20 years ago, a book called Freakonomics became an instant bestseller and worldwide sensation. Tim Harford got his hands on the first copy that Steve Levitt ever signed... and promptly sold it on eBay. In this Cautionary Conversation, the pair are reunited to discuss the Freakonomics phenomenon, why Levitt left the hostile world of academia, and how simple changes could revolutionise everything from education to organ donation.
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Twenty years ago, I was working on the final draft
of my first book, The Undercover Economist, when my publisher
sent me a worried email. There's this new book about
to come out. He said, it's also about economics, and
it looks like it's going to scoop you, and that
might be a problem, But I wasn't worried. If the
book was a success, it would just make economics seem cool.
(00:39):
And anyway, how big a success could an economics book be.
At the time, I lived in the US, and I've
been doing some writing for the Financial Times, so I
pitched the idea of flying to Chicago to interview the
economist whose work was at the heart of this book.
It was my first ever interview, and little did either
of us know that his work was about to become
(01:01):
one of the biggest books of the decade. I walked
away from the interview with a copy to Tim the
first book I've ever signed. You can probably get at
least nine dollars fifty on eBay. Steve Levitt, the book,
co authored with Stephen J. Dubner, was called Free Economics
and a Combined Pop Culture with Economics. It was a
(01:22):
global smash hit. It spawned several sequels, a documentary film,
and a podcast, and twenty years after our first meeting,
I am reunited with Steve Levitt. Steve, welcome to Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
A great to talk to you, Tim. We both had
a pretty good run for the last twenty years.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well you've had an even better run than me, but yeah,
good enough. I can't believe it's been twenty years. It
was my first interview, so I was just terrified that
the digital recorder wouldn't work, and you kept picking it
up and going, sure, this is working. I was like, please, please,
don't mess with my tape recorder. And did you really
not know the book was going to be so big?
(02:00):
I mean, nobody thought the book would be successful.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
After we signed the contract, I called my dad to celebrate,
and his only response was, this is completely immoral. I said,
what are you talking about? He said, it's a moral
to take the money from the publishers when you and
I both know no one wants to read the junk
that you write about. And I think that everyone kind
of had that view. I mean, Stephen Denner and I
(02:24):
we both agreed that we could use a little extra cash.
So when they were willing to overpay us for the book,
we agreed to write it, but honestly, it was just luck. Really.
The biggest thing that happened was they got me on
the Daily Show with John Stewart. And honestly, the way
they got me on, I know I'm not supped to
say this, but somebody traded a rent controled apartment to
(02:46):
someone who worked on Chance show in return for getting
me on to the show, and that changed everything. It
was pure graft, you know, that made this thing take off?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, I meant is cool these days? So you were
as so often, you were ahead of the curve. Although
I have to say I was on I was on
John Stewart's show, but I was on the Colbert Report. Yeah,
with my second book, and I can assure you myself,
and I don't think anybody trading in any rent control departments.
But I assure you my second book did not do
nearly as well as Freakonomics, so I think there was
(03:18):
more going on than just corruption. But first I need
to say, I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales, Steve.
(03:50):
If you can recall the elevator pitch from twenty years ago,
what was economics all about?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, so freakonomics was really my research. Up to that time.
I had written dozens and dozens of really odd ball
economics papers, so about how real estate agents rip you
off because they have bad incentives in the contract, how
getting the financial records of a crack selling gang and
(04:16):
looking at the economics of selling drugs and the names
you give to your kids doesn't expect the life. So
that's the kind of research I did. Now, of course
it was very dry and academic, but it was on
topics that lent themselves to storytelling, and so when I
got together with Stephen Tumner, we turned all of these
academic papers I had written into a series of interwoven
(04:39):
stories that were fun and exciting and really touching on
pop culture. So in many ways it was a rigorous
economics book because the ideas and the studies that we're
writing about were really serious and had the validation of
having been published in top economics jurnales, but done with
a tone that nobody had ever really done before. The
(05:03):
heart and soul of economics is how can you talk
about economics but as if you were kind of what
we call like a rogue sorts of rogue way of
having fun and making fun of a lot of things
and a lot of people while you're dabbling in big
economic ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
You may remember, you probably don't. I did actually auction
that book you signed for me on eBay. I got
quite a lot more than nine dollars fifty for it.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
No?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't. I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
I said, look, I'm going to auction this and give
them money to charity, and you very nobly said, well,
whatever they pay, I'll match it, so or'll double the money.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
You know it's coming back to me. Yeah, yeah, it
wasn't it a few hundred dollars? It was a few hundred.
I think it was about six hundred dollars. I can't
remember exactly. Wow, So it was not nothing slightly self interestedly.
I sold it about the time my book was coming out,
which was about six months after Freakonomics, obviously, just you know,
anything to get a little bit of attention.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And I remember a six poker game too.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Ah yeah, you. So this is a separate interview the
Ft the Financial Times. Maybe me go and lose it
poker to you while trying to interview you. It was
really really difficult multitask.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I thought it was good though. I thought that turned
out really well.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
It was a fun interview, but you took all my money,
and by the way, the expense claim on that was
quite difficult.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
That's like when I invited a call girl, a prostitute,
to come in and guest lecture to my class at
the University of Chicago on the economics of crime, and
to get her to come, I had to agree to
pay her hourly wage. And I will say I did
not have success billing either the National Science Foundation or
the University of Chicago six hundred dollars to cover the
(06:47):
cost of hiring a prostitute to come to teach.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
My class form because of the amount, or because of
who it was being paid to.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
It was because I didn't even try. Could you imagine,
I can imagine. I can imagine the National Science Foundation
pays a freaking author six hundred dollars for prostitute.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
With the benefit of twenty years of high any sense
of why the book was such a phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It really was a case of being in the right
place at the right time. A combination of that and
the fact that Dubner and I didn't expect anyone to
ever read the book, so we wrote it in a
way that was very freeing because we started we started
out trying to write a regular book, and it was terrible,
(07:35):
and we knew it was terrible, and we were almost
going to write it anyway, because well, that's the way
you write books. And then we had the good sense
to sit back and look, since no one's going to
read it, why don't we try to write a book
that's fun for us. Dubnor is an amazing writer, and
I think he and I had the right tone. But
Dubnor had written this piece about me in the New
York Times, and he had cast me as this genius
(07:57):
srlock Homes of economics. You give him a pile of
data and he'll go bang away in his computer for
two hours and solve any problem. I mean, it was
completely and totally artificial, but people loved it.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
It was a great piece. It was a read regret.
That was a great piece of writing.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So we just basically have been milking that completely fake
image he built about me for the last twenty years,
and it was a really easy voice for both of
us to fit into. And I think that's part of it.
I don't know why people were so eager to read it. Now.
What was really funny for me is we wrote that book,
and then, of course, if you have that kind of success,
(08:31):
you think, well, let's write a second book. And what
we thought is, oh, people loved our stories, and so
if we can come up with a whole bunch of
good stories, people will love the next book. But people
didn't really like it, and people didn't really buy it
nearly this much, and I came to realize it wasn't
actually the stories that people wanted. It was more the attitude,
and it was an attitude that people weren't used to,
(08:52):
a sassy kind of exploration of possibilities people hadn't thought about,
and getting that once was plenty, people didn't really need
any more of it, and so we had the good
sense eventually to stop writing books because I think of anything,
maybe reading Freakonomics people feel smart because it was really
(09:12):
easy to read what was written at the seventh grade level,
but it kind of invited you inside of academia in
a way that was more fun and unusual compared to
other books. Like nobody really knows why it worked. I'm sure,
if we did it again, it wouldn't work, but we
were super lucky.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
You said it invited people into academia in a way
that made it seem really fun.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Is academia really fun?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I mean, you recently announced that you're leaving academia, and
listening to conversations you've had about that, not only are
you leaving academia, but you kind of wish you'd left
academia a long time ago. So what is it about
academia that, if anything that ever was fun? And why
did it stop being fun?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
The fun part about academia for me is the freedom
to pursue ideas and the ability to tackle things you
don't know anything about, and then to take the time
to learn about them and to have the them to fail,
to not have a boss. Sometimes it's an incredible gift.
