Freakonomics Radio

There's this Valentine's book that we always read as kids called Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch.

I'll mail you this book. It's an awesome book.

But there's this older gentleman, lives alone, never had a family. And he gets this big box of chocolates that says, Somebody Loves You. And it talked about how before he ate the same crappy sandwich every day and ate alone at his job at a shoelace factory and had no friends.

But the point is the guy's life completely changes because quote, somebody loves you.

He's like, maybe it was the person I buy the paper from. Maybe it was someone at work. Maybe it was the neighbors.

And in some sense, this is a larger phenomenon that's related to the things Manker Olson wrote about 40 years ago in The Rise and Decline of Nations, in which in a stable society, insiders basically figure out how to rig the game for themselves.

I really think I'm an intellectual granddaughter of Ernest Becker, who famously wrote The Denial of Death.

He was an anthropologist as well and his take was that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, that we defiantly create meaning where none exists because we do not want to deal with the terror that the ultimate mistake is one that's going to get us killed.

And again, I'm just Becker's granddaughter, because his argument was if we distract ourselves and we try to push down our fears of failing, ultimately that's about our fear of dying, that ironically trying to push all of that down and not talking openly about it creates more problems.

In 2021, they published a book called The Violence Project, How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.

The noted public policy scholar Anne Marie Slaughter, in a book called Unfinished Business, singled out what she calls the care penalty as a main driver of gender inequity.

In her new book *The Two-Parent Privilege*, the economist Melissa Kearney says it's time for liberals to face the facts: U.S. marriage rates have plummeted but the babies keep coming, and the U.S. now leads the world in single-parent households.

Her new book is called *The Two-Parent Privilege*, How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.

It's really challenging to discuss the topics of marriage and family without it feeling like a conversation about values.

And I reject that response.

The reason why I thought it was important to say that is because a lot of social scientists will look at the exact same data as me.

Twin Oaks was started in 1967 by a group of people studying psychologist B.F. Skinner's book, *Walden 2*. The book describes a fictional behaviorist community that became the model for Twin Oaks.

That's Kristen Gatze. She's an ethnographer and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and an author of a new book called *Everyday Utopia*, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life.

The Japanese, she writes, are quote, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.

Filbrek has written several well-regarded books of maritime history. The one most relevant to our discussion today is called In the Heart of the Sea, the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. The Essex was a real-life inspiration for Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the whale of all whaling books.

Bridgerton, if you haven't seen it, is an historical romance series on Netflix, executive produced by Shonda Rhimes and based on a book series by Julia Quinn.

Miss Prudence Featherington, Miss Philippa Featherington and Miss Penelope Featherington. And they are announced to the Queen.

Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet Google have seized a large lead in shaping our potentially AI-dominated future.

Big Tech is Bad, Big AI Will Be Worse.

I started the firm in 95 on my birthday, March 29th. With the concept, I read a book by George Gilder who became a friend. Life After Television.

And he talked about infinite distribution and I thought about it and talked to him a lot.

And he said, wow, there's going to be more distribution than ever.

I don't know if you saw, Zeke came out with a book. The Brothers book.

And we did an interview at Microsoft CEO conference.

You know, I'm not a wallflower. Rom's not a wallflower. Zeke's not a wallflower.

So we go up to the interview. It's all three of us. And immediately we turn into the siblings.

It's Zeke in the lead. Rom fighting for it. Me shutting up.

My most recent two books were Nine Nasty Words about profanity and Woke Racism about race and cultural issues.

One thing that it's important to realize with cursing and profanity is that it isn't words in the sense that ironing board or yesterday or therefore are words. Profanity, when you're talking about real profanity, real cursing, is eruptions.

My name is Melissa Moore and I'm a writer.

Moore is the author of a book called Holy Sh**, A Brief History of Swearing.

So when I was getting my Ph.D., I was reading a lot of medieval and Renaissance texts, obviously. As one does.

He talked about the importance of being not just not racist, but an anti-racist, right? And making sure that you're a positive force for social change.

Finkelstein cites a famous paper by the economist George Akerlof called The Market for Lemons, Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.

It is this sort of reasoning that led most economists, including ourselves, to the intuition that mandates are the best and most straightforward solution to selection problems.

Mandates do work the way economists like George Akerlof, who wrote about this in his Nobel Prize-winning work, The Market for Lemons, predicts.

The Peter Principle states very simply that in any hierarchy, an employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

The Peter Principle. Why Things Always Go Wrong.

His idea is that firms and organizations tend to promote people based upon their performance so far.

In any organization where competence is essentially eligibility for promotion and incompetence is a bar to promotion, people will rise to the level of incompetence and tend to stay there.