646. An Air Traffic Controller Walks Into a Radio Studio ... | Freakonomics Radio

What does it take to “play 3D chess at 250 miles an hour”? And how far will $12.5 billion of “Big, Beautiful” funding go toward modernizing the F. A. A.? (Part two of a two-part series (https://freakonomics.com/is-the-air-traffic-control-system-broken/).) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/an-air-traffic-controller-walks-into-a-radio-studio/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Imagine there is a big government agency that is in charge of regulating a particular industry, but is also an employer within that industry and is essentially a business partner. That would describe the Federal Aviation Administration. Is it possible for the FAA to serve all those functions, including its all-important air traffic control function? Is it possible to maintain its high safety standards with an aging infrastructure and with a funding stream that's tied to Congress? Those are some of the questions we asked on last week's episode, and this week, we are back at it with part two and even more questions. We also wanted to hear from the humans who do the actual work of air traffic

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  control. As you may remember from last week, the series was inspired by a recently retired controller named Kenneth Levin, who sent us an email a few months ago. We wrote back, and eventually, we called him up. Yeah, it's Stephen. Is that Kenneth?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  It is. This is Ken.

• 1:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, Ken.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Nice to meet you, Stephen.

• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nice to meet you. Thanks for writing.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Oh, man. You know, I can't believe I'm talking to you. I love the podcast. I love what you guys do. And just can't believe we're sitting here, man. It's a thrill. I think a lot of times, people just don't think about these things, or are scared to think about them. But, you know, you give us permission.

• 1:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. Now I'm blushing. But yeah, permission granted.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 1:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kenneth Levin recently retired after 23 years in the air traffic control industry. What does it take to be a controller? It has been described as playing 3D chess at 250 miles an hour. Levin came to understand this early on during his initial training.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  You develop the ability to scan. You hear it every minute of every day. Your trainer is sitting there going, you got to scan, you got to scan, you got to scan. So what are you scanning for? You're learning your sector. You're checking the outside to see who's coming in and what are they trying to do? Are you going to approve it to just let them come in as they are? Or do you need to make a change because they're in conflict with someone else already in your sector? And then you're also scanning the inside. There's no guarantee that anything is going to transpire as you think it should.

• 2:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  You also have to be a good communicator.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  The system that we have, it's full of, I give you an instruction and that pilot is going to read it back to me. I have to actually listen to what you say to make sure that what you say is what I said. Your brain is in this rush to be like, I want to move on to the next thing. But you have to take the time to make sure that everybody is doing exactly what you instructed them to do.

• 3:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Being a controller is a niche job in a specialized sector. So how does someone end up there?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  I always thought I was going to be a pilot. I was infatuated with it from my earliest memories. I just loved being around aircraft. I trained from a very early age. I was a certified pilot, just single engine.

• 3:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was in Colorado?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yep. Growing up in Colorado, flying around there, had a fantastic time. I went to college, kept flying sporadically throughout college. And then when I graduated, I thought, okay, now's the time to build ours. With the idea of becoming a commercial pilot, that was the goal? Correct. So I was like looking for jobs where I could just pay the bills to fly. I applied for several jobs, one of which was working at an air traffic control center. It was not being a controller, it was just working on databases in the back rooms. I got offered that job, so I took it. And it was in the Bay Area at Oakland Center. When I came in, I thought, I'm not making much money, but it's enough to pay rent and to allow me to fly a couple of days a week.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Well, being in the control center, you're bumping into air traffic controllers left and right. A lot of them asked me the question, why don't you become a controller? I never really even thought about that, but I hung out with these guys and I was like, this job actually looks really cool. It's different than being a pilot. What was your impression at that point about the difference between ATCs and pilots? Both are very intense positions where they both have a lot of responsibility. As a pilot, you're in charge of your aircraft. You're making sure that all the systems onboard are functioning. But as a controller, you're looking at the grand scheme of things. The thing that stuck out to me was that in ATC, you're gonna be home every night. You're not traveling for work, you're there.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  How much pressure do you feel when you first get in the chair? It's a different kind of pressure. It's a pressure that especially at that age, a lot of people are probably not used to. You could say, hey, we want people who like to be put in a clutch situation. We want someone who goes up to bat two outs and two strikes and they're like, yeah, I want that spot. But younger people especially, like have they had that experience? Do they even know, are they even aware that they're good in the clutch? We want people who can perform under pressure, but the training will teach you how to do that. So it's not a prerequisite. I see. What is a prerequisite is the dedication, the desire to learn, the desire to become better.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  And the awareness that there's always room to improve. For me, there was an aspect of creativity to it that is just fascinating.

