siblings called, and one of my sisters, my sister Beth, who I love very much, she's closest to me in age, and she lives in Buffalo with her family,

great family, love the extended family. She called and she said, uh, and she's, Beth is a very kind of not forceful type personality at all. It's very docile generally. And she said, um, Steve, I really think that you and, um, Ellen and Solomon need to leave New York now, forever, and you can come to Buffalo, and you can live with us until you get your footing, until you find your own place. And I said to her, Beth, I love you, but I really would rather die in New York than live in Buffalo. And this is not against Buffalo. I like Buffalo. but it's like new york is a thing that gets in your blood and it is who you are so that's what you're up against brother that's right steven levitt um your sister named freakonomics right yep can you talk about that

story yeah so um we way back we're writing this, and it didn't really have a theme. I mean, we really struggled trying to come up with a title, and between us and the publisher, we've gone back over, like, 15 or 20 bad titles. And my sister is the most, was the most. She died, and actually two of the posts in this book are about her, one about me, and one about my father. They're my favorite posts. They're really beautiful.

She's an extraordinary person. She sure was. She's the most creative person I ever met and kind of transformed me completely. I mean, literally transformed me. When I was 12, she made it her mission to turn me from a little Weasley loser into a cool kid. And I was weird enough to actually be willing

to let her mold me in whatever way she wanted. What did she call you? Oink baby? Yeah, oink baby. And then I knew she would... I knew, I told Dubner, my sister will be the one to name this book. And within, I don't know, literally 10 minutes of me sending

her the first version of the book, she said, it's Freakonomics. And it took a while to get people on board, and there was a lot of resistance to it. But honestly, it was such a perfect title. It so captured what we were doing, and it was so far from any of the titles we were thinking about. You know, it would be neat to play back a counterfactual in a world in which we called it, you know, some... E-ray vision. Ain't necessarily so.

There were, like, one person there... Oh, really? E-ray vision? E-ray vision as in, like, economist vision. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even when you get it, it's not good, you know? Well, that is the post that you write. Linda was your sister.

It's really moving, and in fact, that's something that I really, really like about this, about When to Rob a Bank, is how personal you guys get. It's really wonderful. In the past 10 years, what has surprised you the most about what you do? The one that comes to

mind for me is a bummer so i don't want this to be the last word said here what surprised me the most is how on balance brutally ineffective most current treatments are for cancer and that we still do them at massive expense financial and emotional and other ways and that when we began to look at the data on that was just crushing to me because you sit back and you know everybody knows someone who suffered from cancer and often someone who's died from it but then we always hear about new drugs new treatments there was the war on cancer, Nixon, 40 years ago now. And the fact is, is that when you look at the data for most solid organ cancers, particularly, we're just not very good yet. And that, like I said, is obviously not a happy thing to have learned,

but it's a thing I'm glad I learned because then you look for other people who are trying to do things very very differently so when you guys make a discovery like that what can you do with that we all hear that knowledge is power so how can you make how can you take what you learn and make a change well we wrote about it right you write about i mean to me that's you know we're pretty we're pretty we're two pretty feeble people overall we don't have much leverage in the real world at all but writing is the best leverage that we can muster so if we have you had responses to like do you feel like it's made for meaningful response I know that now uh to say that in public is not necessarily heresy but I don't think much more than that I mean some things that we write really do influence people I mean sometimes people really change their behavior even even legislation, because of what we do.

But that's not... What are you talking about? The only legislation I'm aware of is there was a little tiny town in Alaska that had like 2,000 people and they made it illegal to walk drunk in that city.

And that was one of our proudest moments was when we showed that drunk walking was eight times worse than drunk driving and encouraged everyone to, if they were drunk, to certainly drive home drunk as opposed to walking home drunk. And this one city in Alaska took those words to heart and made it a punishable crime to walk drunk.

But literally, I cannot think of another piece of legislation that they've passed. I've got another one for you. So do you remember dog poop DNA? Yes, very well. Do you remember dog poop DNA? Please tell us. Before the penny, his obsession was dog poop.

So, this would come from, honestly, this would come from walking my daughter to nursery school in this building, right? So you're walking down the street, and you're thinking about a lot of things. You've got, like, is the lunch there? Is the lunch smushed? Is my daughter walking into traffic?

Is my daughter walking drunk into traffic? All kinds of issues. And then the last thing you want to do is step in it, right? And it happens, especially if you live kind of near the park. So we came up with a plan I thought was kind of a good plan, right? Which is, if you want to own a dog somewhere, like New York City, where people walk around. It's a poop database. A poop database. So you have to, when you register your dog to get a license, you just have to submit a saliva swab or some kind of swab. And then you can get the

DNA from that. Poop, as it turns out, is a very rich DNA source. So once you get the poop, you can match the poop to all dogs on the registry, send them a ticket, bam. If you make a ticket, $500. The city would make so much money. Wouldn't it? Right? So it hasn't happened in New York, but it has happened in other places. It has happened. It has happened.

I believe, I want to say in Petak Tikva, Israel, there's a poop DNA law on the books. I want to say in some other smaller jurisdictions, like certain condos on condo communities in Long Island have invoked it, which isn't quite legislation. Changing the world one poop at a time. Um, Levitt, what surprised you the most? What surprised me the most is that anyone cares and that we, um, you know, we set out to something that we did almost really for ourselves. And we were super lucky and in the right place at the right time. And so I don't think anyone ever would have imagined if we had been with you at a cocktail party 10 years and two weeks ago

and said, hey, I'm writing this book with Dubner that anyone would say, well, 10 years from now, 500 people will come out and hear what you have to say about what you've been doing the last 10. I mean, it really defies logic. And it's surprising and it's fun. This is really an indictment more of them than us. No, we do care.

Thank you for the four books, these last ten years of making us think and writing great stories. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hey, we survived. Any final thoughts?

Not really. I used them all out there. I didn't have that many tonight. No, on fire. I was done on fire. You were funny. You were so funny. You were good.

I've talked a lot, but you were funny. You were good. Hey, podcast listeners. Next time we're in your town, I hope you'll come out and see us. Thanks so much to all of those who came out to see us in New York and especially to Faith Saley and to everyone at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. This recording was provided courtesy of the 92nd Street Y. Next week on Freakonomics Radio, we talk about how failure can be your friend. I failed for the first five or seven years.

Now I look back and I say, why did I keep going that long? Because of the shame. I didn't want to admit failure. Are we thinking all wrong about failure? That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, Merritt Jacob, and Christopher Wirth.

We had help this week from Wayne Schulmeister. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.