In another sense, it's complete travesty because it leads many
(10:18):
people to be very unproductive and get paid very well
for many, many years. That is all really fun. I
think what's not fun for me about academia is that
the standard of evidence is sky high, So when you
try to publish your work, you've got referees whose job
is to find every possible hole in the paper, and
(10:41):
there's an incredible bias there for in academics answering very
small questions very very convincingly, And ultimately I didn't find
that so exciting because anytime there was a little bit
of uncertain not that you thought it was wrong, you're
ninety seven percent sure that you're right. And even the
(11:02):
referees are ninety seven percent sure they're right. Their whole job,
all of their incentives, is to poke holes, and the
editor's job is not to get called out later for
having published a paper that's wrong. All of the work
goes into trying to polish off that last one or
two percent of certainty. It's really not fun and it
drives you away from tackling big problems. And so for me,
(11:24):
ultimately I found it really fun to be in the
real world after fre economics, so many doors opened up.
I got to talk to people like you and and
it just showed me how big the world was and
how many exciting things there were to do. And personally,
the part I like best about ideas is coming up
(11:44):
with them and testing them until I'm eighty five percent
sure they're right. That's good enough for me, and then
I like to move on to the next thing, and
so the real world is a much better lab for
doing that than academics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
You were talking about in another interview about your experiences
at the University of Chicago. The Economic Department of the
University of Chicago is very famous, lots of Nobel Prize winners.
But some of the stories you were telling about what
sounded like a really toxic culture, a lot of bullying.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It sounded really really bad. Actually, most of my colleagues
were wonderful. But the monster in my case is this guy,
Jim Heckman, who's a brilliant economist, a Nobel Prize winner,
but just to give you an example, at some point
he just started to hate me. But the most extreme
thing he ever did was to start a seminar series.
And typically the seminar series and academics are like macroeconomics, macroeconomics,
(12:36):
law and economics, trade things like that, and we only
invite academics and usually pretty esteemed academics to come and
visit and talk. The seminar that he put into place,
the only requirement to speak in that is that you
had to hate me and have written something critical about me.
And it was completely absurd, and eventually the powers that
(12:57):
be made him stop doing it. But there's a core
exam that every first year student has to pass in
order to stay into the program, and it would be
completely standard that the question he would put on would
be discuss what's wrong with Steve Levitt's work, which of
course puts the gradu students in a terrible position because
they have no choice except to say everything that is
(13:21):
supposedly wrong with my work when maybe they want to
actually be my student. But it was an extremely rambunctious
and difficult environment. The idea at some level was that
that kind of roughness would lead to big breakthroughs in scholarship.
Do you think it does? You know, I don't think so.
(13:42):
I think what is good for a scholarship is that
people will tell you the truth about what they think
about your work. But I think it also helps if
you do it nicely. And there are amazing scholars at
the UFC Economics Department. But when we were completely dysfunctional,
you know, a lot of people were willing to know
about prizes, and in part it was because Chicago was
willing to take folks who were thinking about things differently
(14:05):
and to invite them in and it didn't have to
come at such a high cost personality wise.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Obviously, Jim Hackwin's not on the podcast to give his
side of the story. No doubt he would describe everything
in his own way, but just to leave academia behind
on a high before we move on, what's the academic
paper you've written that you're most proud of.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
So I wrote this paper on abortion and crime, which
got enormous amounts of attention. And the idea is that
I don't wanted children are at risk for crime, okay,
And that's I think very well documented from decades of
social science research that if your mother doesn't love you,
your life is going to be difficult on many dimensions.
(14:47):
And so we applied that very simple logic to the
changes in abortion laws in the US, the legalization abortion,
and we showed that pretty credibly a huge share of
the decline in crime that happened in the nineteen nineties
was due to the legalization of abortion. Okay. At the
end of that first paper, we in our conclusion said, well,
(15:08):
because use abortion only affects crime with a twenty year lag,
we can see as we write this paper the predictions
we can make about what will happen to crime over
the next twenty years, and we predict that crime will
continue to fall into US about one percent a year
for the next twenty years. So the paper I'm most
proud of it is that twenty years later, John Donnie,
(15:28):
who was my CA author, and I said, hey, we
made that prediction twenty years ago, why don't we go
test it. Let's see if it really worked. And it
was different from a typical academic paper because number one,
we had exactly the hypothesis we've made. We knew exactly
what we were testing. And number two, we had a
set of tables we had used in the initial paper
that we said, look, well, exactly replicate that methodology. So
(15:50):
we'll get twenty years of data that is completely out
of sample, and we'll just see what happens in the data.
And what was so interesting is that the data over
those next twenty years were completely consistent with our hypotsis,
I think, better even than we had expected. And I
do not know any economist who has made a prediction
and waited twenty years and then seen where that prediction
(16:12):
came true and done it with a real scientific rigor.
And it was so confirming. To me of what we
had done, and in some sense though, my deep pride
about that paper also led to my exit from the
profession because nobody cared. We couldn't get academics to care,
(16:32):
We couldn't get it published easily. I mean, I sent
it back to the original journal that our first paper
had been polished, and the responsors, well, we don't really
publish simple papers like that anymore. And so it really
pointed to me that what was important to me and
what I thought was exciting about academics, there was no
market for that anymore. And when there's no market for
(16:54):
what you're making, it's a really good idea to exit.
And that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
You're listening to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford and
my special guest Steve Levitt. When we come back, will
be talking about how to teach maths in a way
that makes it exciting. We're back, and I'm here with
(17:18):
Steve Levitt. Steve, when you were at Chicago University, you
founded the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change. It's
quite a grand sounding title.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
We just got risk. I verrely remember what it says
for anymore.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Okay, Oh yeah, Radical Innovation for sarch changed risk. Yeah,
I got it. Okay, So you were just aiming for
the backronym. Now I understand what were you trying to
do with that center.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I had gotten tired, as we've talked about already about
what was going on in academics, but I wanted to
try to do something that put together the best of academics,
so real rigor based on innovative ideas and unpopular ideas.
I didn't want to shy away from things that were unpopular,
as academics don't have to shy away from unpopular things.
(18:02):
Mixed that with a kind of startup feel and with
a philanthropic feel, and to try to go out and
saw of really big, important problems, often problems that regular
nonprofits couldn't tackle because the ideas might be repugnant or unpopular.
I guess it's been six or seven years now we've
been at it, and like it's hard, it's hard to
(18:24):
make real world change. But I think we finally got
two or three successes on the book that we can
feel pretty good about. For example, for a long time
we've been working on the issue of kidney donations, and
so in the US in particular, there's this huge waiting
list of people who are on dialysis who need a kidney,
(18:45):
and there's a tremendous shortage of donors for kidneys. In
large part that is because it is against the law
to compensate financially people for giving their kidneys. It all
depends on altruism. So economists disagree with most people in
the sense that we think that does make sense, that
done well, we could give financial incentives for kidneys and
(19:08):
it would make the world a much better place. And
the value of a kidney to the recipient and to
the government who's paying for the dialysis is huge, hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we could offer
donors hundreds of thousands of dollars and still it would
be worth doing the transplant operation. And so the ethical
issues around kidney donation are such that people say, well,
(19:28):
we can't really have a market for kidneys because the
market price is ten thousand dollars, and that'll be exportation
of the poor. But it's not exploitation. If you actually
pay people two hundred thousand dollars for kidneys, then what
you have is you have a list of seven million
people all signed up begging to give their kidney. I
tried to do that for years and I failed. But
as part of Risk, as we were trying to push
(19:51):
that agenda, we were just learning a lot about kidneys.
