Freakonomics Radio

I rarely do this, but today I'm going to start by reading a couple sentences from Freakonomics, which Steve Levitt and I published in 2005.

Cheating, we wrote, may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act, getting more for less. So when you think about it, why shouldn't we expect cheating even among scientific researchers?

I rarely do this, but today I'm going to start by reading a couple sentences from Freakonomics, which Steve Levitt and I published in 2005.

In the first Freakonomics book, published in 2005, Steve Levitt and I wrote about one such consequence of the original Roe v. Wade ruling, and in 2019 we put out a Freakonomics radio episode called Abortion and Crime Revisited.

If you've ever read Freakonomics, the namesake book of this show, you may recall this controversial link between legalized abortion and the fall of crime.

Levitt eventually wrote a paper called Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s, four factors that explain the decline and six that do not.

Legalized abortion, they wrote, appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

In 2001, the economist Steve Levitt and the economist slash legal scholar John Donahue published a paper arguing that the legalization of abortion in the U.S. in 1973 accounted for as much as half of the nationwide reduction in crime a generation later.

I am best known for co-authoring Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner.

This was around the time that Levitt and I published our first Freakonomics book.

In the Freakonomics movie, he gets a chapter on names and he does it completely backwards.

And we tell him that it's completely backwards. And he's completely unbothered by the fact that he's gotten it completely backwards and makes names destiny.

When we wrote about names in Freakonomics, we made it pretty clear that naming is not destiny.

If you've ever read Freakonomics, the namesake book of this show, you may recall this controversial link between legalized abortion and the fall of crime.

My favorite book of the last 20 years is Freakonomics. Now, I don't know who wrote that book, but it's a great book. And if you ever meet the author of that book, I'd like to meet that person.

Steve Leavitt is the guy I write books with, freakonomics and super freakonomics

In our first book, Freakonomics, we analyzed the Bagel Man's payment data and wrote up the findings, what the payment rates told us about honesty as it relates to the size of a company, time of year, company morale, things like that.

Their 2005 book Freakonomics used economic theory to offer...

In order to prompt the Google ads, Sweeney needed to find real first and last names, some black and some white. So she would type in a search like Shaunice PhD or Molly MBA to find real people, some of whom were like herself professionals.

So when we wrote about names and Freakonomics, we made it pretty clear that naming is not destiny.

And we made we told that story to reinforce the point that naming is not destiny.

It is amazing how everyone thinks that we said the opposite.

He completely he gets a chapter on names and he does it completely backwards. And we tell him that it's completely backwards. And he's completely unbothered by the fact that he's gotten it completely backwards and makes names destiny.

If you do it right, we'll send you a Freakonomics Radio t-shirt or coffee mug or a signed Freakonomics book.

It's that moment every couple of weeks we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

It is altogether now the hidden side of everything.

From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

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.

Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog.

Oh, geez, Kai, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Fight through it. Okay, all right. Books and the blog of the same name. It is, of course, the hidden side of everything.

the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

So what Leavitt is talking about is the freakonomics documentary that came out a couple years ago

He completely he gets a chapter on names and he does it completely backwards and we tell him that it's completely backwards

And he's completely unbothered by the fact that he's gotten it completely backwards and and makes names destiny

When we wrote about names and freakonomics We made it pretty clear that naming is not destiny, right?

In fact we told the story of these two brothers in New York whose parents had named them loser and winner and The fact was is that loser turned out to have a great life as an upstanding citizen

It is, yes, yes, it is the hidden side of everything.

One of the questions that we posed in our first book, Infreakonomics, was simply this.

It is the hidden side of everything.

Every two weeks we talk with Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and blog about the hidden side of everything.

Stephen Dovener, Freakonomics Radio. He also puts out a podcast, which you can get on iTunes and hear more at Freakonomics.com.

The hidden side of everything is what it's all about.

Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name.

the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

Stephen Levitt, the co-author of the books in the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

It is the hidden side of everything.

my daughter bought your book because of the, quote, funny title, end quote, and has read sections to us, her father and me, in the car and at home. She's 16.

What I would like to know is what you think the perfect meal is to match up with your book at our book club discussion.

So for instance, after we published Freakonomics, some of my colleagues were not that wild about the book and the attention we received.

Books in the blog of the same name, it is of course the hidden side of everything...

Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything.

Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name.

Our once every couple of weeks chat with Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It's all about the hidden side of everything.

It's the hidden side of everything.

