Freakonomics Radio - 591. Signs of Progress, One Year at a Time

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Every December, a British man named Tom Whitwell publishes a list of 52 things he’s learned that year. These fascinating facts reveal the spectrum of human behavior, from fraud and hypocrisy to Whitwell’s steadfast belief in progress. Should we also believe? SOURCES:Tom Whitwell, managing consultant at Magnetic. RESOURCES:"Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Exhibit Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud," by Saul Justin Newman (Working Paper, 2024)."52 things I learned in 2023," by Tom Whitwell (Magnetic Notes, 2023)."Job Satisfaction 2023," by The Conference Board (2023)."What Fax Machines and Floppy Disks Reveal About Britain’s Productivity Problem," (The Economist, 2017).Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, by Peter D. Norton (2008)."Beyond Propaganda," by John Kenney (The New York Times, 2006).

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. The other day I sat back and I took a look at the work we've been putting out on Freakonomics Radio over the past few months. I'm really proud of it. I think a lot of the episodes are very strong, but a lot of the topics are tough. The continuing opioid epidemic, the political and economic issues around immigration, both legal and illegal, the boom in fraud among academic researchers, and how the private equity industry is making our economy ever more top-heavy.

Like I said, good episodes, but yeah, serious stuff. Also, there are wars going on all over the place. Our former and maybe future president just became the first presidential felon. I could go on and on, and I'm sure you could too. So today, we are bringing you something a bit different, a bit lighter to head into summer. Something to think about, maybe talk about on your cross-country road trip or while you're working in the garden or maybe flying to another continent to visit family or go to a wedding or just catch your breath. As you know, we spend a lot of time on the show simply looking for interesting new things in the world and trying to explain them. Today's guest is very good at finding such things. For instance, there is this thing called Takubin.

If you're traveling around Japan, rather than hauling your bags from hotel to hotel, there's a whole system. Every hotel apparently has it. You send it on and they ship your bags around for you. I'd never heard of that before. And then you sort of think, well, why don't we have that? Yeah, why don't we? That I don't know. I only know the facts, nothing else.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, facts that will make you think twice, that may make you grimace or laugh, that will hopefully help you catch your breath and look at this wondrous, weird world of ours in a slightly new way. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. All right, first things first, a proper introduction is in order. I'm Tom Whitwell. I am a consultant and a... You've stuck with the most difficult question, first of all. Okay, let me help out a bit.

Tom Whitwell works at a London consulting firm called Magnetic. They specialize in innovation and design. Not your usual consultants, is how they put it. Among the clients that Whitwell has worked with are National Grid, the big UK power company, Vogue Business, a spinoff from the fashion magazine, and the candy and chocolate company Mars, which, as we will learn in today's episode, also makes something that is very much not candy or chocolate. Before he got into consulting,

Whitwell was a journalist with magazines and with the Times of London. He also designs electronic musical instruments, some of which have been bought by Tom York of Radiohead. But none of that is why we're speaking with Tom Whitwell today. We're speaking with Tom Whitwell today because of another thing he does. Every year I write a list called 52 Things I Learned. Whitwell has been publishing his list of 52 things he's learned every year for the past 10. He publishes it himself on the blogging platform Medium, but then it ricochets all around the interweb,

or at least certain precincts of it, where it is greeted with enthusiasm and wonder. It is a weird list in the best way. Nearly all the items are at the very least informative and interesting. Some are sad, but some are joyful. The joy is generated by, as Richard Feynman might have said, the pleasure of finding things out, and for Whitwell himself, the pleasure of sharing these things. The items are short, pithy, word perfect. Here's one from last year's list. Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the U.S. in 2022. Eight of them were by romance

novelist Colleen Hoover. Here's one from the 2015 list. In China, cigarette companies are allowed to sponsor schools with slogans like genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented. And this one from 2021. 10 percent of U.S. electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads. As a consultant, Whitwell engages with a wide variety of topics. I asked if most of his 52 things are a byproduct of his day job. There's certainly bits where part of the job means I will be immersed in

one particular subject for a few months and then another subject for a few months afterwards. I think if I went back and looked over the years, I would say, oh, that's why I was doing an electricity project or that's where I was doing a fashion project. How much do you enjoy your day job? I enjoy it a lot. The variety is the key thing. Typically, a project might last three weeks to about six months. So every few months, you're fundamentally changing. You're in a completely different environment. A couple of months ago, we were asked to help Mars, who produce chocolate and pet food. They have a chain of stores around.

