Freakonomics Radio

I've always thought the United States does better when it encourages conditions that lead to the spread of democracy rather than imposing it by forcing elections if you think about countries that modernize their economies modernize their societies often under dictatorships and then modernize their political systems.

I think the biggest challenge we face this year and it's a larger trend of course is the one that I identified about 20 years ago which is the rise of illiberal democracy.

I'm a senior writer at the New York Times, and on the author of HOurs Was the Shining Future, the story of the American Dream.

I also in writing this book came to grapple with the question of, okay, immigration can be great.

I think he and the people who around him genuinely believed that the immigration system of the time was grossly unfair.

I think they inevitably are.

A lot of people particularly on both the political left and the pro business libertarian right, imagine immigration as a kind of free lunch with no downsides.

Buston and her frequent collaborator Ron Abramitsky recently published a book called Streets of Gold America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success.

We chose the title of the book the basis of a famous quotation that's painted on the walls at the Ellis Island Museum.

The quotation is attributed to an unnamed Italian immigrant who said I came to America because I heard the streets were paid for gold.

But when I got here I found out three things one the streets were not paid for gold two they weren't paved at all and three I was expected to pay of them.

I approached Phil face to face three times, asked him to sit for interviews, and he ultimately said no, which is his prerogative. I didn't really need him.

I thought it would benefit him to tell his side of every story and it would have been fun, but that wasn't his decision and that was fine.

So I just kept working on the book.

I'm not even sure I want this league to succeed but it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape the business of professional golf and I have to take it.

And he was quite candid about his feelings towards the Saudis. He called them scary motherfuckers. And he admitted that it's just sports washing and that we know they killed Jamal Khashoggi and we know the execute people for being gay over there. But nevertheless, it's just too good opportunity to pass up.

According to Fred Shapiro, editor of The New Yale Book of Quotations, the term whitewashing, a deliberate attempt to cover up some dark matter, this dates back to at least 1703. Green washing, that's when you try to appear more environmentally friendly than you are, this goes back to at least 1989, and Shapiro says the first use of sports washing was likely in 2015. It described Azerbaijan's hosting of the European Games despite a troublesome human rights record.

It's about a really unusual relationship between Arizona and Saudi Arabia. You wouldn't think that they would have anything in common.

Okay, let's go back in time to see the genesis of the relationship between Arizona and Arabia.

There once was a man named Carl Twitchell.

Carl Twitchell is quite a character, let's say.

He was an American mining engineer.

Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, by Tim Hwang (2020).

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy (2011).

And he said, oh, I was going to go to South America. And he said, fantastic, come to Brazil.

Feynman officially taught an undergraduate class at Caltech only for two years, and those were captured by some now famous books called the Feynman Lectures on Physics. They're three big red books.

Feynman worked very hard on that. He thought very deeply about how to organize the material, and they're rather extraordinary.

It's a great collection of his letters, his thoughts about a lot of things.

It's full of these great stories about Feynman, his thinking, and how he approached things. It's very entertaining and insightful.

It's classic Feynman, the stories are just hilarious.

It's kind of a nice book of letters that are really interesting to read. They're interesting because they're written by him.

And that's a really great book that captures his style.

He has since published seven more books, including one called Safe Enough Spaces, a pragmatist's approach to inclusion, free speech and political correctness.

I'm going to read to you from The Science of Trust, Emotional Attunement for Couples.