And one of my young people, we really hire really twenty,
really talented twenty two year olds to come and work with.
He was talking with some doctors and actually maybe watching
an intake of a potential dollar. What he realized was
that it turns out that of every one hundred people
who show up and say I would like to donate
(20:13):
a kidney, in the end, only about three of them
make the donation, and fully forty percent of those are
kicked out of the process because they're either too heavy
or they smoke, and those are two things that will
make doctors unwilling to do with the transplant. And he
had this incredibly simple idea. He said, hey, why don't
(20:34):
we work with the transplant centers and when someone comes
in and the weight is too high, instead of saying hey,
you can't donate, we'll just have the transplant center say
hey you can't donate. Yeah, but if you lose weight
you could. And there's this group called Risk that will
for free help you lose weight. So all we did
was just work with transplant centers, give them flyers and
say send people our way, and all we would do
(20:57):
was just give them free access to weight watchers, and
we would have a young person who would text them
and try to give them moral support and be a
cheerleader to help them lose weight. And it seems really silly,
really simple, and so obvious that how could it make
any difference. But on a shoestring budget, our little group
has led to sixty extra kidney donations over the last
(21:21):
year and a half, and that's sixty lives changed or saved,
and the cost per life saved is something like five
thousand dollars nothing. It is about the best intervention that
anyone has ever seen from a simple cost benefit and
it's totally obvious. Why was no one else doing it?
(21:41):
We're not sure, but it's a really simple insight that
led to a big impact, and at scale we could
be doing thousands of these per year. We really did
it almost as a pilot, and now we're trying to
figure out how we can make it really transformational in
the kidney space. So that's one example of a success.
I'd say another one that is really interesting to a
(22:01):
sale con of the con Academy, and with Arizona State
University we helped start in online school. You know, we
had various ideas about what we thought was wrong with
the way current high schools are run in the US,
and it turned out that the online school was incredibly
successful in terms of test scores. And what we've learned
is that the idea that there'd be a teacher standing
(22:24):
in front of twenty five or thirty students lecturing them
about things, that turns out to be roughly the least
efficient way to learn that you can come up with.
And the only reason we do it is because it's
the technology. We had to do it in the eighteen
fifties when public education got going, And so now we're
launching an in person school at brick and Mortar School.
So I can't say it's going to be success that
because it has happened, but I have every reason to
(22:45):
believe that we are going to be able to deliver
a high school experience that is staggeringly better than what
is being done right now in terms of what kids learn,
how enjoyable it is to them. That we will build
in creativity rather than drive creativity out, and so for me,
that is the single most important and interesting and inspired
(23:09):
anything I'm working on right now is I just believe
that we are at the right moment post COVID to
create a completely different model for how we teach and
how we learn. And I hope that this is something
I'll do till the day I die, and that more
than freakonomics, that this will be my legacy.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
You and I both have an interest in maths or
math as I guess you would say, what do you
think that we get wrong in the way the young
people are taught to engage with numbers.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So I think what we do up through about the
age of twelve or thirteen is not that bad. I
think knowing how to add and subtract and divide and
do fractions and things like that is the basic skill
in life that you need and everyone should have that,
and I don't think we do in the most efficient way,
but at least we have our eye and the prize
up through about the age of thirteen. High school math,
(24:01):
on the other hand, I think is a complete horror
show because we ask children to do a whole bunch
of math, which is complicated based on doing computations that
know what he does anymore. So one of the things
that I watch all of my high school kids do
is try to learn how to compute the minimums and
(24:22):
maximums or the zeros of polynomials. And that is something
that they did in Hidden Figures, that movie about getting
people to the Moon, because we didn't have good computers
and so people had to do that. But since computers
came in, there's not a person on the planet who's
had to do that manually other than a high school student.
And we try to teach kids how to do proofs.
(24:43):
Again great, I think knowing how to prove things is wonderful,
but we make them prove all sort of things about
triangles that who cares about. Back in ancient Greece, it
was important to know things about triangles. Now it really isn't.
What do people actually use in their daily life. They
add and subtract, They do simple arithmetic, and that's good
because they've usually learned that, and then they analyze data.
(25:04):
They use spreadsheets, they have to make sense of complicated relationships,
and we do all almost none of the teaching of
that in high school. And so data science might call
it data analytics, that those are the skills that people need,
and I believe we should teach people the things that
they will use. Many of the hardcore mathematicians get upset,
they say, oh, we're not teaching deep math. But I
(25:25):
will tell you there is very deep math in data
science and a lot of artistry and a lot of judgment.
And another thing that we've been doing at my Risk
Center is we ended up launching something called Data Science
for Everyone, which has become the leading think tank everything
group that's trying to change the way we teach math
(25:47):
to incorporate data science in the United States, and it's
been really, really quite successful. I'm sure you know.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Steve Strogatz, of course, has this idea that colleges should
teach math appreciation. We have art classes where you teach
people to draw. You have hours appreciation where you teach
people the history, and you know, you get people to
look at pretty pictures and discuss like why they're such
studding works of art. And he suggested for some students, Okay, fine,
(26:13):
they're not going to calculate a lot of stuff. They're
not going to be high powered mathematicians or statisticians, but
they could still have an appreciation of how math works,
how data works. I guess fre economics should be on
the course, right. It's an example of data appreciation. It
doesn't really tell you the details of how your detective
work was done, but it gives you a sense of
the kind of things you were doing and the kind
(26:34):
of things that you could do if you had control
of the data.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
See, you've shutts and I have talked a lot about that.
Actually worked with the State of Utah in the United
States to try to implement some of those ideas. And
we're just getting gone and we'll see how that works.
The discoveries, the process of the history of math, I
think is actually fascinating once you get into it. Yeah,
But the real power of this idea of appreciation is
(26:59):
with young people, because so many twelve and thirteen year
olds are right at the point where they're deciding, oh,
I'm not a mass person. That's not for me, and
then they check out. And that's because they don't understand
why they're doing this complex math, and which makes sense
because I don't really understand why they're doing that complex math.
(27:19):
But on the other hand, if you instead focused with
young people and saying, hey, here's what's amazing about math.
Here's how math is useful, Here's how math is a
form of storytelling, or here's how math is the language
of the universe. I mean my own high school kids.
They just thought, well, the teacher told me I do this,
this and this could the answer, and so I do that.
(27:39):
But they didn't really understand it is true that if
you would do a different galaxy, it would also be true.
And so I think the idea, the most powerful part
of the appreciation idea is to take people who are
still trying to figure out who they are. They don't
know who they are, and they're making these choices, and
if they say, WHOA, maybe math is fun, then they
won't close off the path to eventually maybe saying that
(28:03):
math could be a part of your career from they
don't have to be afraid of science. And so that's
where I think the idea heads.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
It's real legged you're listening to Cautionary Tales with me,
Tim Harford and my guest Steve Levitt. After the break,
we'll be talking about Steve's very own podcast, People I
mostly admire. I wanted to ask you about podcasting when
(28:31):
you and Dubna launched the Free Comics radio podcast. I
remember thinking, what are they doing. They've created this unbelievably
successful brand. People love the books, they got a New
York Times column, but podcasting, you're going to spend your
time podcasting. Obviously that worked out pretty well. So you
guys were really ahead of the curve there.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I was in the exact same boat as you were
when when Dumney said I'm going to start a podcast.
