Vital stats:
Format: Freakonomic investigations
Duration: 5m-40m
Frequency: biweekly
Archive available on iTunes: all
It’s about time for a Freakonomics podcast, fans of the book might grumble. I won’t call the complaint invalid; Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s bestseller came out half a decade ago, and even then podcasting was a thing. A podcast feels like a natural outgrowth of the Freakonomics brand, which has already racked up years in, for example, the blogosphere. I read Freakonomics back when it hit (though I haven’t made it around to the sequel, Superfreakonomics) and found myself pretty damned entertained by journalist Dubner’s description of the economist Levitt’s investigations into human behavior in such exotic, data-rich settings as sumo tournaments, Israeli daycares, and crack dealers’ moms’ apartments. So why not try out Freakonomics Radio [RSS] [iTunes]?
I recall a bunch of the grumpier economics bloggers giving Freakonomics a hard time, even going so far as to accuse it of having nothing much to do with economics. Despite having cultivated an interest in the subject, I was never quite able to figure out whether that charge stuck. (I admit that Levitt’s title, “Rogue Economist”, may oversell his distance from the mainstream.) A similar backlash met Freakonomics Radio’s debut earlier this year, though it was less about the proper rigors of social science than the proper regularity of podcast production. To their credit, Levitt and Dubner took to the mics and addressed these issues in an episode [MP3], promising more and better.
They have indeed gone on to deliver some and good. With a huge-name, massively-downloaded podcast like this, I’ve been conditioned to expect a rigid regularity of format. There’s not a lot of that here; episodes vary between a few minutes of Levitt and Dubner talking about what’s to be learned by applying the Freakonomic method to the World Cup [MP3] and a big, rich, This American Life-type documentary thing on the similarities between the suckiness of public schools and the suckiness of commercial radio stations [MP3]. They even do two-parters, including a recent one on the challenges facing a saving-incentivizing type of bank account which works like a “no-lose lottery” [MP3] [MP3]. This sometimes elaborate sound richness (as they call it in public radio) surprised me at first, but then I found out that the show isn’t just any old podcast. It’s actually an agglomeration of Freakonomically literate audio entertainments, some of which air on “real” radio — shows like Marketplace — all co-produced with WNYC, the public radio station of choice for many a public radio geek. No surprise this all took so long to come around, then.
One of the complaints Steven and Stephen quoted asked for “more Levitt, less Dubner.” Some of the the aforementioned econ bloggers have said the same. I myself have never known quite how to feel about the journalist-presents-researcher format, tried and true on the bestseller list and ridden even harder in the popular economics book boom that was Freakonomics’ aftermath. Part of me wants more direct access to a mind like Levitt’s; part of me is happy not to have it. There was a particularly fascinating 19th-century sense in which Dubner presented Levitt as something of a freak show — as it were — who finds even freakier things under the socioeconomic logs he overturns himself. The book form worked well enough for this sort of thing, but what I’ve heard so far makes me think the podcast/radio form could work even better. It grants the right kind of directness: you get to hear from the actual economic actors involved in these situations, plus you get both Levitt and Dubner’s voices discretely. Dubner was servicable as Levitt’s P.T. Barnum, but he’s better as his interlocutor.
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]