I'm sorry. I don't mean to laugh, but somehow chocolate and pet food in the same sentence. Exactly. Conjures images I'd rather not conjure, but please continue. And we do a lot of work for them. They might come and say.

Like, would some of your work be for them to not describe themselves as a chocolate and pet food company? No, I think that would be marketing. We don't really do that. So one piece of work I did for them, they have a research station in the UK, which has a large number of cats and dogs living in comfortable and pseudo-domestic situations. And they came to us and said, we want to be sure we're using the best technology to track them, to monitor them, to understand what they're doing. And we want somebody to just spend a little bit of time looking around the market and suggesting different ways you might do this. And so I spent two weeks or something

researching that area. How do people track animals? How do they understand what they're doing? How do they monitor them? So a project like that gives you an opportunity to find pet-related facts that might appear on the list of 52 things you learned that year? Yeah. One year has a piece about weightlifting dogs, and that came from some research we were doing for Mars, who I hasten to add are certainly not considering weightlifting dogs as a thing to try and sell. Oh, you mean a person lifting a dog. I was imagining a dog on a bench press. No, dogs lifting weights. Dogs wearing, for example, weighted little waistcoats. Dogs having protein shakes. Dog influencers who are big muscly dogs who advertise dog protein shakes.

And I think there's some kind of yard equipment that are good for dogs to lift things up. So essentially dogs bench pressing things. I see. And is that something that the dogs choose to do? I didn't get too deeply into that. I discovered this thing existed. I was asked in that to say, let's look at the outside edges. What are the strangest things that pet parents are doing? Something like that will leak over into 52 Things, because if I'm spending a few weeks researching something like that, I will normally find quite a lot of interesting things

and store them away to put in the list. Whitwell has a history of curating odd and interesting things. Back in the 2000s, I wrote a blog when people had blogs called Music Thing that was all about here are interesting, funny, weird pieces of music equipment. Can you give a couple examples? It's kind of endless. all about here are interesting, funny, weird pieces of music equipment. Can you give a couple examples? It's kind of endless. There is an enormous installation on the coastline,

which are pipes that are played by the waves coming in and going out. There's a big music conference called NAMM, which is the big trade show. And every year you will find extraordinary things that people invent to do music, whether it's quadruple necked guitars or folding drum kits or whatever it is. It's one of those areas where lone entrepreneurs and inventors can come up with things and they can find a big audience and they can get things out there. Okay, so take us through the origins of your 52 Things I Learned list. In 2014, I had left The Times. I'd fallen out with the editor, and it became clear I needed to find a different job.

While I was unemployed and looking around for things to do, I had this idea of collecting things that I'd found during the year. I was always a fan of the list of colors, the genre, and my ambition for it was that I was obviously looking for a job. So I was looking for ways to reach out for people in London who I could reach out to. And I thought, well, if I can get a thousand people to look at this, then that would feel like out of that, a few of those people are going to be people who might be able to offer me a job. So it was kind of a creativity resume or ingenuity resume. Maybe you're showing people what your brain's interested in, hoping they'd be interested

in your brain too. Yeah, it was exactly that. Or it was content marketing for me, I suppose. Can you describe the, you know describe either the characteristics of something you discovered that you know will be a good link or maybe the emotion you feel or the cognitive jolt you get when you come upon something that you know will be good? The simplest thing is it's probably something that is counterintuitive. It's not what you expect. It's something that maybe seems to have some slightly bigger resonance, but it doesn't have to. How much do you care about a sort of news peg if you sent yourself something in February that was

on a topic like transportation safety, and then that year there happened to be a bunch of bridges collapse? I assume you tend to gravitate toward the peggy things. Not really. No, I probably do ignore that completely, the news peg. That was something that always slightly frustrated me working in newsrooms. And there will often be stories that are two years old, five years old, 10 years old. They don't need to all have been published that year at all. I don't really pay any attention to that. Let's go to 2022. 52 things you learned in 2022. This is item number 30. By the way, is there any relevance to the order? Just shuffling, really. Try to make sure the first 10 are really good,

and then they're reasonably random, so you don't get three similar ones. So number 30 from the year 2022 was, in the 1920s, new car sales were falling. So the industry promoted the term jaywalking to blame accidents on pedestrians rather than aggressive drivers. That is such an appealing catnippy item on so many levels. So talk me through it. And what I really want to know is how confident we are that that is in its totality true. With something like that, the question is, is this clickbait or is this a real thing? And I would be very confident that was true

