Freakonomics Radio

That's Charlie Whelan... and I'm the author of the Naked Books, Naked Economics, Naked Statistics and most recently Naked Money

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon.

Simple yet not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.

Nearly millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others.

The miracle of this pencil isn't that nobody knows how to make it. The miracle of the pencil is how did it get made?

If you can become aware of the miraculousness, which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.

In one of your papers you make the point that young people while needing education to do well later are kind of the worst candidates for understanding how much they need education to do well later and you open with a quote from Aristotle which I'd never read which I love the roots of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet.

Right my father always mentioned that quote when I was a kid to remind me that however bitter the experience of education is right now the effort from staying home on a Friday night or you know doing something that doesn't really seem that exciting or fun and requiring concentration and thinking however tedious the benefits are long-term and they're big.

He tells the story in a new book called Superforecasting, co-authored by the journalist Dan Gardner.

The book is both a how-to if at a rather high level and a cautionary tale about all the flaws that lead so many people to make so many bad forecasts.

In the book, you mention a couple cases from history where the intelligence community did not do so well.

That's how he puts it in his book, Super Forecasting.

If you take women who don't have caregiving obligations, they're almost equal with men.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, a conversation about the life story that Bernanke tells in his recent book, The Courage to Act.

again his book is called The Courage to Act.

Once I got my degree in 2013, that's when I started writing a book too.

The book Buchanan wrote is called New Money, Staying Rich.

See, the issue is once you make it, that's when you got to turn up a whole other notch. And you have to try to learn everything that you can learn about handling your money.

In a 1994 book called Pricing the Priceless Child, Zelizer showed how the economic role of children has changed over time.

I'm the author of several books, but most recently, Someday All This Will Be Yours, a History of Inheritance and Old Age.

Honzraj's most recent book is called Keys to an Amazing Life.

As the former London cop Stephen Colgan writes in a forthcoming memoir called Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?

That's Harlan Coben reading the beginning of his latest thriller, The Stranger.

I'm all about suspense, trying to make you turn that next page. I want you to start The Stranger at 11 o'clock at night. Think, I'll read 10 or 15 minutes and next thing you know it's four in the morning. That's the kind of book I try to write.

The Stranger is my 27th book and I'm told worldwide I'm around 70 million books in print.

In 1965, Economist Mancur Olson published an influential book called The Logic of Collective Action

While I was writing my book, I tried to sell a diamond.

I waited a week and then I went around to other diamond dealers on 47th Street and they were offering me things like three and four hundred dollars.

So I realized I was going to lose a great deal of money, which I did.

So they weren't going to pay that when someone tried to sell it. And diamond, of course, didn't gain in value. So you instantly lost 50 or 60 percent.

Now, we should make clear that this behavioral understanding of human nature is hardly new. Shakespeare understood it. The Book of Proverbs, to name just one book of antiquity, is full of it.