Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner uncovers the hidden side of everything. Why is it safer to fly in an airplane than drive a car? How do we decide whom to marry? Why is the media so full of bad news? Also: things you never knew you wanted to know about wolves, bananas, pollution, search engines, and the quirks of human behavior. To get every show in our network without ads and a monthly bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, sign up for SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts at http://apple.co/SiriusXM.
830 episodes transcribedAre betting markets more accurate than polls? What kind of chaos would a second Trump term bring? And is U.S. democracy really in danger, or just “spu...
Sure, we all pay lip service to the Madisonian system of checks and balances. But presidents have been steadily expanding the reach of the job. With a...
Sixty percent of the jobs that Americans do today didn’t exist in 1940. What happens as our labor becomes more technical and less physical? And what k...
His research on police brutality and school incentives won him acclaim, but also enemies. He was suspended for two years by Harvard, during which time...
What happened when the Rooney Rule made its way from pro football to corporate America? Some progress, some backsliding, and a lot of controversy. (Se...
The biggest sports league in history had a problem: While most of its players were Black, almost none of its head coaches were. So the N.F.L. launched...
We revisit an episode from 2016 that asks: Has our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken ca...
Young people have been reporting a sharp rise in anxiety and depression. This maps neatly onto the global rise of the smartphone. Some researchers are...
Only a tiny number of “supertaskers” are capable of doing two things at once. The rest of us are just making ourselves miserable, and less productive....
Educators and economists tell us all the reasons college enrollment has been dropping, especially for men, and how to stop the bleeding. (Part 3 of ou...
Stephen Dubner appears as a guest on Fail Better, a new podcast hosted by David Duchovny. The two of them trade stories about failure, and ponder the...
America’s top colleges are facing record demand. So why don’t they increase supply? (Part 2 of our series from 2022, “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to...
We think of them as intellectual enclaves and the surest route to a better life. But U.S. colleges also operate like firms, trying to differentiate th...
There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. As the Olympics come to a close, we revisit a 2018 episode in which...
Tania Tetlow, a former federal prosecutor and now the president of Fordham University, thinks the modern campus could use a dose of old-fashioned valu...
It’s not oil or water or plutonium — it’s human hours. We've got an idea for putting them to use, and for building a more human-centered economy. But...
A new proposal from the Biden administration calls for a nationwide cap on rent increases. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. We revisit a 2019...
That’s the worry. Even the humble eyeglass industry is dominated by a single firm. We look into the global spike in myopia, how the Lemtosh got its na...
A single company, EssilorLuxottica, owns so much of the eyewear industry that it’s hard to escape their gravitational pull — or their “obscene” markup...
You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. In...