because I was going to say I've read, I haven't read. I've flipped through the book, Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton, which is all about the early years of the car industry. And the critical point seems to have been in around 1922, 23, 24, when it wasn't a decline in sales, it was a decline in growth. And at the same time, there was this feeling that cars were pretty dangerous. People were getting killed by them. There was a petition in Cincinnati to limit the speed of cars to 25 miles an hour, which I thought was interesting because at the moment,

the speed limit across most of London is 20 miles an hour. So car companies saw that this was a problem. And this notion of jaywalking, which should have evolved, I think, organically as a word, really, the idea that people were kind of country bumpkins and they were walking around and they didn't know that there was big cars zooming past. And a jay was a word used by whom to mean what? I think it meant country folk, kind of rustics. American? It was an American? An American, yeah. This is all American, I think. Before then, roads were for people. If you look at pictures of roads before cars, you had big wide roads and they were full of people and

horse-drawn vehicles. Bicycles. I suppose they look in some ways like when you see pictures of Chinese roads in the 80s, when you see enormous torrents of bicycles going across, but you wouldn't see cars. And this idea that the curb was a barrier that must not be stepped across. I think the really nice explanation of this was when the idea of jaywalking came along, the pedestrian felt they were wrong. They felt they were wrong to be in the road. That the road no longer belonged to them. It belonged to cars. Exactly. Car firms would hire Boy Scouts to give cards to pedestrians saying,

we're in a new era. This is old-fashioned what you're doing. Don't be a J. Don't be a J. Don't cross the road like that. And how strong is the evidence that it was actually the auto industry that built and encouraged this movement to the point where laws were written forbidding it? I am only basing my evidence on Mr. Norton's book, but he tells a very clear story that the relationship between the American Automobile Association and the National Safety Council got closer. And there was a guy called Charles Price who had worked for the National Safety Council. And he was the person who came to the industry and said, you need to own safety. For example, go into schools and say, we're going to teach people road safety. Road safety meant get out of the road. It's not for you. So how did jaywalking laws come about? And was any segment of the auto industry directly

affiliated with that? I don't know exactly that. I think they came in. It's funny coming from the UK, this whole concept of jaywalking is alien to us. We have no law like that. But pedestrians do seem to be quite obedient in the UK because there are crossing lights and all things like that. Yeah. We just don't have laws about it. No policeman will ever go and tell somebody off or give them a ticket for crossing the road. To be fair, I think that almost never happens in America. The only time that's ever happened to me in my life, and I jaywalk always everywhere, was in Vancouver. And I wasn't even crossing mid-block. I was crossing

at the intersection against the light. There was no traffic. And someone, you know, stopped me. And I laughed. I mean, from reading about it, it does seem like people like you or me are generally not stopped for jaywalking. I have read that there was a Department of Justice report on the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, the place where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer, which became a flashpoint in racial policing, said that 95% of the people there cited for jaywalking are black. Now, I don't know what share of the population there is black, but still, that sounds like an aggressively high number. I'm curious what kind of feedback you received or additional information maybe about jaywalking when you published that piece. I don't remember. I mean, you've got to remember that piece was, what, 14 words. So I don't think I saw anything particularly with that.

I mean, there's a sort of thread of those kinds of stories. The kind of story where an industry or a company or maybe a government is behind something that you may think emerged naturally? Is that what you mean by that kind of story? Exactly that. One of my favorite ones, which was a fact-checking challenge, but I do think was probably true, the way I wrote it up was that fondue was invented by the cheese industry, which does seem to be more or less true in that fondue did exist as a kind of niche Swiss dish. But the Swiss cheese industry extensively promoted the idea that this was something that families in America might be doing and that you could buy a fondue set. Another item in this category, then, of inventions that come from perhaps interested sources rather than disinterested sources, would be your item about the invention of the carbon footprint.

Yeah, this was really interesting. So this was in, I think, 2001. BP, British Petroleum. It was called BP Amoco previously. It used to be British Petroleum. They even changed their name, didn't they? They called it Beyond Petroleum. I'm not certain if that was actually their official company name or if that was their slogan. But there was a great piece by one of the ad executives who worked on it who said how oil company advertising always used to be aimed essentially at investors and the industry. And it generally consisted of helicopter shots of oil tankers with somebody with a kind of Morgan Freeman voice saying, we're working hard to help

the world work hard or something like that. That was the way all the companies were advertised. And then come 2000 and you've got the real beginnings of concern about, I mean, not the beginnings of concern about global warming, but more and more of that. And I think at this stage, the only oil company that acknowledged that global warming was a real thing was BP. And their advertising switched completely. Instead of these kind of helicopter shots and we're making the world go round, they went out onto the street