I think I said, what's a podcast? It spons what
fifteen years ago. He's one of the really early podcasters,
and I thought it was the silliest idea. You would say, hey,
can you come on my show? Could I interview you?
And I I'd always do it, and it's really out
of sympathy for him. And then I remember if we
(29:13):
were on a book tour, and I suppose it must
have been for our third book, Thinks like a Freak
And Dumna said to me, hey, how many downloads do
you think I get a month for Freakonomics? And I
didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I said, I
don't know, maybe ten thousand and fifteen thousand. I really
thought it was probably five hundred, but I didn't want
to say that, and make him think I had a
(29:33):
low opinion and said, oh no, it's actually over a million.
I said over a million a month, and he said yeah,
and I couldn't believe it. And that was one of
those epiphanies, those moments of truth where you say, wait
a second. So in a year you have twice as
many downloads of the podcast we've ever sold the books,
(29:53):
even though we had a really excise books, And it
really opened my eyes that as a vehicle for talking
about ideas, it is amazing. And so I never could
have imagined that I would end up doing my own podcast.
But when I decided that I wanted to leave academia,
I thought, well, you know, for twenty five for thirty years,
(30:16):
I've been so helpent on being a producer of ideas.
I literally spent all my time trying to come up
with Grady cannowming ideas that I had closed myself off
completely to learning or knowing about anything else. And I said,
I just want to relax for a while and be
a consumer. And a podcast was a way that I
(30:37):
could convince all sorts of amazing people to come and
talk to me. Nobel Prize winning chemists and things that
I could just have the joy of having really amazing
conversations with incredible people and completely switch my own role
from being the person who's supposed to be the genius
to being the person who doesn't know anything, and this
(30:57):
is asking the questions and got I've I found him
very comfortable with that second role. I love being the
person who doesn't know anything, and then he's trying to
extract information from experts. And one of the things I've
learned is that many experts are incredibly bad at explaining
what they do and making it approachable. And I think
(31:20):
one of my real talents is that I'm pretty good
at hearing something complex, grasping on to the end of
a string, and pulling on it until I can get
people to explain things in ways that I and other
regular people can understand.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
The podcast is called People I mostly Admire, and it's
a really wonderful podcast. I love listening to it. I'm
sure you'll take this as a compliment. You are quite
a weird interviewer in a way that it's hard to
put my finger on exactly what it is. But I
think it is partly this. You don't mind appearing like
you don't know what you're talking about. You don't mind
seeming a little bit stupid, and I think it's because
(32:00):
actually everybody knows you're not stupid. You're a professor at Chicago.
You want all these prizes, so you don't mind asking
the dumb questions. There's an artlessness about it, which.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I really like. I'm very antisocial in general, and I
have very little human interaction. But for these podcasts, I
come prepared and I think I asked them different questions
and they used to being asked sometimes and sometimes because
of that, it gets very personal and we end up
(32:30):
talking about things that might be seen as out of bounds,
but build this strange bond. And for me, that's what
is completely unexpected. But there's something about the artificiality of
a podcast interview that allows this emotional connection. You wouldn't
expect it, but that's how I judge whether a podcast
episode is successful. And it happens often in the most unexpected,
(32:56):
strange ways, and that's but so fun about it for me.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, there's definitely some podcasts you listen to that you're
clearly just like having the best time. I mean, there's
an incredible podcast where you interviewed, you will daughters, which
is not a normal podcast behavior for a podcast, like people,
I mostly in my interviewing all these academics, and there's
one point where you're in tears, She's in tears. I'm listening.
(33:21):
I'm in tears. I mean, you know, it's it's heavy stuff.
It was an incredible interview.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
So yeah, I did interview my two oldest daughters, and
one of my daughters was anorexic, seriously inerrexit in hospitalized,
in your death. And we never really talk about the
deepest issues in regular life because there's always some excuse
not to. But the idea that we would sit down
in a recording studio and for you know, an hour,
(33:50):
she and I would talk and it was a conversation
that for me is so special and honestly, we hadn't
had a conversation ever before that, and we really haven't
had a conversation ever that special since. Again, it was
this weird thing about it being an interview being a
(34:12):
podcast that somehow got us to open up. And I
have to say, I'm so glad that I did that.
Everyone else thought it was a terrible idea. My producer
thought it was a terrible idea. I wasn't sure if
it work or not, but it was really magical and
I think it's pulled my daughter, Lily and I closer
(34:34):
together than we ever would have been otherwise. But again,
it's almost like that initial Freakonomics somehow captured light thing
in a bottle. It's the right thing at the right time,
and that conversation with Lily was just a I'm so
glad that I had that, and I think I don't
really have it in me to have those kind of
conversations with her outside of that setting. It was the
artificiality that somehow allowed both of us to open up
(34:56):
in a way we don't Usually.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
You're kind of trapped. You might make an excuse and
walk away from the conversation. But yeah, I wanted to
ask you, Steve, about your perspective on parenting. And when
I first met you, I was about to become a
dad for the first time. That my oldest daughter is
is slightly younger than pre Economics. You have been through
(35:22):
some very difficult experiences as a parent. You lost your
youngest son when he was very young. You had this
experience with your daughter, Lily, who was so ill. But
you know, you're still going you've got a young family,
you've got more children under the age of five, You've
got a chance to do it all again. And I
just think people who have had to deal with these
(35:44):
really difficult challenges learn something that those of us who
get a bit more lucky and don't have to deal
with so much, maybe we don't learn. So I just
wanted to get your thoughts on what you've learned from everything.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Well, I really thought after I went through my older
children and then I did it, she said, I started
a new family. Oh my god, all the lessons I learned,
I'm going to be such a better parent. The second
num around, and two things happen. Number One, I realized
I was so tired of those first kids I can
barely remember what I did. And number two, in the
(36:21):
actual practice of it, I literally made all the same mistakes,
and it was really disappointing to me. I have two
simple pieces of advice about parenting, one of which I
take and the other which I don't take, even though
it's my own advice. The first simple one is that
I believe that if your kids feel loved, most other
things will take care of themselves. I don't do a
(36:43):
lot of helicoptering of my kids. I don't care whether
they are good at school, and I don't push them
or pressure them anyway. I think that's so much less
important than just having kids who can see and know
that you love them deeply and that no matter what happens,
you're going to be behind them. So that's the piece
of advice that I actually do a good job of parenting.
(37:05):
The thing I don't do wish I wish I would
do is not trying to do other things while you parent.
What I do all day long is I have take
care of my kids and I have work on my
podcast or my new school, and it's frustrating to everyone
and it's no fun at all. And whenever I have
the discipline, which isn't very often, to say, hey, for
(37:26):
the next four hours, I'm gonna sit with my kids
and I'm not even gonna think about anything else. I'm
just gonna be with them and let them dictate what happens.
I'm always happier, there's always more rewarding. The kids love it.
It's good for me. I have such a lack of
discipline that I cannot do that on a regular basis.
There's just this outside polls, I me are so strong.
(37:49):
But if I were to give advice to others, if
you're gonna work work, if you're gonna be with the kids,
to be with the kids, try not to do both
at once.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Steve, thank you so much for joining us on Coation Retales.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Oh, thank you, Jim. It's all so good. We got
to do this more often. Yeah, I'll take you up
on that.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I'm sure this conversation would have whetted your appetites to
hear Steve. We've interview a huge variety of guests on
his podcast, people I mostly admire. You can of course
find that anywhere you get your podcasts. As for Cautionary Tales,
we will be back very soon in your feed with
another of our episodes. For a full list of our sources,
(38:30):
see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan
(38:55):
at Brain Audio Bend and Dapfhaffrey edited the scripts. The
show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jopp, Messaam Monroe, Jamal Westman and rufus Right.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
(39:17):
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios
in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
(39:39):
the show page, on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash plus
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Twenty years ago, I was working on the final draft
of my first book, The Undercover Economist, when my publisher
sent me a worried email. There's this new book about
to come out. He said, it's also about economics, and
it looks like it's going to scoop you, and that
might be a problem, But I wasn't worried. If the
book was a success, it would just make economics seem cool.
