Freakonomics Radio

In 2014 you co-authored an econ textbook, Principles of Economics textbook.

Now, from what I can tell, the business model for economic textbooks is that the authors get paid wonderfully, extravagant sums to write them. And then the publisher recaptures that sum by charging exorbitant prices to university students who have no choice but to buy the textbook.

So the other day I looked on Amazon. Your book was selling for $210.

Sound has always been a challenge to our sense of autonomy.

Fighting sound with sound is what I see people doing with these different kinds of technologies. Sort of pacifying the space around them in order to maintain their own control of their own attention and their own state of mind.

Have we fallen into certain patterns where we're so used to controlling the sounds around us that we don't think to take off the headphones?

And this is the real problem is there can never be enough control.

In the book, he busts a variety of nuclear power myths and he highlights the countries that have built a lot of nuclear reactors, countries like Sweden and France.

They all go over budget, very slow. It's like literally a billion dollars and 10 years before a shovel can ever touch the ground.

And we literally wouldn't have the climate crisis that we have today if we had stayed on that track.

Everybody knows that Gutenberg's Bible was influential, that printing the Bible and religious tracts were crucial to the spread of the Reformation.

His kids are Hank whom we heard Hershovitz speaking with a moment ago and Rex

Why are some words bad the idea that they could be bothered me as a kid words are strings of sounds How could sounds be bad? But of course words aren't just strings of sound They're strings of sound to which we attach meaning and yet it's not the meaning of words that makes them bad either

I wrote the book in part to call people's attention to that

Change won't come easy, but there are many ways to make things better We could limit at will employment we could give workers a role in workplace governance so that their interests are taken into account We could also change the context in which we work by guaranteeing a basic income in health care so that no one feels forced to work for an abusive employer

Somehow lots of Americans have been convinced that government handouts hamper freedom The truth is providing for people's basic needs promotes freedom it makes it possible for people to say no to a boss who would treat them badly

My colleague Bill Miller has a parenting view about this in his book Faking It There's a chapter on apologies and he says look There's a million ways to fake an apology when you've demanded one child apologize to the other you're gonna get an insincere Apology and Bill thinks here's what has to happen. You've got to demand a second apology Now the second apology is going to be as insincere as the first apology But Bill says you have to stop you have to declare the second apology good enough Because if you keep going until you get the thing that's sincere, you're never gonna get it and you lose this interaction You declare the second apology good enough and you recognize that it serves a purpose Even if it wasn't sincere in Bill's view it kind of brought the wrongdoer low by being made to apologize Not just once but twice and that's the real compensation to the other kid

She argues that the most oppressive government that most of us interact with is not actually the state We're hyper concerned about the government and our constitutional rights and whether the government's respecting our rights and she says but wait a minute I want you to look somewhere else your employer has a ton of power over you and you have as things stand now in our society very few rights and Many of our employers treat us in just the ways that we're worried about governments treating us

Bob Shiller has talked about, he calls it naturally occurring Ponzi process.

What Shiller talks about is when Ponzi-like processes occur, but there's not like a man behind the curtain who's in charge of it.

He recently published a three-volume book called Vanishing Asia that includes 50 years of his photographs from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south and everything in between.

His latest is called A Brief History of Motion, From the Wheel to the Car to What Comes Next.

You may think you know the story of Bambi from the famous Walt Disney film, but trust me, you don't really know the story of Bambi.

Walt Disney was known for turning fairy tales into box office hits, a process that often required brightening up some of the story's darker themes.

It's quite clear that Bambi was Salten and Salten was Bambi. He understood the dilemma not only of Jews, but of all minority groups.

They made it into the sweetest, most poisonous and putrid film I've ever seen.

Disney's Bambi is an innocent creature who only wants to live happily with his forest friends.

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

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.

It's that people rise to the level of their incompetence, which I find is a bit cruel sounding,

because one could also say that people rise to their ceiling of competence, right? And then maybe they're not as good at that.

He's a retired psychology professor and author of a book called Believing in Magic, the Psychology of Superstition.

It reminds me of this book by Barbara Ehrenreich, the journalist who's most well known for a book called Nickel and Dimed, which was an amazing piece of reporting about low wage work in America.

But she wrote another book called Bright Sided, which is a play on blindsided. And it came about because she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer and she was suddenly being assaulted with all these optimistic and inspirational messages about, you know, keep your head up. Everything's going to be okay.

And it's a bit of a knockdown of the kind of work that you do. Yeah. And very explicitly a positive psychology.

He wrote, they, Americans, have a lively faith in the perfectibility of man. They all consider society as a body in a state of improvement. Humanity as a changing scene in which nothing is or ought to be permanent. And they admit that what appears to them to be good today may be superseded by something better tomorrow.

You've coauthored a book called A Beginner's Guide to the End. And the best way I can summarize it is that it's like what to expect when you're expecting, except for dying instead of giving birth.

The reason why we titled it that way is in some ways, turn your attention to the fact that you're mortal. Wrap your head around that one to the degree you can or any of us can.

And in some ways, that's where the living starts. That's when you appreciate time. That's when you appreciate needing one another. That's when you appreciate how important love is.

And that's when you start pondering what really matters to you.

B.J. Mueller's book about preparing for death is called A Beginner's Guide to the End.