Freakonomics Radio
Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner
Original podcast
What did Levitt and Dubner learn as kids from their dads?
3,452 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Hey, it's almost Father's Day. If you are totally out of ideas for what to get your dad this year, if you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, you might want to think about sending him this podcast. Today, we've got stories about things our fathers gave us. One, from my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt, and one from me. And you'll hear one more story about disciplining kids that'll make any father proud. Happy Father's Day. Here's Levitt, reading an essay that's just been published in the new paperback edition of Super Freakonomics.
Growing up, I was the worst kind of mama's boy. Never has there been a bigger sissy. I would cry if an adult gave me a cross look. I sat on my mom's lap until I weighed nearly as much as she did. I liked to needlepoint. It drove my father crazy. Although I'm sure he would have rarely been doing just about anything else, he made it his mission to turn me into a man. His initial attempts were pretty standard. He forced me to play baseball, but mercifully, that experiment ended after just a few years. He was disgusted by my lack of baseball instincts and my tendency to sit down while playing shortstop. The final straw came when my team had a stirring come-from-behind victory to win the city championship. All the other kids mobbed one another in celebration. I just sat on the bench and watched. We did a lot of fishing together.
He was a remarkably good sport when one of my errant casts resulted in my fishhook lodged in his cheek. I suppose he expected me to be equally brave when another exceptionally poor cast on my part left the hook embedded in the back of my own head. I did not take it well. We didn't do much fishing after that. It was only when my father's lessons veered off the beaten path that they really started to take hold. Our common ground turned out to be that we both liked to break the rules. So he'd take me to the hospital where he worked, and when no one was looking, we'd sneak into the room with radioactive materials and play games with them. At the mall, just for fun, we would go up the down escalators. One April, when I was still a pre-teen, he introduced me to the idea that there might be a few tricks here and there that could be used to lower his payments to the IRS.
It was only a few years later that he began taking me to country roads, where he would let me try at driving the family car. He didn't drink much alcohol, but whenever he did, he'd slide the glass my way when my mom wasn't looking, so I could have a swig. As I look back, I can't think of anything more valuable in my life than the time my father spent breaking the rules with me. It wasn't just, or even principally, laws that we violated. He taught me to flout the limits that society imposed. Even though I was just a kid, I was supposed to be able to think like an adult, or better, for that matter. One of his favorite activities, starting roughly when I was 10 years old, was to present scenarios from work--he's a doctor--involving other doctors making gross misdiagnoses. He would tell the stories in such a way that the answer he was looking for was attainable,
even for a 10-year-old. And when I gave the answer he wanted, he would tell me I was already a better doctor than the one who had handled the patient. He made me believe that there was nothing I couldn't do, if only I put my mind to it. Not everyone will agree that all the lessons my father taught me were the right ones. For instance, I learned from him that men don't cry, ever. That's a lesson I've tried to unlearn as an adult, but without much success. I can say this, however: everything that is interesting about me today, I owe to the mischief that my father and I engaged in when I was young. Like my father, I have a son, and he too is one of the world's biggest sissies. We recently celebrated his eighth birthday. That's the perfect age to start breaking
rules with his dad. And if he's really lucky, maybe we can get his grandfather involved as well.
Hey Levitt, you call your dad on Father's Day every year?
Um, probably. It's the last day of the US Open, so we usually have a reason to talk.
And would you say that your father's parenting is generalizable? In other words, should it be replicated? Should all of us try to do what your father did?
I think my father's approach to parenting was a high variance approach, in the sense that he put tremendous pressure on the child. And I think I could have veered one way or the other, and I veered in a direction that I think was good, but I could see breaking the spirit of the child, the way he parented.
So you've been a father yourself for quite a few years. Now, what's the best Father's Day you've ever had?
Oh God, you know, I don't even pay attention to Father's Day.
Does your family pay? Does your family pay? Does your wife and kids, they do stuff for you?
No, I mean, they try, but I don't let them.
What do they try? They try to bring you breakfast in bed? They try to?
I get up too early for that. You know what it is.
Dad, we hereby grant you four hours today to go play golf with no guilt.
Eight hours.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, what am I thinking?
Coming up, what my father taught me.
It's not time to make a change. Just relax and take it easy. You're still young, that's your fault. There's so much you have to know. Find a girl, settle down. If you want, you can marry.
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So I grew up in this fairly strange family. This was in upstate New York, in the Boondocks, in the back of beyond, on this little farm outside of Albany. And it was strange, in part, because my parents were this pair of city people, these Brooklyn-born Jews, who each of them, before they met each other, had both converted to Roman Catholicism. So that was pretty traumatic, as you can imagine. Their families didn't care for that very much. And they really cut themselves off from their families and they were cut off from their families. So they migrated upstate and they really reinvented themselves, started a new life up there and started having kids and kept having kids and, you know, very Catholic, kept having kids. And one measure of their devotion was the fact that we had eight children and I was
the eighth and last of their kids. Now, my dad worked as a newspaper man in Schenectady. And, you know, my mom took care of the kids and a million other things. We grew most of our own food. We had a cow and usually some chickens and a pig or a goat once in a while. And it turns out we were pretty poor, but everybody around there was pretty poor. And being poor wasn't a problem at all. We didn't want for things, really. We were, you know, we worked hard, we were pretty happy. But there was, so money wasn't really the scarcity that we were concerned with. The real scarcity, when you grow up in a big family, is time with a parent, like one-on-one time with a parent was a really big deal.