(00:39):
And anyway, how big a success could an economics book be.
At the time, I lived in the US, and I've
been doing some writing for the Financial Times, so I
pitched the idea of flying to Chicago to interview the
economist whose work was at the heart of this book.
It was my first ever interview, and little did either
of us know that his work was about to become
(01:01):
one of the biggest books of the decade. I walked
away from the interview with a copy to Tim the
first book I've ever signed. You can probably get at
least nine dollars fifty on eBay. Steve Levitt, the book,
co authored with Stephen J. Dubner, was called Free Economics
and a Combined Pop Culture with Economics. It was a
(01:22):
global smash hit. It spawned several sequels, a documentary film,
and a podcast, and twenty years after our first meeting,
I am reunited with Steve Levitt. Steve, welcome to Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
A great to talk to you, Tim. We both had
a pretty good run for the last twenty years.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Well you've had an even better run than me, but yeah,
good enough. I can't believe it's been twenty years. It
was my first interview, so I was just terrified that
the digital recorder wouldn't work, and you kept picking it
up and going, sure, this is working. I was like, please, please,
don't mess with my tape recorder. And did you really
not know the book was going to be so big?
(02:00):
I mean, nobody thought the book would be successful.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
After we signed the contract, I called my dad to celebrate,
and his only response was, this is completely immoral. I said,
what are you talking about? He said, it's a moral
to take the money from the publishers when you and
I both know no one wants to read the junk
that you write about. And I think that everyone kind
of had that view. I mean, Stephen Denner and I
(02:24):
we both agreed that we could use a little extra cash.
So when they were willing to overpay us for the book,
we agreed to write it, but honestly, it was just luck. Really.
The biggest thing that happened was they got me on
the Daily Show with John Stewart. And honestly, the way
they got me on, I know I'm not supped to
say this, but somebody traded a rent controled apartment to
(02:46):
someone who worked on Chance show in return for getting
me on to the show, and that changed everything. It
was pure graft, you know, that made this thing take off?
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Well, I meant is cool these days? So you were
as so often, you were ahead of the curve. Although
I have to say I was on I was on
John Stewart's show, but I was on the Colbert Report. Yeah,
with my second book, and I can assure you myself,
and I don't think anybody trading in any rent control departments.
But I assure you my second book did not do
nearly as well as Freakonomics, so I think there was
(03:18):
more going on than just corruption. But first I need
to say, I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales, Steve.
(03:50):
If you can recall the elevator pitch from twenty years ago,
what was economics all about?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, so freakonomics was really my research. Up to that time.
I had written dozens and dozens of really odd ball
economics papers, so about how real estate agents rip you
off because they have bad incentives in the contract, how
getting the financial records of a crack selling gang and
(04:16):
looking at the economics of selling drugs and the names
you give to your kids doesn't expect the life. So
that's the kind of research I did. Now, of course
it was very dry and academic, but it was on
topics that lent themselves to storytelling, and so when I
got together with Stephen Tumner, we turned all of these
academic papers I had written into a series of interwoven
(04:39):
stories that were fun and exciting and really touching on
pop culture. So in many ways it was a rigorous
economics book because the ideas and the studies that we're
writing about were really serious and had the validation of
having been published in top economics jurnales, but done with
a tone that nobody had ever really done before. The
(05:03):
heart and soul of economics is how can you talk
about economics but as if you were kind of what
we call like a rogue sorts of rogue way of
having fun and making fun of a lot of things
and a lot of people while you're dabbling in big
economic ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
You may remember, you probably don't. I did actually auction
that book you signed for me on eBay. I got
quite a lot more than nine dollars fifty for it.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Do you remember that?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
No?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't. I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
I said, look, I'm going to auction this and give
them money to charity, and you very nobly said, well,
whatever they pay, I'll match it, so or'll double the money.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
You know it's coming back to me. Yeah, yeah, it
wasn't it a few hundred dollars? It was a few hundred.
I think it was about six hundred dollars. I can't
remember exactly. Wow, So it was not nothing slightly self interestedly.
I sold it about the time my book was coming out,
which was about six months after Freakonomics, obviously, just you know,
anything to get a little bit of attention.
Speaker 1 (06:03):
And I remember a six poker game too.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Ah yeah, you. So this is a separate interview the
Ft the Financial Times. Maybe me go and lose it
poker to you while trying to interview you. It was
really really difficult multitask.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I thought it was good though. I thought that turned
out really well.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
It was a fun interview, but you took all my money,
and by the way, the expense claim on that was
quite difficult.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
That's like when I invited a call girl, a prostitute,
to come in and guest lecture to my class at
the University of Chicago on the economics of crime, and
to get her to come, I had to agree to
pay her hourly wage. And I will say I did
not have success billing either the National Science Foundation or
the University of Chicago six hundred dollars to cover the
(06:47):
cost of hiring a prostitute to come to teach.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
My class form because of the amount, or because of
who it was being paid to.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
It was because I didn't even try. Could you imagine,
I can imagine. I can imagine the National Science Foundation
pays a freaking author six hundred dollars for prostitute.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
With the benefit of twenty years of high any sense
of why the book was such a phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
It really was a case of being in the right
place at the right time. A combination of that and
the fact that Dubner and I didn't expect anyone to
ever read the book, so we wrote it in a
way that was very freeing because we started we started
out trying to write a regular book, and it was terrible,
(07:35):
and we knew it was terrible, and we were almost
going to write it anyway, because well, that's the way
you write books. And then we had the good sense
to sit back and look, since no one's going to
read it, why don't we try to write a book
that's fun for us. Dubnor is an amazing writer, and
I think he and I had the right tone. But
Dubnor had written this piece about me in the New
York Times, and he had cast me as this genius
(07:57):
srlock Homes of economics. You give him a pile of
data and he'll go bang away in his computer for
two hours and solve any problem. I mean, it was
completely and totally artificial, but people loved it.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
It was a great piece. It was a read regret.
That was a great piece of writing.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
So we just basically have been milking that completely fake
image he built about me for the last twenty years,
and it was a really easy voice for both of
us to fit into. And I think that's part of it.
I don't know why people were so eager to read it. Now.
What was really funny for me is we wrote that book,
and then, of course, if you have that kind of success,
(08:31):
you think, well, let's write a second book. And what
we thought is, oh, people loved our stories, and so
if we can come up with a whole bunch of
good stories, people will love the next book. But people
didn't really like it, and people didn't really buy it
nearly this much, and I came to realize it wasn't
actually the stories that people wanted. It was more the attitude,
and it was an attitude that people weren't used to,
(08:52):
a sassy kind of exploration of possibilities people hadn't thought about,
and getting that once was plenty, people didn't really need
any more of it, and so we had the good
sense eventually to stop writing books because I think of anything,
maybe reading Freakonomics people feel smart because it was really
(09:12):
easy to read what was written at the seventh grade level,
but it kind of invited you inside of academia in
a way that was more fun and unusual compared to
other books. Like nobody really knows why it worked. I'm sure,
if we did it again, it wouldn't work, but we
were super lucky.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
You said it invited people into academia in a way
that made it seem really fun.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Is academia really fun?
Speaker 2 (09:37):
I mean, you recently announced that you're leaving academia, and
listening to conversations you've had about that, not only are
you leaving academia, but you kind of wish you'd left
academia a long time ago. So what is it about
academia that, if anything that ever was fun? And why
did it stop being fun?