So in Chapter one of Freakonomics, Dr. Leavitt explores cheating by Chicago school teachers and with what and what type of elite athlete? Oh, was it the fencers? Right. Yeah, I think they're elite or the sumo wrestlers maybe. Yes.

Dr. Leavitt took an observation step further, researching the dangers of childhood. According to this research, a child is 100 times more likely to die in one of these than playing with a gun.

It's in a swimming pool. Swimming pool. It's a swimming pool.

And in Freakonomics, we learn about the financial structure of drug gangs with the leaders prospering from the work of a large number of very low income workers.

To which major corporation did Leavitt compare these drug gangs? Wasn't it like AIG? And your answer, Captain? AIG.

Angela, in case you don't know, is a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Grit.

Our friend Angela Duckworth, a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a book about this. It's called Grit, the Power of Passion and Perseverance.

I think the reason why there are all these aphorisms about not giving up and maybe why so much of my research has focused on the psychology of staying the course is that sometimes the road not taken, the track that you want to switch to, is appealing not because it is objectively better, but because it's objectively easier just in the short run.

In other words, we give up because we're lazy, or maybe impatient or intimidated, or we're scared to fail. That makes sense, doesn't it?

Duckworth is saying we might be better off by learning to tough it out.

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She's the author of the book Grit and she is my co-host on the No Stupid Questions podcast, which you should also be listening to.

A couple of years ago, I got to be good friends with Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book, Grit.

And that's how I discovered your book, Grit. And, oh man, Grit every day.

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She's the author of the book Grit, and she is my co-host on the No Stupid Questions podcast, which you should also be listening to.

In 2016, you wrote a book called Grit that really touched a nerve in society. It became a mega bestseller.

The two minute version of Grit is that when you look at high achievers, so Olympic athletes and frankly, Steve, people like, oh, Levitt, people like you, entrepreneurs who are really successful across all these different fields, they have one thing in common.

Likely not the only thing, but one common denominator that I've studied as a psychologist is this combination of perseverance and passion over really long periods. That's what I call Grit.

And I think if you wanted a one word synonym, it would be stamina.

a few months ago, we tried something different, a conversational question-asking episode between me and Angela Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who wrote the book Grit.

Also joining us tonight as co-host, the University of Pennsylvania's psychology professor. She's also the author of the great book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Angela, if you don't know, is the author of the longtime bestseller Grit, the Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Angela, here's what we know about you so far. We know that you are founder and CEO of The Character Lab. Correct.

You're best known for having written the book Grit.

Now you're the person that studies Grit, passion and perseverance, so I'm not going to fact check you on whether people stick with things or not.

Joining us tonight as co-host, the author of Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

In your book, Angela, it's passion and pursuit, right?

including people you've heard before on Freakonomics Radio, like Angela Duckworth, the Penn Psychology professor and author of Grit, and David Laibson, chair of the Harvard Economics Department. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.

You may know Duckworth from her bestselling book called Grit, which we discussed on Freakonomics Radio.

I define Grit as passion and perseverance for especially long-term goals.

The message of the book is not that Grit is a good thing in particular. The message of the book is that like so many other things about us that are good, we can do something to intentionally cultivate Grit in ourselves and in others that we care about.

Oh, yes, here comes the self-promotion part. I am also author of a book called Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

I abbreviated it to 10 items in the book because I have discovered through personal experience that people are not very good at dividing by 12 to calculate their score.

I don't think that any of the measures that are currently available are appropriate for high stakes accountability policy, like whether a school is doing a good job educating their kids.

I am also author of a book called Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

I define Grit as passion and perseverance for especially long-term goals.

So the message of the book is not that Grit is a good thing in particular. The message of the book is that like so many other things about us that are good, we can do something to intentionally cultivate Grit in ourselves and in others that we care about.

Daniel Kahneman is perhaps best known as the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, but he also helped revolutionize the fields of both psychology and economics.

He became famous for his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow but it was his decades of earlier research, much of it done with his collaborator Amos Tversky,

You may be familiar with system one and system two from the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

He wrote, not only are we blind to the obvious, but we are blind to our blindness.

The phenomenon even had a name, courtesy of the psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They had called it the planning fallacy.

From an economic standpoint, this sounds backwards. You would think that larger size theoretically creates more specialization of labor and ultimately higher productivity.

If you realistically present to people what can be achieved in solving a problem, they will find that completely uninteresting. You can't get anywhere without some degree of overpromising.