and they interviewed people talking about climate change and talking specifically about their part in climate change and what they should do. And they created a calculator so you could go on and tap in stuff about your lifestyle and how many holidays you went on, this kind of thing. And you're saying this carbon footprint calculator was created for BP by its ad agency, the very famous Ogilvy and Mather. Is that right? Yeah. You got some kind of sum for how much weight of carbon you were responsible for. It just seems like such an interesting and telltale shift, the idea from we are the company that is making the world go round to as soon as that becomes kind of problematic or questioned,

it's now we're interested in you and your responsibility and what you as a consumer are doing. It does strike me as interesting, if not paradoxical, that you, a consultant who helps firms do a variety of things, but especially change behavior, either their own behavior or the behavior of their customers and so on, are highlighting in many of your items the fact that advertisers, marketers, and firms are trying to change behavior in order to suit their own needs without those needs being obvious. I suppose so. I'm not somebody who works in marketing. I may be slightly more skeptical about marketing than some people. When you say you may be slightly more skeptical, why is that? Something like the jaywalking story or the carbon footprint story, I think is amazing in how it

genuinely changes the way we as individuals perceive the whole playing field. It's not like you're thinking product X is better than product Y. There's that famous story about when they're trying to get women to smoke cigarettes and the idea of torches of freedom, which is to encourage women to do that. That feels quite direct. But the entire notion of how we interact with the street being changed by a marketing campaign feels amazing to me. How many people each day are thinking slightly differently as they walk along the pavement because of that campaign 100 years ago? After the break, more echoes of the past and perhaps more harbingers of the future. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio, and we will be back with Tom Whitwell right after this.

Tom Whitwell is a collector of interesting facts. He spends his year reading widely, websites and blogs, newspapers and magazines, books and journals. And then he presents his harvest each December in a list of 52 items. Most items are short, just a sentence or two. Often they have nothing to do with the previous year. For instance, this one about Ibn Battuta, the medieval explorer. When Ibn Battuta visited China in 1345, facial recognition was already in use. All visiting foreigners had their portraits discreetly painted and posted on

the walls of the bazaar. Here's another. When users download the Kenyan mobile loans app, Okash, the software's terms and conditions quietly give it permission to access their contacts. If they fall behind in repayments, the app starts to message all those contacts to shame the user into repaying the debt. Whitwell's skill at distilling a long thing into a short thing comes from his time as a magazine editor. It was almost a bit like, you know, pull quotes in magazines, where you've got a magazine article and you find the little quote that is the important bit from the article.

That important bit is then reprinted in a bigger font inside the body of the article. This acts as a sort of billboard or a secondary headline for the article. And that's the thing that often gets read far more than anything else because people don't read the body copy, but they scan over and read the pull quote. Often what I was doing was reading an article online and then finding the pull quote and keeping that in a list, keeping a store of that. Given the state of AI in 2024, if I give ChatGPT or Perplexity a 2,000-word article

and I give Tom Whitwell the same article, do you think you'll do better at finding what might be judged to be the best pull quote or worse? So I have tried this quite a lot. I've done experiments with this over the years. I think I would probably have a pretty good chance of finding a more interesting, more distinctive take. I've done things like obviously asking JGPT to come up with things for the list. And it can come up with fictional ones that are kind of

fine, but obviously the fact they're fictional does make them a lot less interesting than if they were real. I think AI at the moment does seem to struggle to find that sort of quirkiness and distinctiveness. Let's go to 2017, item number 18. The NHS, National Health Service, that's the British National Health System, uses more than 10% of all pagers in the world. Tell me about that, how much we trust that claim, etc. So this is a really, really interesting one. So 2017, I saw an article in The Economist that had this stat in it. And because it was The Economist, I trusted it, I put it on the list. After 2017, it became a sort of political issue in the UK. The fact that we were using pages somehow showed that the NHS was not

in a good state, it was not being well managed. In 2019, the government put out a press release that said pages are going to be banned by 2021. They did say they're going to be banned except for emergencies, which obviously in a hospital context is quite a large loophole, I think. And obviously between 2019 and 2021, quite a lot happened in the healthcare sphere. So I don't think a tremendous amount has really happened with this. I think there are still a lot of pagers in use in the NHS. Now, the pro-pager people argue that it does fill a gap, right? That it can be more reliable under certain circumstances, less prone to dead spots and so on.