Speaker 1 (09:54):
The fun part about academia for me is the freedom
to pursue ideas and the ability to tackle things you
don't know anything about, and then to take the time
to learn about them and to have the them to fail,
to not have a boss. Sometimes it's an incredible gift.
In another sense, it's complete travesty because it leads many
(10:18):
people to be very unproductive and get paid very well
for many, many years. That is all really fun. I
think what's not fun for me about academia is that
the standard of evidence is sky high, So when you
try to publish your work, you've got referees whose job
is to find every possible hole in the paper, and
(10:41):
there's an incredible bias there for in academics answering very
small questions very very convincingly, And ultimately I didn't find
that so exciting because anytime there was a little bit
of uncertain not that you thought it was wrong, you're
ninety seven percent sure that you're right. And even the
(11:02):
referees are ninety seven percent sure they're right. Their whole job,
all of their incentives, is to poke holes, and the
editor's job is not to get called out later for
having published a paper that's wrong. All of the work
goes into trying to polish off that last one or
two percent of certainty. It's really not fun and it
drives you away from tackling big problems. And so for me,
(11:24):
ultimately I found it really fun to be in the
real world after fre economics, so many doors opened up.
I got to talk to people like you and and
it just showed me how big the world was and
how many exciting things there were to do. And personally,
the part I like best about ideas is coming up
(11:44):
with them and testing them until I'm eighty five percent
sure they're right. That's good enough for me, and then
I like to move on to the next thing, and
so the real world is a much better lab for
doing that than academics.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
You were talking about in another interview about your experiences
at the University of Chicago. The Economic Department of the
University of Chicago is very famous, lots of Nobel Prize winners.
But some of the stories you were telling about what
sounded like a really toxic culture, a lot of bullying.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It sounded really really bad. Actually, most of my colleagues
were wonderful. But the monster in my case is this guy,
Jim Heckman, who's a brilliant economist, a Nobel Prize winner,
but just to give you an example, at some point
he just started to hate me. But the most extreme
thing he ever did was to start a seminar series.
And typically the seminar series and academics are like macroeconomics, macroeconomics,
(12:36):
law and economics, trade things like that, and we only
invite academics and usually pretty esteemed academics to come and
visit and talk. The seminar that he put into place,
the only requirement to speak in that is that you
had to hate me and have written something critical about me.
And it was completely absurd, and eventually the powers that
(12:57):
be made him stop doing it. But there's a core
exam that every first year student has to pass in
order to stay into the program, and it would be
completely standard that the question he would put on would
be discuss what's wrong with Steve Levitt's work, which of
course puts the gradu students in a terrible position because
they have no choice except to say everything that is
(13:21):
supposedly wrong with my work when maybe they want to
actually be my student. But it was an extremely rambunctious
and difficult environment. The idea at some level was that
that kind of roughness would lead to big breakthroughs in scholarship.
Do you think it does? You know, I don't think so.
(13:42):
I think what is good for a scholarship is that
people will tell you the truth about what they think
about your work. But I think it also helps if
you do it nicely. And there are amazing scholars at
the UFC Economics Department. But when we were completely dysfunctional,
you know, a lot of people were willing to know
about prizes, and in part it was because Chicago was
willing to take folks who were thinking about things differently
(14:05):
and to invite them in and it didn't have to
come at such a high cost personality wise.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Obviously, Jim Hackwin's not on the podcast to give his
side of the story. No doubt he would describe everything
in his own way, but just to leave academia behind
on a high before we move on, what's the academic
paper you've written that you're most proud of.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
So I wrote this paper on abortion and crime, which
got enormous amounts of attention. And the idea is that
I don't wanted children are at risk for crime, okay,
And that's I think very well documented from decades of
social science research that if your mother doesn't love you,
your life is going to be difficult on many dimensions.
(14:47):
And so we applied that very simple logic to the
changes in abortion laws in the US, the legalization abortion,
and we showed that pretty credibly a huge share of
the decline in crime that happened in the nineteen nineties
was due to the legalization of abortion. Okay. At the
end of that first paper, we in our conclusion said, well,
(15:08):
because use abortion only affects crime with a twenty year lag,
we can see as we write this paper the predictions
we can make about what will happen to crime over
the next twenty years, and we predict that crime will
continue to fall into US about one percent a year
for the next twenty years. So the paper I'm most
proud of it is that twenty years later, John Donnie,
(15:28):
who was my CA author, and I said, hey, we
made that prediction twenty years ago, why don't we go
test it. Let's see if it really worked. And it
was different from a typical academic paper because number one,
we had exactly the hypothesis we've made. We knew exactly
what we were testing. And number two, we had a
set of tables we had used in the initial paper
that we said, look, well, exactly replicate that methodology. So
(15:50):
we'll get twenty years of data that is completely out
of sample, and we'll just see what happens in the data.
And what was so interesting is that the data over
those next twenty years were completely consistent with our hypotsis,
I think, better even than we had expected. And I
do not know any economist who has made a prediction
and waited twenty years and then seen where that prediction
(16:12):
came true and done it with a real scientific rigor.
And it was so confirming. To me of what we
had done, and in some sense though, my deep pride
about that paper also led to my exit from the
profession because nobody cared. We couldn't get academics to care,
(16:32):
We couldn't get it published easily. I mean, I sent
it back to the original journal that our first paper
had been polished, and the responsors, well, we don't really
publish simple papers like that anymore. And so it really
pointed to me that what was important to me and
what I thought was exciting about academics, there was no
market for that anymore. And when there's no market for
(16:54):
what you're making, it's a really good idea to exit.
And that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
You're listening to Cautionary Tales with me, Tim Harford and
my special guest Steve Levitt. When we come back, will
be talking about how to teach maths in a way
that makes it exciting. We're back, and I'm here with
(17:18):
Steve Levitt. Steve, when you were at Chicago University, you
founded the Center for Radical Innovation for Social Change. It's
quite a grand sounding title.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
We just got risk. I verrely remember what it says
for anymore.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Okay, Oh yeah, Radical Innovation for sarch changed risk. Yeah,
I got it. Okay, So you were just aiming for
the backronym. Now I understand what were you trying to
do with that center.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
I had gotten tired, as we've talked about already about
what was going on in academics, but I wanted to
try to do something that put together the best of academics,
so real rigor based on innovative ideas and unpopular ideas.
I didn't want to shy away from things that were unpopular,
as academics don't have to shy away from unpopular things.
(18:02):
Mixed that with a kind of startup feel and with
a philanthropic feel, and to try to go out and
saw of really big, important problems, often problems that regular
nonprofits couldn't tackle because the ideas might be repugnant or unpopular.
I guess it's been six or seven years now we've
been at it, and like it's hard, it's hard to
(18:24):
make real world change. But I think we finally got
two or three successes on the book that we can
feel pretty good about. For example, for a long time
we've been working on the issue of kidney donations, and
so in the US in particular, there's this huge waiting
list of people who are on dialysis who need a kidney,
(18:45):
and there's a tremendous shortage of donors for kidneys. In
large part that is because it is against the law
to compensate financially people for giving their kidneys. It all
depends on altruism. So economists disagree with most people in
the sense that we think that does make sense, that
done well, we could give financial incentives for kidneys and
(19:08):
it would make the world a much better place. And
the value of a kidney to the recipient and to
the government who's paying for the dialysis is huge, hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we could offer
donors hundreds of thousands of dollars and still it would
be worth doing the transplant operation. And so the ethical
issues around kidney donation are such that people say, well,
(19:28):
we can't really have a market for kidneys because the
market price is ten thousand dollars, and that'll be exportation
of the poor. But it's not exploitation. If you actually
pay people two hundred thousand dollars for kidneys, then what
you have is you have a list of seven million
people all signed up begging to give their kidney. I
tried to do that for years and I failed. But
as part of Risk, as we were trying to push
(19:51):
that agenda, we were just learning a lot about kidneys.
