Podcast
Freakonomics Radio
It was explained how Vienna, as a city of ideas, created the modern world by showcasing how they applied modern disciplines like physiology, medicine, mathematics, and statistics to build a new civilization. It was also highlighted that Vienna's legacy lived on, especially in the United States, in many areas of daily life, such as music, philosophy, nuclear fission, biology, art therapy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and free market economics.
The claim is as much a provocation as the claim. It grabs the reader's interest. It's worked on you.
— Episode: 586. How Does the Lost World of Vienna S...
Episode: 586. How Does the Lost World of Vienna Still Shape...
It was explained how Vienna, as a city of ideas, created the modern world by showcasing how they applied modern disciplines like physiology, medicine, mathematics, and statistics to build a new civilization. It was also highlighted that Vienna's legacy lived on, especially in the United States, in many areas of daily life, such as music, philosophy, nuclear fission, biology, art therapy, psychoanalysis, psychology, and free market economics.
The claim is as much a provocation as the claim. It grabs the reader's interest. It's worked on you.
To hold that a European capital in the banks of the Danube lit the spark for most of Western intellectual and cultural life in the 20th century may sound like an absurdly extravagant claim.
And yet, Richard, this is the flame that you choose to chase in this book. So persuade me in just a minute or two that this claim is indeed neither absurd nor extravagant.
To support the claim, there are three main arguments. One is the breadth of the Viennese contribution. Other cities and other places produced outstanding achievements in certain fields, but it was the breadth of contribution that struck me about Vienna.
The big lesson for me, the thing that really changed my thinking, was a realization of just how fragile a society can be and how the arrival of nationalism and fascism can ruin in a short time what took generations to build.