What do you know about that? I think like anything, it's a combination of there's issues around the technology and then there's issues around culture and etiquette and how it works. I think these are also quite poorly understood. So I was talking to my dad. My dad used to be a hospital doctor. He started working in hospitals in 1968. And he said they had, pages then, these battery-powered handheld devices that would go off.

And then you had to run and ring a number and they worked on a private radio network within the hospital in the uk they're called bleeps which i always think is quite sweet i just found this really interesting i actually spoke to a doctor called constantino regas who's an nhs doctor in southampton and he previously sent Freedom of Information requests to every NHS trust in the country to say, how many pages are you using? How much are you spending on it? What are you doing with it? He's definitely anti-pager. Because why? He said it's a weird legacy aberration. He would talk about you're on an eight-hour shift, you finally get a chance to go to the bathroom, and then you get bleeped. You have to run, and it turns out it's a nurse

who wanted you to prescribe some paracetamol to somebody who's going to be discharged tomorrow. So that he found very frustrating. He said different wards were different. Some were good, some, he had the phrase, bleeped incessantly, which I imagine must be very irritating. But he also talked about having a crash bleep. So this is where you are a doctor around the hospital or a nurse around the hospital. You have this thing on you and it bleeps and you have to run to save somebody's life, literally. I read an interview with a final year medical student who said, the first time I carried a crash bleep, I was more self-aware. I felt older and more responsible

than I'd ever felt in a clinical setting. So there's a kind of status thing, but there's also etiquette. You need a method to gather people. You need a method to communicate within the hospital. And some people do that well, and some people do that badly. And that frustration has been mapped onto a particular device, which I think is unfair. I am in some ways pro-pager. The basic story was the NHS uses 10% of remaining pagers. I would imagine the other 90% are in American hospitals. So whether or not that 10% is accurate, and I've seen it challenged on a couple dimensions, but whether or not that's accurate, the fact is that if you look around the world a little bit, you do see that older technologies often have long and productive afterlives. Can you talk about

any other technologies that you see that are used, maybe not so prominently, but seriously, that one might think had disappeared. Fax machines are still used in Japan quite a lot. My assumption is that is something to do with handwriting and having a very complicated script. That may be wrong. What about computer programming that is in languages that almost nobody learns anymore? That absolutely is an issue. COBOL is one of those languages, and you often see stories

where a particular organization, it might be an old pension fund, has that requirement that they need to hire people to bring those things to life. The other big one is floppy disks. I think until very recently, there were systems on Boeing 747s that relied on floppy disks. These legacy systems do exist and often work well. They're often just fine. With the pages, the idea that you can spend an awful lot of money tearing out one system and putting in another system is an idea that people who sell systems often promote. In that press release, when the pages were banned, part of their evidence was they said, there are 130,000 pages in the NHS and it's costing 6.6 million pounds a year. You hear that and you go, well, that sounds bad until you realize that's 50 pound per page per year. It's

less than a pound a week for a critical healthcare piece of infrastructure. It's probably the best bargain ever. Here's an item from your 2023 list that I was particularly interested in. Item number five says job satisfaction in the US is at a 35-year high, not low, which is what I think everybody would be expecting. You write that in 2010, less than 45% of people said they were satisfied with their jobs, but in 2022, over 62% said they were. And you write further that you need to go back to the 80s to find satisfaction as high as today. Talk to me about that. First of all, were you as surprised as I was to read that number? I was really surprised by that. It was at a time when we had high inflation,

a real sense of uncertainty in the economy and uncertainty in people's careers. It did absolutely seem just really counterintuitive. How can this be right? There obviously are other surveys. This was the survey by the conference board. Which is funded by whom or represents whom? It's an American organization. I don't know an enormous amount about it, but it does seem to be a very large and well-trusted industry body. And the things people were satisfied were the people they work with, commuting. More than 65% of people were satisfied with commuting, which I found interesting. Job security, physical environment. But what I found really interesting was the sort of change.

