Freakonomics Radio

He once wrote a paper called An Economic Theory of Suicide.

Back in the spring of 1972, Dan Hammermesh was hunting around for a research topic. And he thought of a poem he'd read back in high school. The poem is Richard Corey by Edwin Arlington Robinson, written in the last decade of the 19th century.

Whenever Richard Corey went downtown, we people on the pavement looked at him. He was a gentleman from soul to -

And he was rich, yes, richer than the king and admirably schooled in every grace. In fine, we thought that he was everything to make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked and waited for the light and went without the meat and cursed the bread. And Richard Corey, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet in his head. That's it. The last part.

He's a philosopher of sorts and he writes fascinating books, most recently The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile.

It's much more costly for someone to not detect a pattern That's Nassim Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and the Black Swan

I think the greatest writer Chicago produces during these years is Nelson Ogren and his love story during this time with Simone de Beauvoir... Ogren wrote The Man with the Golden Arm. It's a great novel about a heroin addict named Frankie Machine. Frank Sinatra played him in the film.

capitalism requires, and I quote, a more individualistic form of entrepreneurship and the absence of nepotism.

And he even was kind enough to give her some of his ammunition for her gun. That is from the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, published by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Yep. Government officials behaving badly. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

OK, so this is from, well, it's called a memoir. I don't know this book, A Memoir of Jane Austen by... OK. Oh, it's by one of her nephews. Austen Lay? Is that a nephew?

Yeah, exactly right. He was like the first person who really kind of memorialized and kind of gave a biography of Austen.

So he kind of, he's like the beginning of Austenmania started with him.

OK, so he writes that before she began Emma that she wrote, I guess, in a journal or a letter, I am going to take a heroine, referring to Emma, whom no one but myself will much like.

In fact, most of the basic emotions that guide us from our animal and paleolithic early human past.

I remember when you and I first started working together and we started talking about, we knew we were going to be writing about crime and therefore violence and therefore guns. And we started talking about Jeff Canada's book, Fist Stick Knife Gun.

And what Canada talks about is that in the old days, in the 50s and 60s, when there weren't that many guns around, disputes would be resolved with fist fights or maybe with knives.

It's fantastically insightful.

I contacted them to let them know that I was doing this book and was surprised to learn, they told me, that any word of Churchill's, either written or uttered in public, was copyrighted by the Churchill estate and that I would have to pay a royalty to quote from Churchill.

I used 3872 words of Winston Churchill's in the book and that cost me 950 pounds, which is roughly 40 cents a word.

I cut every quote to the bone. I was shaving quotes. I was cutting part of the book.

So they did bring it down somewhat. I can tell you that my entire advance went to photo and word rights in the end.

I've never - unlike Churchill, I have a day job because I've never written entirely for money. I really wanted to write this book and I'm really glad to see it.

Joel Waldfogel, who is an economist at University of Minnesota, wrote this book you may know about called Scroogenomics, Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays.

He recently hiked the Appalachian Trail, the entire Appalachian Trail. He wrote to me and said that on the last days when he was so sick of it and so, so weary, he kept repeating to himself, he had been in a class where I used Samuel Beckett's writing, my favorite author. And he said, I kept repeating to myself from Beckett, 'I can't go on, I'll go on.'

The easiest way to think about this is really that they divide the roles into two parts.

And the first part is the one that we tend to understand the best and the one that we tend to think of in the most positive terms. And that is that they bring advice to a firm that doesn't otherwise have it.

Okay. So the second thing that they provide is legitimacy. And that's the one that seems a little bit strange. So you've made a decision or you think you might know what you'd like to do about entering those markets or making a new product. And instead of just going ahead and doing it, you hire the consultants to confirm what you already thought.

And those consultants come in and they say, yes, you're right. Or even imagine you're having a political fight within the firm and both sides hire consultants and in fact they both produce reports and somebody wins that fight with the help of that extra amount of knowledge from outside.

So there's a double entendre in The World's Newest Profession, right? Because your first thought should also be the world's oldest profession, which is prostitution, which I think we can all agree is not actually a profession.

Before the last presidential election in 2008, when Barack Obama beat John McCain, Brian Kaplan published a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter. Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.

The background assumption is this. Everyone understands why dictatorships choose bad policies. There's some awful jerk at the head of a country running it like his own personal piggy bank. The puzzle, though, is why democracies would choose bad policies in a similar way.

So in other words, the question - everyone can agree that dictatorships choose bad policies. There's no big intellectual puzzle as to why that would happen.

But the idea that democracies, which are run by the people or by the people elected by the people, would also make mistakes is the puzzle.

The cover of Kaplan's book shows a flock of sheep standing up like humans in a sort of military formation, ready to follow someone. We the sheeple.

He hung out more and more and more, and eventually he wrote a book about what he learned. It's called Off the Books, The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

In her follow up book, Spook, she goes looking for evidence of the afterlife.

Sandel's latest book is called What Money Can't Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets.

Basically, my book, The Wine Trials, has been my, I guess, principal outlet for writing about wine.