And one of my young people, we really hire really twenty,
really talented twenty two year olds to come and work with.
He was talking with some doctors and actually maybe watching
an intake of a potential dollar. What he realized was
that it turns out that of every one hundred people
who show up and say I would like to donate
(20:13):
a kidney, in the end, only about three of them
make the donation, and fully forty percent of those are
kicked out of the process because they're either too heavy
or they smoke, and those are two things that will
make doctors unwilling to do with the transplant. And he
had this incredibly simple idea. He said, hey, why don't
(20:34):
we work with the transplant centers and when someone comes
in and the weight is too high, instead of saying hey,
you can't donate, we'll just have the transplant center say
hey you can't donate. Yeah, but if you lose weight
you could. And there's this group called Risk that will
for free help you lose weight. So all we did
was just work with transplant centers, give them flyers and
say send people our way, and all we would do
(20:57):
was just give them free access to weight watchers, and
we would have a young person who would text them
and try to give them moral support and be a
cheerleader to help them lose weight. And it seems really silly,
really simple, and so obvious that how could it make
any difference. But on a shoestring budget, our little group
has led to sixty extra kidney donations over the last
(21:21):
year and a half, and that's sixty lives changed or saved,
and the cost per life saved is something like five
thousand dollars nothing. It is about the best intervention that
anyone has ever seen from a simple cost benefit and
it's totally obvious. Why was no one else doing it?
(21:41):
We're not sure, but it's a really simple insight that
led to a big impact, and at scale we could
be doing thousands of these per year. We really did
it almost as a pilot, and now we're trying to
figure out how we can make it really transformational in
the kidney space. So that's one example of a success.
I'd say another one that is really interesting to a
(22:01):
sale con of the con Academy, and with Arizona State
University we helped start in online school. You know, we
had various ideas about what we thought was wrong with
the way current high schools are run in the US,
and it turned out that the online school was incredibly
successful in terms of test scores. And what we've learned
is that the idea that there'd be a teacher standing
(22:24):
in front of twenty five or thirty students lecturing them
about things, that turns out to be roughly the least
efficient way to learn that you can come up with.
And the only reason we do it is because it's
the technology. We had to do it in the eighteen
fifties when public education got going, And so now we're
launching an in person school at brick and Mortar School.
So I can't say it's going to be success that
because it has happened, but I have every reason to
(22:45):
believe that we are going to be able to deliver
a high school experience that is staggeringly better than what
is being done right now in terms of what kids learn,
how enjoyable it is to them. That we will build
in creativity rather than drive creativity out, and so for me,
that is the single most important and interesting and inspired
(23:09):
anything I'm working on right now is I just believe
that we are at the right moment post COVID to
create a completely different model for how we teach and
how we learn. And I hope that this is something
I'll do till the day I die, and that more
than freakonomics, that this will be my legacy.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
You and I both have an interest in maths or
math as I guess you would say, what do you
think that we get wrong in the way the young
people are taught to engage with numbers.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
So I think what we do up through about the
age of twelve or thirteen is not that bad. I
think knowing how to add and subtract and divide and
do fractions and things like that is the basic skill
in life that you need and everyone should have that,
and I don't think we do in the most efficient way,
but at least we have our eye and the prize
up through about the age of thirteen. High school math,
(24:01):
on the other hand, I think is a complete horror
show because we ask children to do a whole bunch
of math, which is complicated based on doing computations that
know what he does anymore. So one of the things
that I watch all of my high school kids do
is try to learn how to compute the minimums and
(24:22):
maximums or the zeros of polynomials. And that is something
that they did in Hidden Figures, that movie about getting
people to the Moon, because we didn't have good computers
and so people had to do that. But since computers
came in, there's not a person on the planet who's
had to do that manually other than a high school student.
And we try to teach kids how to do proofs.
(24:43):
Again great, I think knowing how to prove things is wonderful,
but we make them prove all sort of things about
triangles that who cares about. Back in ancient Greece, it
was important to know things about triangles. Now it really isn't.
What do people actually use in their daily life. They
add and subtract, They do simple arithmetic, and that's good
because they've usually learned that, and then they analyze data.
(25:04):
They use spreadsheets, they have to make sense of complicated relationships,
and we do all almost none of the teaching of
that in high school. And so data science might call
it data analytics, that those are the skills that people need,
and I believe we should teach people the things that
they will use. Many of the hardcore mathematicians get upset,
they say, oh, we're not teaching deep math. But I
(25:25):
will tell you there is very deep math in data
science and a lot of artistry and a lot of judgment.
And another thing that we've been doing at my Risk
Center is we ended up launching something called Data Science
for Everyone, which has become the leading think tank everything
group that's trying to change the way we teach math
(25:47):
to incorporate data science in the United States, and it's
been really, really quite successful. I'm sure you know.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Steve Strogatz, of course, has this idea that colleges should
teach math appreciation. We have art classes where you teach
people to draw. You have hours appreciation where you teach
people the history, and you know, you get people to
look at pretty pictures and discuss like why they're such
studding works of art. And he suggested for some students, Okay, fine,
(26:13):
they're not going to calculate a lot of stuff. They're
not going to be high powered mathematicians or statisticians, but
they could still have an appreciation of how math works,
how data works. I guess fre economics should be on
the course, right. It's an example of data appreciation. It
doesn't really tell you the details of how your detective
work was done, but it gives you a sense of
the kind of things you were doing and the kind
(26:34):
of things that you could do if you had control
of the data.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
See, you've shutts and I have talked a lot about that.
Actually worked with the State of Utah in the United
States to try to implement some of those ideas. And
we're just getting gone and we'll see how that works.
The discoveries, the process of the history of math, I
think is actually fascinating once you get into it. Yeah,
But the real power of this idea of appreciation is
(26:59):
with young people, because so many twelve and thirteen year
olds are right at the point where they're deciding, oh,
I'm not a mass person. That's not for me, and
then they check out. And that's because they don't understand
why they're doing this complex math, and which makes sense
because I don't really understand why they're doing that complex math.
(27:19):
But on the other hand, if you instead focused with
young people and saying, hey, here's what's amazing about math.
Here's how math is useful, Here's how math is a
form of storytelling, or here's how math is the language
of the universe. I mean my own high school kids.
They just thought, well, the teacher told me I do this,
this and this could the answer, and so I do that.
(27:39):
But they didn't really understand it is true that if
you would do a different galaxy, it would also be true.
And so I think the idea, the most powerful part
of the appreciation idea is to take people who are
still trying to figure out who they are. They don't
know who they are, and they're making these choices, and
if they say, WHOA, maybe math is fun, then they
won't close off the path to eventually maybe saying that
(28:03):
math could be a part of your career from they
don't have to be afraid of science. And so that's
where I think the idea heads.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
It's real legged you're listening to Cautionary Tales with me,
Tim Harford and my guest Steve Levitt. After the break,
we'll be talking about Steve's very own podcast, People I
mostly admire. I wanted to ask you about podcasting when
(28:31):
you and Dubna launched the Free Comics radio podcast. I
remember thinking, what are they doing. They've created this unbelievably
successful brand. People love the books, they got a New
York Times column, but podcasting, you're going to spend your
time podcasting. Obviously that worked out pretty well. So you
guys were really ahead of the curve there.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
I was in the exact same boat as you were
when when Dumney said I'm going to start a podcast.
I think I said, what's a podcast? It spons what
fifteen years ago. He's one of the really early podcasters,
and I thought it was the silliest idea. You would say, hey,
can you come on my show? Could I interview you?