I read your book. I don't know if you've thought about this or if others have said this to you, but I read this as a little bit of an analog to Danny Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Are you familiar with Danny and or his book?

If you realistically present to people what can be achieved in solving a problem, they will find that completely uninteresting. You can't get anywhere without some degree of overpromising.

Kahneman's book thinking fast and slow really opened a lot of eyes around the world

The research paper that Heller and the others would write is called 'Thinking Fast and Slow', which is the same name as Kahneman's 2011 book.

You know, I kind of often talk about Daniel Kahneman and thinking fast and slow was kind of just, I think, a really great overall kind of modern guide to thinking, if that isn't a little too pretentious or too precious rather.

Sutherland here subscribes to the theories of Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, who suggests the brain engages in two distinct kinds of thinking, system one and system two, Kahneman calls it.

The best description I've ever heard of this comes from Danny Kahneman, the Nobel-winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow. He calls it being blind to our blindness.

You may have heard. That's the title of a wonderful book by Daniel Kahneman.

We've just published our third book together, Think Like a Freak.

So I'm going to give you a childish answer to that question, which is that my second favorite chapter in the book is to think like a child.

Last May, when Levitt and I published Think Like a Freak, we went on a long book tour, first in the US and the UK.

On Monday, August 4th, I will be doing a live Twitter chat with iBooks at 4pm Eastern Time, 1pm Pacific Time. I will answer your questions about our new book, Think Like a Freak, about Freakonomics Radio, any question you want to throw at me.

In our book, Think Like a Freak, we give this practice a different name. We call it teaching your garden to weed itself.

The most important idea in your new book was the underlying principle that to Think Like a Freak, you must in fact think.

I love Glenn's question. I think this is super smart and really interesting and important. I think it's great.

I never would have thought this before I started working with companies. I never would have imagined that it is an IT problem.

I do love Glenn's question. I think this is super smart and really interesting and important. I think it's great.

So the minute you hear your name on this program, that means that you are going to get some Think Like a Freak swag.

Hey, podcast listeners on the next Freakonomics Radio, the first installment of our Think Like a Freak book club will answer your questions about the first three chapters.

In our new book, Think Like a Freak, we make the argument that perhaps we are not thinking clearly about failure. Maybe failure can be your friend.

We heard from a lot of listeners who told us that this episode inspired them to quit something and inspired us to write a chapter about quitting in our new book, Think Like a Freak.

We've just published our third book together, Think Like a Freak.

So I'm going to give you a childish answer to that question, which is that my second favorite chapter in the book is to think like a child.

And I think that the beauty of thinking like a child and the beauty of that chapter in our book is that sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place.

Hey, podcast listeners, as you may have heard, our new book, Think Like a Freak is out on May 12th.

On May 4th, the CBS show Sunday Morning is scheduled to run a segment on us and the book.

Hey podcast listeners, our new book, Think Like a Freak is out on May 12th. You can visit Freakonomics.com to learn more or pre-order a copy or 100 copies if you need them.

And happy news here, we are bringing back our free signed bookplate offer.

Which means you can turn a regular old copy of Think Like a Freak into a snazzy autographed copy.

Hey podcast listeners, don't forget our new book Think Like a Freak will be published on May 12th.

So if you think you need to set aside a little time on that day for some light reading, maybe you want to go ahead and call in sick right now just to get it out of the way.

Hey podcast listeners, our new book, Think Like a Freak, will be published on May 12th as a hardcover ebook, audiobook, large print edition, you name it.

And if you preorder it in any format from any store, you can get the first chapter now delivered to your email inbox.

Remember our new book, Think Like a Freak is out on May 12th.

If you preorder it in any format from any bookstore, you can get the first chapter now.

The date? May 13th. Okay. The title of the book? Think Like a Freak.

But then we had this idea to do something that's more like a, almost like a how-to book, how to Think Like a Freak.

The full title is Think Like a Freak. The authors of Freakonomics offer to retrain your brain.

We are starting a Think Like a Freak book club right here on the podcast.

Hey, podcast listeners, as we mentioned at the top of the show, Levitt and I are putting out a new book called Think Like a Freak on May 13th.

We wrote about this in our book Superfreakonomics in a chapter called Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism.

And a prediction that I made that I wish hadn't been true, but turned out to be quite true was with Stephen Dubner in the book, Super Freakonomics. We suggested that because of private incentives, the attempts to rein in carbon emissions just weren't going to work.