So over the last maybe 10 years, one of the big changes has been in performance reviews, which I was just interested because it's such a sort of unglamorous part of working life. No politician has ever stood up and said, I've got a grand vision for performance reviews, and this is how we're going to change the world. But this survey suggests that there is a real fundamental shift in the last just 10 years that you've got millions of people who were made unhappy by that process, who now are happier and more satisfied. I think we've all met people and possibly had experience yourself of those old school performance reviews where once a year you'd go and sit with your boss

and they would say something that annoyed you or made you think they really don't understand who I am at all. They don't understand what I do in this company. And you were furious for the next six months. And that idea that training and HR is actually fixing things like that, I found counterintuitive and really interesting. I do see that the conference board is a non-profit and non-partisan research group made up of over a thousand public and private corporations and other organizations encompassing 60 countries. Maybe it's not so surprising that a firm representing big corporations says, hey, guess what? People at corporations are actually much happier than you think. But let's assume that there's some truth in these numbers. I'm curious to know what it may say about

the rise and or triumph of the HR department in firms, do you think it's kosher to make that kind of connection? That's how I understood it. I do think that that is an area which is that is a very unglamorous and rarely celebrated. But it's a place where there are people who are very committed to what they're doing and they're experimenting and they're changing. Like instead of having one big annual review, we should have continuous assessment, these sorts of things. Those ideas spread in five, 10 years and they seem to work a lot better. So this is about job satisfaction in the US. What can you tell us about in your country, the UK? I don't know because I haven't read a survey as extensive as this. I think the real challenge is that counterintuitive split between a kind of national narrative, which certainly in the UK is of quite a lot of doom and gloom at the moment for a whole range of reasons.

Considerably more than the US at the moment, as much as ours may feel gloomy. Yeah, I think there's a classic newsroom thing, which is something that is bad and critical, is reportable, and is interesting and is seen as important. Something that is, this has improved by 5% since last year, is almost impossible to report. And that's not because there's a grand conspiracy stopping it. It's just very hard to make that sort of story work. But after a few years of 5% improvements, you really start to get a change in the way people work and people feel and in happiness. Here's to finding happiness wherever it can be found. After the break, if someone tells you they are 100 years old, should you believe them? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio.

We'll be right back. Given that we are in the sixth month of the year in our 12-month Gregorian calendar, Tom Whitwell is roughly halfway through collecting items for his 52 Things I Learned list for this year. Can you give us any kind of preview of 2024? Or do you not do that? Or would it be impossible even if you wanted to do that? Well, let me just look in my 52 things folder and see what I've posted in recently. One that I saw just last week was, there is a wonderful graph of, it's not a wonderful graph, there is a fascinating graph

of global deaths from disasters. What's really striking with this is how much it varies. There's a really interesting thread about how we are getting much better at coping with those kind of disasters. So there's a period from 2016 to 2021 when it was extremely low. Okay, I'm looking at this graph now too, and I see that in 2023, there was a spike. We go from, it looks like an average of around 35,000 deaths per year from natural disaster. But then 2023 was like a tripling of that. So the point here is that life in this category is extremely random, yes? It is. But the thing I find interesting is that idea that there are ways that we are getting better at some of these. So there's a whole thing about typhoons in places like Bangladesh and India,

where they spend a lot of money building big concrete shelters that are used as schools during the normal periods, but then everyone piles in and the deaths in some of those things have gone from being tens, hundreds of thousands of people dying to much, much smaller. I really appreciate that you seem to be a person who generally looks for, you know, the best in people or the world. But in one case, in your list from 2023, item number 15, you are basically calling a bunch of sweet, cuddly old people a bunch of liars. You're right. The number of super centenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced. Walk me through this one, please. I'm especially

interested to learn how much lying or maybe misremembering or uncertainty there may be for people who think they're over 100 years old when in fact they're not. So this is an amazing story. One of the things I always look at with these lists is something where it's a little tiny nudge, you know, it's a few lines, but if you go and get into it, you will discover this extraordinary rabbit hole. And that's what I've done with this business of supercentenarians. A lot of this relates to, in the mid-2000s, this idea came about around blue zones. If you were somebody who read Sunday supplements of newspapers, or if you watched National Geographic, they spent a lot of time talking about blue zones, which were areas

where people lived remarkably long, like 110 years old. They talk about eating beans, drinking red wine, not too much food, little amounts of meat, natural exercise, not going to the gym, but gardening, having friends, having a sense of purpose. A couple of academics, Italian and French academics, I think, identified an area in Sardinia that they felt had unusual longevity. Oleastra, it's called? Yes. One of the things I thought, seeing this very casually, I thought the blue zones referred to like blue skies and blue sea. It's just the

software they used to draw the graph, put a blue circle around that area. Anyway, they wrote this paper. They had a few suggestions in the original paper about what might be causing this longevity, which was slightly odd. They were to do with inbreeding and genetics, and a lot of it was about male and female longevity being different. A lot of that got lost because the paper caught the attention of a guy called Dan Buechner. He started his career running celebrity croquet tournaments. He then did these three enormous transcontinental bike rides where he rode across the Americas and Soviet Union. I've got in with National Geographic, discovered this report, and in 2008 published

