Freakonomics Radio

Stephen Dubner appears as a guest on Fail Better, a new podcast hosted by David Duchovny. The two of them trade stories about failure, and ponder the lessons that success could never teach.   SOURCES: David Duchovny, actor, director, writer, and musician.   RESOURCES: “Martin Seligman and the Rise of Positive Psychology,” by Peter Gibbon … Read more

America’s top colleges are facing record demand. So why don’t they increase supply? (Part 2 of our series from 2022, “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)   SOURCES: Peter Blair, professor of education at Harvard University and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Zachary Bleemer, assistant professor of economics at Princeton … Read more

We think of them as intellectual enclaves and the surest route to a better life. But U.S. colleges also operate like firms, trying to differentiate their products to win market share and prestige points. In the first episode of a special series originally published in 2022, we ask what our chaotic system gets right — … Read more

There are a lot of factors that go into greatness, many of which are not obvious. As the Olympics come to a close, we revisit a 2018 episode in which top athletes from a variety of sports tell us how they made it, and what they sacrificed.   SOURCES: Lance Armstrong, former professional cyclist. David … Read more

Tania Tetlow, a former federal prosecutor and now the president of Fordham University, thinks the modern campus could use a dose of old-fashioned values.   SOURCE: Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University.   RESOURCES: “Not a Priest, Not a Man, but Ready to Run Fordham,” by David Waldstein (The New York Times, 2024). “Tech Glitch … Read more

It’s not oil or water or plutonium — it’s human hours. We’ve got an idea for putting them to use, and for building a more human-centered economy. But we need your help.   SOURCES: Nathan Dietz, research director at the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland. Al Roth, professor of economics at Stanford … Read more

A new proposal from the Biden administration calls for a nationwide cap on rent increases. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. We revisit a 2019 episode to hear why.   SOURCES: Tommy Andersson, professor of economics at Lund University. Vicki Been, professor of law at New York University and former deputy mayor for housing and … Read more

That’s the worry. Even the humble eyeglass industry is dominated by a single firm.  We look into the global spike in myopia, how the Lemtosh got its name, and what your eye doctor knows that you don’t. (Part two of a two-part series.)   SOURCES: Maria Liu, professor of clinical optometry at the University of … Read more

A single company, EssilorLuxottica, owns so much of the eyewear industry that it’s hard to escape their gravitational pull — or their “obscene” markups. Should regulators do something? Can Warby Parker steal market share? And how did Ray-Bans become a luxury brand? (Part one of a two-part series.)   SOURCES: Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO … Read more

You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. In an interview from 2018, the founder of behavioral economics describes his unlikely route to success; his reputation for being lazy; and his efforts to fix the world — one … Read more