In Superfreakonomics, one of the books I wrote with the economist Steve Levitt, we performed a rough calculation showing that if a Major League Baseball player has a son, that boy is about 800 times more likely than a random boy to also make the majors.

Steve Leavitt is the guy I write books with, freakonomics and Super Freakonomics

It just reminds me, I don't know why, of when Superfreak Analytics came out, and we had this stuff on climate change.

You remember that story we wrote in Super Freakonomics about why terrorists should buy life insurance?

And that was whether or not a given bank customer had bought life insurance from that bank.

And that was the sort of logic we threw out in the book.

And this whole thing in the Superfreeconomics book about life insurance was just a complete and total lie.

We wrote about him in Super Freakonomics, too. He did an extensive survey of street prostitutes.

And we weren't sure if we'd ever write another book.

So in Superfreak, there was a chapter on altruism. And we explored how you know when altruism is real, and how do you know whether it's sometimes just the product of scrutiny. You do nice things because you know that you're being watched.

Books like Moneyball, which was about the way the Oakland A's managed to function on a shoestring budget in Major League Baseball and the book was in my mind really about the way the market for baseball players misvalued those players.

The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap and then there's us.

I was astonished that anybody bothered to make Moneyball much less The Big Short and so my experience with the movie business is peculiar because what seems to happen is I write books that are ever harder to turn into movies and they work ever harder to make them into movies.

The heart of the story was that markets can really pretty dramatically misvalue and misjudge people. And if a baseball player could be misjudged, who couldn't be kind of thing?

If you need some Michael Lewis before then, you might want to listen to an episode we made with him last year on the 20th anniversary of his book Moneyball.

If you need some Michael Lewis before then, you might want to listen to an episode we made with him last year on the 20th anniversary of his book Moneyball.

We called it Did Michael Lewis Just Get Lucky With Moneyball?

I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story the story concerned a small group of undervalued Professional baseball players and executives many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues

This book is called money ball.

The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of site-based scouting prejudices

One moral of the money ball story was to not trust your gut so much the other moral was that history is one long battle between Traditionalists and new thinkers

If gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field before a live audience of 30,000 and a television audience of millions more What did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work?

The book is Moneyball, the art of winning an unfair game.

Even if you don't know the book or the movie, even if you didn't know there was a book or a movie, you probably know the word, Moneyball.

That was the title of a book published in 2003 by Michael Lewis. The subtitle is The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

It tells the story of a baseball executive, the Oakland A's general manager Billy Bean, who realized he couldn't compete with the big budgets of the bigger teams.

So when it came to assembling his roster, he put his money on smaller bets, smarter bets, statistically sound bets.

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of Lewis's book. So we are going to interview him for an episode of our Freakonomics Radio Book Club.

Books like Moneyball. Which was about the way the Oakland A's managed to function on a shoestring budget in Major League Baseball.

The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap and then there's us.

The heart of the story was that markets can really pretty dramatically misvalue and misjudge people. And if a baseball player could be misjudged, who couldn't be? Kind of thing.

And they said very sweetly that this is a good story Michael Lewis has written, but he doesn't seem to realize that these two guys named Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists, have explored the biases in the human mind that lead people to make these sorts of misjudgments.

They're calling them Nudge units after Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein's work but his job is really to create environments that will lead people to make choices that are good for them and that really comes out of Danny and Amos's work

Back in 2008, Thaler published a book called Nudge, improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. It was co-authored with the legal scholar Cass Sunstein.

A Nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

The title of the new edition is Nudge, the final edition.

Here's a relevant passage from the new edition of Nudge. It addresses the concern that carbon taxes will necessarily hurt the economy.

The software our publishers provided when we were proofreading the galleys of this book was so sludge ridden that Sunstein gave up and typed up a list of changes.

There's so much low-hanging fruit because so many things are done so stupidly...The economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for showing the world how to Nudge itself toward a better future. We can't solve climate change with nudging, but we can't solve it without nudging. And he's just published an updated edition of his landmark 2008 book Nudge.

Also as coauthor of the wonderful book Nudge and the resultant Nudge movement.

It came to be called the Nudge Unit after the book of that name by the American academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

They're also known as the Nudge Unit after the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Dick is the co-author of an excellent book called Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which shows how behavioral economics can be used in the real world.

so-called meaning they named the unit after this book.

Dick is the co-author of an excellent book called Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which shows how behavioral economics can be used in the real world.

They are more informally called the Nudge unit after the book Nudge by the American academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

One of his main inspirations was a Harvard economist named Ed Glazer, who four years ago published a manifesto called Triumph of the City.