And I I'd always do it, and it's really out
of sympathy for him. And then I remember if we
(29:13):
were on a book tour, and I suppose it must
have been for our third book, Thinks like a Freak
And Dumna said to me, hey, how many downloads do
you think I get a month for Freakonomics? And I
didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I said, I
don't know, maybe ten thousand and fifteen thousand. I really
thought it was probably five hundred, but I didn't want
to say that, and make him think I had a
(29:33):
low opinion and said, oh no, it's actually over a million.
I said over a million a month, and he said yeah,
and I couldn't believe it. And that was one of
those epiphanies, those moments of truth where you say, wait
a second. So in a year you have twice as
many downloads of the podcast we've ever sold the books,
(29:53):
even though we had a really excise books, And it
really opened my eyes that as a vehicle for talking
about ideas, it is amazing. And so I never could
have imagined that I would end up doing my own podcast.
But when I decided that I wanted to leave academia,
I thought, well, you know, for twenty five for thirty years,
(30:16):
I've been so helpent on being a producer of ideas.
I literally spent all my time trying to come up
with Grady cannowming ideas that I had closed myself off
completely to learning or knowing about anything else. And I said,
I just want to relax for a while and be
a consumer. And a podcast was a way that I
(30:37):
could convince all sorts of amazing people to come and
talk to me. Nobel Prize winning chemists and things that
I could just have the joy of having really amazing
conversations with incredible people and completely switch my own role
from being the person who's supposed to be the genius
to being the person who doesn't know anything, and this
(30:57):
is asking the questions and got I've I found him
very comfortable with that second role. I love being the
person who doesn't know anything, and then he's trying to
extract information from experts. And one of the things I've
learned is that many experts are incredibly bad at explaining
what they do and making it approachable. And I think
(31:20):
one of my real talents is that I'm pretty good
at hearing something complex, grasping on to the end of
a string, and pulling on it until I can get
people to explain things in ways that I and other
regular people can understand.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
The podcast is called People I mostly Admire, and it's
a really wonderful podcast. I love listening to it. I'm
sure you'll take this as a compliment. You are quite
a weird interviewer in a way that it's hard to
put my finger on exactly what it is. But I
think it is partly this. You don't mind appearing like
you don't know what you're talking about. You don't mind
seeming a little bit stupid, and I think it's because
(32:00):
actually everybody knows you're not stupid. You're a professor at Chicago.
You want all these prizes, so you don't mind asking
the dumb questions. There's an artlessness about it, which.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I really like. I'm very antisocial in general, and I
have very little human interaction. But for these podcasts, I
come prepared and I think I asked them different questions
and they used to being asked sometimes and sometimes because
of that, it gets very personal and we end up
(32:30):
talking about things that might be seen as out of bounds,
but build this strange bond. And for me, that's what
is completely unexpected. But there's something about the artificiality of
a podcast interview that allows this emotional connection. You wouldn't
expect it, but that's how I judge whether a podcast
episode is successful. And it happens often in the most unexpected,
(32:56):
strange ways, and that's but so fun about it for me.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Yeah, there's definitely some podcasts you listen to that you're
clearly just like having the best time. I mean, there's
an incredible podcast where you interviewed, you will daughters, which
is not a normal podcast behavior for a podcast, like people,
I mostly in my interviewing all these academics, and there's
one point where you're in tears, She's in tears. I'm listening.
(33:21):
I'm in tears. I mean, you know, it's it's heavy stuff.
It was an incredible interview.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
So yeah, I did interview my two oldest daughters, and
one of my daughters was anorexic, seriously inerrexit in hospitalized,
in your death. And we never really talk about the
deepest issues in regular life because there's always some excuse
not to. But the idea that we would sit down
in a recording studio and for you know, an hour,
(33:50):
she and I would talk and it was a conversation
that for me is so special and honestly, we hadn't
had a conversation ever before that, and we really haven't
had a conversation ever that special since. Again, it was
this weird thing about it being an interview being a
(34:12):
podcast that somehow got us to open up. And I
have to say, I'm so glad that I did that.
Everyone else thought it was a terrible idea. My producer
thought it was a terrible idea. I wasn't sure if
it work or not, but it was really magical and
I think it's pulled my daughter, Lily and I closer
(34:34):
together than we ever would have been otherwise. But again,
it's almost like that initial Freakonomics somehow captured light thing
in a bottle. It's the right thing at the right time,
and that conversation with Lily was just a I'm so
glad that I had that, and I think I don't
really have it in me to have those kind of
conversations with her outside of that setting. It was the
artificiality that somehow allowed both of us to open up
(34:56):
in a way we don't Usually.
Speaker 2 (34:58):
You're kind of trapped. You might make an excuse and
walk away from the conversation. But yeah, I wanted to
ask you, Steve, about your perspective on parenting. And when
I first met you, I was about to become a
dad for the first time. That my oldest daughter is
is slightly younger than pre Economics. You have been through
(35:22):
some very difficult experiences as a parent. You lost your
youngest son when he was very young. You had this
experience with your daughter, Lily, who was so ill. But
you know, you're still going you've got a young family,
you've got more children under the age of five, You've
got a chance to do it all again. And I
just think people who have had to deal with these
(35:44):
really difficult challenges learn something that those of us who
get a bit more lucky and don't have to deal
with so much, maybe we don't learn. So I just
wanted to get your thoughts on what you've learned from everything.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Well, I really thought after I went through my older
children and then I did it, she said, I started
a new family. Oh my god, all the lessons I learned,
I'm going to be such a better parent. The second
num around, and two things happen. Number One, I realized
I was so tired of those first kids I can
barely remember what I did. And number two, in the
(36:21):
actual practice of it, I literally made all the same mistakes,
and it was really disappointing to me. I have two
simple pieces of advice about parenting, one of which I
take and the other which I don't take, even though
it's my own advice. The first simple one is that
I believe that if your kids feel loved, most other
things will take care of themselves. I don't do a
(36:43):
lot of helicoptering of my kids. I don't care whether
they are good at school, and I don't push them
or pressure them anyway. I think that's so much less
important than just having kids who can see and know
that you love them deeply and that no matter what happens,
you're going to be behind them. So that's the piece
of advice that I actually do a good job of parenting.
(37:05):
The thing I don't do wish I wish I would
do is not trying to do other things while you parent.
What I do all day long is I have take
care of my kids and I have work on my
podcast or my new school, and it's frustrating to everyone
and it's no fun at all. And whenever I have
the discipline, which isn't very often, to say, hey, for
(37:26):
the next four hours, I'm gonna sit with my kids
and I'm not even gonna think about anything else. I'm
just gonna be with them and let them dictate what happens.
I'm always happier, there's always more rewarding. The kids love it.
It's good for me. I have such a lack of
discipline that I cannot do that on a regular basis.
There's just this outside polls, I me are so strong.
(37:49):
But if I were to give advice to others, if
you're gonna work work, if you're gonna be with the kids,
to be with the kids, try not to do both
at once.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Steve, thank you so much for joining us on Coation Retales.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Oh, thank you, Jim. It's all so good. We got
to do this more often. Yeah, I'll take you up
on that.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I'm sure this conversation would have whetted your appetites to
hear Steve. We've interview a huge variety of guests on
his podcast, people I mostly admire. You can of course
find that anywhere you get your podcasts. As for Cautionary Tales,
we will be back very soon in your feed with
another of our episodes. For a full list of our sources,
(38:30):
see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
as written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan
(38:55):
at Brain Audio Bend and Dapfhaffrey edited the scripts. The
show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jopp, Messaam Monroe, Jamal Westman and rufus Right.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohene, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
(39:17):
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios
in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
(39:39):
the show page, on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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