And for me, as the youngest kid, especially with my dad, that was like the treasure to get one-on-one time with my dad. And it was very, very rare. And it was rare in part because there were a lot of kids, but also because he worked pretty far away. It was a pretty long drive to work. And also, his health wasn't good. In fact, my father would die by the time I was 10. So every minute with him alone when I was a kid was really pretty precious. And I remember this one time, I must have been like seven or eight years old, when my dad took me down to Gibby's Diner. This was in the little, the closest village called Quaker Street. And Quaker Street was just like one stoplight, a general store, and the diner, Gibby's Diner.
And all my older brothers and sisters had at one point worked at Gibby's Diner, either cooking or as waitress or whatnot. And for my dad to bring me there alone, the two of us, to sit at the counter to this kind of sacred place, it was just, it was this thrill to just be there. And I remember we sat at the counter, and I don't remember what I got to eat, but I remember my dad got a cup of coffee with a half a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, which, looking back, I realize is pretty like, he could have been a Starbucks Imagineer. And I was having whatever I was having, and he introduced me then to this game that he called Powers of Observation. And the way Powers of Observation work was, he would say, "All right, so Stevie,
I just want you to look around and really take it in. Just really look around, pay attention, see what you're looking at, take it in, get attuned to it, and listen hard to, okay?" Like I said, I was probably seven, eight years old or so, and he said, "I'm gonna give you five minutes to just take it all in." So I sat there and I look around, I take it all in, I don't really know where he's going with this. And then after a few minutes, he told me to close my eyes. He said, "Okay, the waitress, Anne," it was, you know, we knew her, it was Anne. I said, "Anne, what color's your apron?" And I said, "Uh, white." And he'd say, "Ah, you're just guessing." I'd say, "White."
He said, "That's right, that's right, okay." "The lady behind us, what'd she just order?" "Grilled cheese?" "Nope, chili." "Okay, how many people have come in since we started playing Powers of Observation?" And on it went, just like that. And he would grill me on these facts, large and small, any kind of sight, smell, sound, anything like that. And the first couple rounds we did this, I was terrible. I couldn't get anything right at all. I just, I just didn't have any powers of observation. And then as we kept doing it, I got better. And after about 20 minutes, I felt like I could take these little snapshots with my mind and then repeat what I'd seen.
My father, that one day at Gibby's Diner in Quaker Street, New York, he taught me that memory, or at least observation, is a muscle that you can build. And I've been flexing that muscle every day since then, or at least trying to.
So we were a family with practically no money and without even really that much time with each parent. But I'll never forget that one day, that incredibly great thing, an incredibly valuable thing that my father gave me. Now, one thing that I've been observing these past several years is that economists are strange people. Now, you heard from Levitt already. I'd like you to hear from one more economist. This is an Australian named Joshua Gans, who wrote a book about being a father called Parentinomics. So what you're about to hear is from an upcoming hour-long Freakonomics radio program we've made
called An Economist's Guide to Parenting. And here's a story of how Joshua Gans got one of his kids to behave.
Right. So the story is this. We would go to the park and our child, who was probably around four, would invariably not want to leave. So we would have this big song and dance about, you know, we have to go now. You can't keep up playing. She'd run off. You know, it would be costly. Let's let me put it that way. And, you know, one option was we could say, you know, we won't go to the park very often as a solution to that, which is perhaps what occurred. But, you know, we could never pre-negotiate this fully. When we were at the park, she was she was off and on her own. So what we did one day is we were sitting there and she was doing it yet again. And we said, you know, we keep threatening that we'll just leave. Why don't we get in
the car and just leave? And so we said, you know, you come, or we're gonna go, we're gonna get in the car and drive off. And that is actually what we did.
In front of a full park, full of other parents as well, we had a screaming child running after us going, you know, no, don't leave me. Exactly to get that message across. Now, to be short, you know, while that might or not been obvious to the other parents standing there, and I'll tell you, it was a tough thing for us to do. There was another family at the park who was going to at least watch out that she didn't do something silly as a result of this, like run onto a road or something like that. So we weren't totally crazy. But then again, we did drive off, leaving our child, thinking she'd been left behind. So
And what happened? And what happened the next time that she wanted to stay at the park longer?
Never ever happened again. Never ever had another problem. Perfectly well behaved.
Sadism works.
You know, at some type of point, you've got to raise the price enough. You've got to be credible. I mean, you know, that's the dispassionate economist says you do what it takes. I guess I've become some hardline hawk in that regard. So occasionally, we break from social mores, but we only had to do it once.
Doesn't that just warm your heart? There's more from Joshua Gans and other economists in our upcoming parenting special on Freakonomics Radio. So if nothing else on this Father's Day, you can be thankful that your father is not an economist. And if your father is an economist, well, then...
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