The work that we first found that really I think sowed the seeds for what would become the Downtown Project was Ed Glazer's book.

I was very flattered when Tony reached out to me. He read my book and seems to have been excited by it, and it's deeply flattering obviously.

In 2011, Glaeser published a book called Triumph of the City. How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier.

You call the city our greatest invention, which means you're putting it ahead of mathematics, the computer, antibiotics, rum raisin ice cream. How so?

He's the author of a book called Triumph of the City, how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier.

He's the author of a book called Triumph of the City, how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier.

One of his main inspirations was a Harvard economist named Ed Glazer, who four years ago published a manifesto called Triumph of the City. How our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier.

The work that we first found that really, I think, sowed the seeds for what would become the downtown project was Ed Glazer's book.

I was very flattered when Tony reached out to me. He read my book and seems to have been excited by it.

He's also the author of a book called Triumph of the City.

Notably, the title of this book is not Triumph of the Nation State.

He's the author of a book called Triumph of the City, how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier.

He's the author of a book called Triumph of the City, how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier.

And he just published his first book, a nonfiction book with an NYU sociologist, Eric Kleinenberg, as a co-author. It's called Modern Romance, and it debuted at number two on the Times Bestseller List.

It's about how people meet and mate in the modern world and how that is different from the past.

It's about how people meet and mate in the modern world and how that is different from the past.

And it's good. And I mean, I guess I'm thinking if I could do what you do, I don't know if I'd want to waste my time writing books.

Considering that his new book, Modern Romance, is about finding love in the digital age, his answer might surprise you.

Listen, really, congratulations on the book. It's just fantastic that it's good and that it's popular, and I wish you all the best with it and with all your other stuff.

It's about how people meet and mate in the modern world and how that is different from the past.

And it's good.

Considering that his new book, Modern Romance, is about finding love in the digital age, his answer might surprise you.

He talks about his book, Modern Romance.

To me, the craziest statistic in the book is in 1967, there was a study they did where they found 76% of women said they would marry someone that they are not romantically in love with.

He talks about his book, Modern Romance.

To me, the craziest statistic in the book is in 1967, there was a study they did where they found 76% of women said they would marry someone that they are not romantically in love with.

He talks about his book, Modern Romance.

To me, the craziest statistic in the book is in 1967, there was a study they did where they found 76% of women said they would marry someone that they are not romantically in love with.

It's about how people meet and mate in the modern world and how that is different from the past.

But I feel like by going really deep into a relatively narrow topic, you came up with stuff that was just even if you know a little bit of literature, it was really interesting.

And it was like, yeah, one out of 12 people married someone in the same building. Eighty some percent. It was the same city. One out of three. It was like within a five block radius. And it was really startling.

And you just think about it now. It's like no one marries someone from the same city. You like meet people throughout your whole life, like that are from different parts of the world. And you go to college.

To me, the craziest statistic in the book, the craziest one that blows my mind the most is in 1967, there was a study they did where they found 76 percent of women said they would marry someone that they are not romantically in love with.

In 2016 the journalist Michael Lewis told the Kahneman Tversky story in his book The Undoing Project, a friendship that changed our minds.

His latest book may pose the biggest challenge yet.

It is called The Undoing Project and it's about a pair of academics in a room alone for a few decades writing papers.

The Undoing Project, the title of Michael Lewis' book, was also the name of the last project that Tversky and Kahneman worked on together.

When I saw the phrase, I thought that's a good description of their enterprise because what these guys are engaged in doing is undoing a false view of human nature and the way the mind works.

one of your other books excellent book is called The Undoing Project about Danny Kahneman Amos Tversky

Michael Lewis's book The Undoing Project was about the Kahneman Tversky partnership and their research

The two of them were the subject of Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, which Lewis discussed on this program in an episode called The Men Who Started a Thinking Revolution.

His latest book may pose the biggest challenge yet. It is called The Undoing Project and it's about a pair of academics in a room alone for a few decades writing papers.

The Undoing Project began to germinate more than a decade ago.

The Undoing Project, the title of Michael Lewis's book, was also the name of the last project that Tversky and Kahneman worked on together.

When I saw the phrase, I thought, that's a good description of their enterprise, because what these guys are engaged in doing is undoing a false view of human nature and the way the mind works.

Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, is a portrait of two men who came together to rewrite many of the assumptions about how people think and make decisions.