his book called Secrets of the Blue Zones or something like that, with these kind of instructions around eating beans and drinking red wine. And this has been an incredibly successful notion. He was on Oprah just last year. He had a Netflix series about this, that if we all sat around eating tomatoes and garlic, sitting in the sun, drinking wine with our friends, we would live to be 110. And you, Tom Whitwell, are here to tell us this is kind of all bullshit. Well, it's not me. It's an academic at Oxford called Saul Newman. He's a demographer. So he's been publishing a preprint of a paper. He published it first, I think, in 2019 of them because this is an extraordinary document. He just tears the entire thing to pieces from beginning to end. So a centenarian is somebody who lives past 100. A super centenarian is somebody who lives past 110. Saul's point is really that this is all not true. He says in Europe, where birth records are generally pretty well recorded, so in the US they've always been very poorly recorded. I don't

think birth certificates were used nationally until 1946 in the US. But in Europe, they were pretty well recorded. And these were usually state records or church records or family records? I think in small areas, they were sort of community records, I guess. He says, remarkable longevity is predicted. If you want to find areas of remarkable longevity, and this is like 110 and above, you look for areas with poverty, low per capita incomes, short life expectancy, high crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation, as he says, relative poverty and short lifespan constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status. So his hypothesis is that these figures are not true. And are they not true primarily because of actual fraud, lying people saying something that, you're living in a small rural town in remote Greece or Italy. Somebody comes to you with an idea. They say, I've got a mate who works in the council, and if we pay him a bit of money, he can change your age so that you as a 50-year-old and now 60, so you get your pension. So it's not just you turn, whatever, 91 and you start telling people,

yeah, I just hit 100 just for pride. You're saying this was financially driven fraud sometimes. This is the suggestion. It got much darker, much faster than I expected, Tom. I thought it was just lovely old people exaggerating a little bit, but you're saying they're shakedown artists. And there's lots of other things. I think there's probably stuff around insurance where you'd get much cheaper insurance if your age was different.

And then there's also these complicated family situations where you might not want the crazy cousin to inherit the farm. So it's very useful if the mother becomes the grandmother or vice versa, or children where the parenting of the child is slightly complicated. So there are a lot of possible things, and this isn't unknown. So 2012, after the financial crisis in Greece, 20,000 people who were getting pension payments or welfare had that stopped. they were obviously investigating government spending because they were dead, mostly. A quick side note, Whitwell got the number wrong here on the number of Greeks who lost their benefits. It wasn't 20,000, it was 200,000. All right, moving on. You might say, well, that's Greece, but what about Japan, which generally has, you know, much stronger records?

In 2010, 230,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors, or dead. This was an 82% error rate. And what are the blue zones in Japan? Okinawa is the blue zone in Japan. World War II was not good for Okinawa. Supposedly about 90% of their paper records were destroyed. After the war, if you needed documents, you would go to the US-led military government. They didn't really speak a great deal of Japanese.

And they used a different calendar from the one in Japan. So the opportunities for confusion were significant there. In those places where there are supposedly a lot of older people, much older people, are there particular days of the month or months of the year where suspicious birthdays tend to cluster, for instance? There is a lot of that. Things like people are born on the first of the month, which just suggests that it's probably been kind of chucked in rather than thought about in too much detail. But the's Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana. Paris's population is seven times larger, and it has 17 of these people. Which suggests that fraud of this sort, if it's fraud, is easier in certain precincts than in others where the record keeping is very different. Yeah, fraud or just chaos. But there is more. So there's another big factor in this. His argument is that it's very

unlikely that really anyone is 110. It's very, very, very unlikely that there are clusters of people who are 110 in very poor areas with low life expectancy. But he then goes back to look at the main argument of this Blue Zones movement is that people live a long time because they live what seem like healthy lives. And he looks into these areas to find how well they align with those healthy lives. Okinawa is the one he chooses. So one of the claims is people in these areas, they don't go to the gym, but they live in environments that are nudging them to move without thinking about it. They have gardens, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, Okinawa, out of 47 prefectures in Japan, has the highest rate of obesity. And it's not the lowest

for gardening, because not surprisingly, Tokyo and Osaka are lower, but it's the lowest for gardening because not surprisingly tokyo and osaka are lower but it's the lowest after them so they're not healthy and they're not gardening now it's possible that there was a cohort however yes that was you know an older cohort that did garden or that is not obese right we shouldn't no that is certainly I mean, if you look at cohorts, another of his is, they have a concept called ikegai, which means kind of purpose in life and why I get up in the morning.

