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