It's right there in the title of the founding text of the field, Adam Smith's book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

They know about The Wealth of Nations and they know that Margaret Thatcher, the enemy, always had a copy of Wealth of Nations, the legend goes, in her handbag.

She didn't read the first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, clearly.

But she read the second one and she did use that as an authority to promote her economic theories and activities and policies.

When Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations in the mid-18th century, it wasn't supermarkets he was worried about. It was trading firms like the English East India Company, which grew so massive that it began acting like a sovereign, as Smith put it.

Writing in The Wealth of Nations, Smith blamed the severity of the famine on the East India Company's improper regulations and injudicious restraints.

By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security. And by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain. And he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Great Britain have for more than a century past amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only.

It has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire, not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine.

A project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost immense expense without being likely to bring any profit.

For a very small expense, the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.

If you go at it with the mindset that this is a book of economics, the way that we understand the field of economics today, you're going to narrow your field of vision.

What was Smith's primary purpose of publishing that book or what did he hope would come of it? I think that Smith is hoping that educated readers will understand that national wealth is not measured in terms of gold and silver coin, and that actually you need to pay attention to output. You need to pay attention to how people are producing and where they're producing and what they're producing.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love.

The Wealth of Nations is an attack on the entire commercial system of Great Britain?

By telling a small story about the pin factory, Adam Smith was making a larger argument about some of the ingredients required for a thriving economy. Division in labor and the division of labor.

You may recognize that title. It is a book published in 1776 by the Scotsman Adam Smith, who is widely seen as the father of modern economics, and some people consider The Wealth of Nations a sacred text of capitalism.

By the time I first spoke with David Lang, he had finished writing Wealth of Nations, the score had been distributed, and rehearsals would start soon.

I wasn't going to read the book unless I had a gig to read the book. It's a long book. It's a long book. And it's, you know, 18th century language. The language is very hard, and there's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't have read if I wasn't reading it for purpose.

And the piece we're talking about is Lang's new oratorio, The Wealth of Nations, which repurposes text from the Adam Smith book of the same name.

Lang's music ... a passage from one of the most famous lines in Wealth of Nations. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, Adam Smith writes, but from their regard to their own interest.

At the end of March, the composer David Lang debuted a modern piece of music set to a 250-year-old book, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

The math and aftermath of Wealth of Nations, starting now.

I caught up with David Lang about a week after the last of the four performances of The Wealth of Nations, and I asked what it felt like to work on a big new piece like this for years, and then hear it come to life, and then go away.

To what degree is your new Oratorio Wealth of Nations a, quote, religious piece?

Movement 18, the final section, you go back to the text of Adam Smith.

Outliers, you know, the classics.

And he gave me Outliers and I was like, man, thanks.

Most people who have heard of the 10,000 hour rule heard of it via the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

I think he's really done something very important, helping people see the necessity of this extended training period before you reach high levels of performance.

But I think there's really nothing magical about 10,000 hours.

One example that you give that Malcolm Gladwell writes about in Outliers that you say looks good on first glance, maybe to a layperson, but falls apart upon inspection is the Beatles playing all those nights in clubs in Hamburg.

And there's a sentence in, I believe it's the chapter called the 10,000 hour rule in Outliers, where you write that 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.

The kind of deliberate practice that kind of went viral when Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers.

The point of Outliers, I mean, there's a number of points, but one is that I wanted people to move away from the notion of success as something individual.

And I wanted to get people to understand that a lot of success has to do with chance, with the contribution of your culture, your generation, your family.

I agree that that would be in the average takeaway.

The 10,000 hour stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function or not narrative function, but kind of argumentative function, which was to me, the point of 10,000 hours is if it takes that long to be good, you can't do it by yourself.

So there's a sentence in, I believe it's the chapter called the 10,000 hour rule in Outliers, where you write that 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.

You may have heard of the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that you need to practice for 10,000 hours to become great at something.

That idea originates from the research of Anders Ericsson and his colleagues.

Most people who have heard of the 10,000 hour rule heard of it via the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Now, right, Gladwell basically thought that was kind of an interesting magical number and suggested that the key here is to reach that 10,000 hours.

The 10,000 hours stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function or not narrative function but argumentative function.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

So I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. That took me a very long time to write.

I loved your first book.

I already did that.

I'm enough. And what I have to say is enough. And that's okay.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

So I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. That took me a very long time to write.

And I had the idea for that book probably sometime around 1999 or 2000. And that book came out in 2017.