Unfortunately, Okinawa has the fourth highest rate of suicide in over 65s in the country. It's not a very happy place generally. He goes through all of these things like their meat consumption. The idea is that people in these blue zones eat very small amounts of meat, maybe five kilos of meat a year. In Okinawa, the average is 40 kilos. Okinawan residents each consume an average of 14 cans of Spam per year.

Well, it could be that spam has some magical longevity properties that we don't know about yet. That wasn't what he was telling Oprah, I don't think. It's not like the Blue Zones thing is evil. The advice does seem quite sensible. I'm sure we should all eat more vegetables. We should have a better social life. I do worry about connection between the idea that very poor people living on very, very meager resources can magically live a long time. And the problem with that supposition is what? Well, it's that actually the opposite is true. So rich people live longer. Rich countries, the average life expectancy is 80 plus. Poor countries, it's 60 plus. It's not mysterious or subtle.

So what has been the response of Dan Buettner and the pro-Blue Zone crowd? I have not been able to find any yet. There has certainly been back and forth with the early versions of the paper. I think the stuff that the Blue Zone organization is doing, it's not like it's a terrible thing, but it does feel, from reading this, like the basis of the research is, it's probably quite a lot more complicated than that. The Blue Zones organization did, in fact, issue a response to Saul Newman's critique, attacking his analysis along a variety of dimensions.

For instance, even though some Blue Z zones are high-poverty areas, people there do, they wrote, enjoy very good or excellent public health services. Saul Newman then responded to their response. Here's a quote. It was basically what you'd expect if you told the Yeti hunting society that Yetis did not exist. Is there a link or three from the past that you are just exceedingly proud of or happy about? I don't know about proud of or happy about. When you ask that, there are some that seem to kind of...

Take on a life? Well, it's more that they sort of make sense. So I remember, I think, in probably the first one, there was a story that China has completed a major dam project for every day since 1949, which to me just seemed like such an extraordinary way of understanding the world and kind of ambition and scale. Are there topics or types of ideas that you avoid? There's definitely a kind of positive thing. I remember quite clearly in 2016 doing the list and thinking, actually, this feels quite important to do a list that is full of, you know, progress and things that are good in

the world. Because why? 2016, why? Because we had Brexit and Trump, essentially. And so there was such a strong narrative amongst people who are often on the internet of just doom and gloom and everything is terrible in the world. And you were constantly seeing stories and suggestions and evidence of things being terrible and trying to find those stories that were about progress or growth or improvement. Those I felt were important.

Can you just describe the process a little bit? I'm curious how formal it is. I'm curious how it unspools during the year and whether you're diligently reading and saving up links and maybe even coming up with way more than 52 that you have to weed down? Or is it the opposite? You find that in November, December, there's this rush to get enough. How does it work? So I do it during the year. The way I do it now is when I find a link, I email it to myself with the words 52 things in the title, my Gmail has a filter and it drops them all into a folder. And then come November, there's usually 100 or so in there. And I just start going through it.

And in the cold light of day, some that excited you no longer excite you, I assume? Yeah, absolutely. And some I will have sent myself an article that kind of seems interesting, but doesn't, you know, I hadn't actually worked out what the fact is. I am glad that Tom Whitwell has taken it upon himself to work out what all the facts are. And I'm always delighted to read his annual list of 52 things. Maybe we'll check in with him again at the end of this year to see what he's come up with. Thanks to Tom for the good conversation today. And thanks to you, as always, for listening. If you have learned some good things so far this year, send them along. I'd like to hear them. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. Coming up next time on the show, if you are someone who used to go to the theater but has

kind of given up on it, you're not alone. But there is a new play on Broadway, a play that, like Tom Whitwell's list, is weird in all the right ways. It's called Stereophonic. It's the one all the rock stars are going to see. The Tony Awards are coming up, and Stereophonic may bring home a bunch of them. We will find out why the show works the way it does and what that might mean for the future of Broadway. That's next time. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Alina Kullman with help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra.

I remember very clearly after a few years when it did seem to have a kind of audience, imagining people like Benedict Evans or the Marginal Revolution people looking at it and going, wrong, wrong, boring, wrong, boring, 30 before, clickbait. That was my nightmare.