The idea, the germination of the idea to the publishing of the book, that's how long it took. The act of writing was about three and a half years maybe.

I loved your first book.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. That took me a very long time to write.

And I had the idea for that book probably sometime around 1999 or 2000. And that book came out in 2017.

The idea, the germination of the idea to the publishing of the book, that's how long it took. The act of writing was about three and a half years maybe.

on behalf of all your readers and fans, of which I am one, I loved your first book.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took me a very long time to write.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat published in 2017 sold more than a million copies in the US alone.

Yeah, I hated that paper. I found it really insulting.

I mean, it's just like hit me where it hurts, you know?

Oh, making a book is truly the worst thing in the world. It's the hardest thing in the world.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took me a very long time to write.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat published in 2017 sold more than a million copies in the US alone.

Yeah, I hated that paper. I mean, it hit me where it hurts, you know?

Oh, making a book is truly the worst thing in the world. It's the hardest thing in the world.

It would kill my soul to be an accountant.

I wrote a book called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took me a very long time to write.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat published in 2017 sold more than a million copies in the US alone. And it was turned into a popular Netflix series starring Nasrat.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is about cooking, but it's also about Nasrat herself and the history of cooking and a lot more.

That's how long it took. The act of writing, I think, was about three and a half years maybe.

Yeah, I hated that paper. I mean, it's just like hit me where it hurts, you know?

Maybe a year and a half ago, we had you on Freakonomics Radio in an episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, and we talked about your first book, Inside of a Dog, which I had read years ago and loved, and then reread it and loved it even more.

I've gotten inside of the dog and have glimpsed the dog's point of view. You can do the same.

If you have a dog in the room with you, what you see in that great furry pile of dogness is about to change.

Inside of a Dog was Horowitz's first book. It was published in 2009 and it was a significant bestseller. Now it's considered a classic.

It perplexes me that some of the questions I have most often been asked about dogs and that I have about my own dog are not addressed by research on matters of personality, personal experience, emotions and simply what they think about.

The questions are typically of two kinds. What does the dog know? And what is it like to be a dog?

Alexandra Horowitz, who runs a dog cognition lab at Barnard College, is the author of a wonderful book called Inside of a Dog.

The next book club episode we're planning will have me as host again. If you'd like to read that book ahead of time, our selection will be Inside of a Dog, What Dogs See, Smell and Know by Alexandra Horowitz.

Alexandra Horowitz has written a couple of fascinating books, Inside of a Dog and Being a Dog.

Horowitz has written a couple of fascinating books, Inside of a Dog and Being a Dog.

Putnam is also the author of the landmark book Bowling Alone, which was published in 2000.

Putnam's work shares a lot of the themes that I was just talking about today.

He wrote some of the seminal work on community membership and did some of the longest ranging studies on that.

Putnam is also the author of the landmark book Bowling Alone, which was published in 2000.

Now this concept of social capital, as you may know, Stephen was popularized in a very well-known book by Bob Putnam called Bowling Alone.

The reason for the title of that book is social capital is notoriously difficult to measure.

It is that social networks have value.

So I was amazed to find, I remember actually discussing this with Bob in his office at Harvard that the number of bowling alleys is actually very highly correlated with the rates of upward mobility in our own data.

Putnam is also the author of the landmark book Bowling Alone, which was published in 2000.

That's a really enormous effect David Halpern again from the British government's behavioral insights team as Obvious as the benefits of social capital might seem we almost hardly seem to notice that it's there Says incredibly consequential and we see it in lots of areas of policy that we touch on

In other words, would it be in his words a fancy television? In other words, it will isolate us more and more or would it be a fancy telephone and would connect us more and more Because technology has both those capabilities

Putnam found that social capital was relatively low in the US in the early 1900s and rose fairly steadily through the 1960s But that's when the decline began.

But he warns it's not easy to do diversity diversity brings out the turtle in us That in a more diverse setting everybody kind of pulls in and disconnects from their neighbors

Or an even more unlikely book to be turned into a film, The Big Short.

Lewis' book about how a housing bubble turned into a financial disaster.

Or an even more unlikely book to be turned into a film. The Big Short, Lewis' book about how a housing bubble turned into a financial disaster.

With something called a credit default swap, it's like insurance on the bond and if it goes bust you can make 10 to 1, even 20 to 1 return.

I was astonished that anybody bothered to make Moneyball, much less The Big Short.

One popular book in Choi's analysis is called The Index Card, why personal finance doesn't have to be complicated.

It was written by Helene Ohlin, a journalist, and Harold Pollack, who is a professor at the University of Chicago, but not in finance or economics. He works in public health policy.

Rule number one, for instance, strive to save 10 to 20 percent of your income.

Dear Professor Pollack, I'm a 28-year-old single mom and I work as a cashier. You have just told me to save 20 percent of my money. F*** you.

And my response is to all of those emails was, you know what? You're totally right. I totally see where you're coming from. I think that my original card was really good for middle class people like me. It wasn't quite as good for people that were at different stages in their life.

But that didn't stop him from turning his index card into a book co-authored with the journalist Helene Ohlin. It is called, yes, The Index Card.

Why personal finance doesn't have to be complicated.

And to me, it's a little bit like, you know, in some sense, you could say all of religion comes down to the Ten Commandments. But a lot of us seem to need some commentary on those and need to know how to execute those.

Or depending on your religious faith, I sometimes refer to the book as the Midrash to our index card for your Jewish listeners.

And for our non-Jewish listeners, a Midrash is rabbinic commentary or teaching on a biblical text. Not quite a canonical passage, but revered nonetheless.

But that didn't stop him from turning his index card into a book co-authored with the journalist Helene Ohlin. It is called, yes, The Index Card. Why personal finance doesn't have to be complicated.

And to me, it's a little bit like, you know, in some sense, you could say all of religion comes down to the 10 commandments. But a lot of us seem to need some commentary on those and need to know how to execute those.

And then people are saying, well, why is there a book?

And to me, it's a little bit like, you know, in some sense, you could say all of religion comes down to the 10 commandments. But a lot of us seem to need some commentary on those and need to know how to execute those.

Or depending on your religious faith, I sometimes refer to the book as the Midrash to our index card for your Jewish listeners.

And for our non-Jewish listeners, a Midrash is rabbinic commentary or teaching on a biblical text. Not quite a canonical passage, but revered nonetheless.

It is called, yes, The Index Card, Why personal finance doesn't have to be complicated.

One popular book in Choi's analysis is called The Index Card, why personal finance doesn't have to be complicated. It was written by Helene Olin, a journalist, and Harold Pollack, who is a professor at the University of Chicago, but not in finance or economics.

I teach economics at the University of Rochester. I write books about economics. Books that apply an economic treatment to topics that don't usually get the economic treatment.

In his book, More Sex Is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases or STDs should be having a lot more sex since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions and things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

People who do have STDs, Landsberg argues, don't feel the full consequences of their actions.

I teach economics at the University of Rochester. I write books about economics. Books that apply an economic treatment to topics that don't usually get the economic treatment.

In his book, More Sex Is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases or STDs should be having a lot more sex since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions and things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

People who do have STDs, Landsberg argues, don't feel the full consequences of their actions.

And so people are not fully accounting for the damage that they're doing to other people when they make decisions.

In his book, More Sex Is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, should be having a lot more sex, since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions, and things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

In his book, More Sex Is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, should be having a lot more sex, since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions, and things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

In his book, More Sex Is Safer Sex, Landsberg argues that people who are free of sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, should be having a lot more sex, since their participation in the sex pool would diminish the overall risk of disease.

The main theme of the book is that things work out badly when people do not feel the full consequences of their actions, and things work out better when people do feel the full consequences of their actions.

I think that robots in 50 years are really going to be completely unlike and beyond anything that we'd imagine.

Whenever you're coming up with these doomsday scenarios the tricky part narratively is always like wait how do we actually give the robot control of our nuclear weapons in a way that does not freak people out.

I think that robots in 50 years are really going to be completely unlike and beyond anything that we'd imagine.

Whenever you're coming up with these doomsday scenarios the tricky part narratively is always like wait how do we actually give the robot control of our nuclear weapons in a way that does not freak people out.

This fact is cited in a recent book by Randall Munroe called What If? If a supernova occurred where the sun is, don't worry, the sun was not going to go into supernova, but if it did, it'd be so bright, it'd be brighter than if a hydrogen bomb exploded at the surface of your eyeball.

I think that robots in 50 years are really going to be completely unlike and beyond anything that we'd imagine.

Whenever you're coming up with these doomsday scenarios, the tricky part narratively is always like, wait, how do we actually give the robot control of our nuclear weapons in a way that does not freak people out?

This fact is cited in a recent book by Randall Munroe called What If?

He's written landmark books called Competitive Strategy and On Competition.