• 6:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't know about you, but I never would have thought of air traffic control as a creative activity. But well, Ken Levin plainly knows better than I do. I asked him to explain how the whole system works. He said, the first thing to know is that in most major airports, there are actually three different types of air traffic controllers, working in three different types of facilities. There's the air traffic control tower you see at the airports. Then there's approach control and finally, an air control center.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Take a wedding cake and flip it upside down. A three-tier wedding cake. That top tier that's now on the bottom and it's the smallest, right in the middle of that is an airport.

• 6:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Let's say about seven miles or something, maybe five miles. Every airport's a little bit different and going up a few thousand feet above ground. So that first tier encompasses the airport. They're trying to keep the runways safe and efficient. Like one aircraft's departing, as soon as that aircraft's wheels up, they'll taxi another aircraft out or allow another aircraft to land.

• 7:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  These air traffic controllers are positioned in the towers at the airport. They interact with each pilot for just a small fraction of their flight.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  The second tier of the wedding cake, it expands out further. That second tier might go out 80 miles, 100 miles, and then it drops down and surrounds the tower. That segment is what's known as the approach control. That's doing this traffic from, you know, maybe surface to 20,000 feet and still in close proximity to the airport. They're really in the transition phase. They're lining all these planes up on final. They're sequencing all these planes to get them at the right spacing, to get them efficiently into the airport in a safe manner. And then on departure, it's the same thing. The tower gets them off the runway, gets them airborne,

• 8:00Speaker 01

  and then switches them over to approach control. Approach control takes them from a couple hundred feet, a thousand feet, and they get them going on their way, pointed towards their destination, and climb them up to nineteen, twenty thousand feet. And then you get to that top tier, which would be the rest of the airspace. And that's the center. The center's in route control. You're basically taking control of the planes from twenty thousand feet on up, all the way up to cruise, whether that's thirty-three thousand feet, thirty-nine, forty-one, however high they want to go.

• 8:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  For most of his career, Levin worked in this last type of facility, the biggest tier of the wedding cake. This was at Oakland Center in Fremont, California. It is one of twenty-two en route centers in the U.S. So what does that look like?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  You sit down, you got a couple of planes. You see four or five departures off the Bay Area flashing at you, trying to climb up to altitude. You got a couple of other aircraft coming at you from Los Angeles Center. Some are going up to Seattle. Some are going to be landing at Oakland. Some are landing at San Jose. You have this picture where you're seeing something start to develop, and you have an idea. You say, I'm gonna unwind this whole situation by separating these aircraft and sequencing these aircraft. You have this creative design in your head. You execute that plan. You watch your thought process unfold. As you see things start to transpire, you might make adjustments, you might change your plan.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  But you're gonna be the one that brings that plan into the world and makes it real. It's very creative, it's very fast paced, and it's always changing. What happened today is gonna be different tomorrow. What happened right now is gonna be different in two hours. The winds change, the way pilots fly is slightly different. There's never gonna be the exact same thing.

• 9:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  When do you develop those plans? In the moment?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have eight or nine planes in your sector, some are coming in, some are leaving. All of a sudden, there's a new plane coming at you from a different sector. They're asking to head into your sector and they're in conflict with one of your aircraft. So the plan you had needs to change, right? Either you need to do something with that aircraft that's coming in, or you can change the trajectory of one of your aircraft that you have. But then you're always like, I might need to amend this to accommodate something else. Like, maybe these guys coming at a certain direction you thought were going to be going 530 knots are only doing 480. You're like, wow, I expected these guys to be going 50 knots faster and they're not.

• 10:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, why would you not know that ahead of time?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Some plane could just be flying slow because they got off early and, you know, their gate's occupied at their next airport or whatever.

• 10:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about weather, wind changes?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, winds could change. As you sit down in the day, you see the way the planes are flying, you see the way the winds are working. So you can get a feel for like, what angle is going to be the fast angle? What angle is going to be flying into the wind? So you get the grasp of those things, but there's always an anomaly like some aircraft is flying really slow because of the gate time or some other reason. And you might have to be a little inquisitive about why that's happening. Can you speed them up? Do they mind if you speed them up?

• 11:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just so I'm clear, the pilot would be aware of some gate conflict potentially that you wouldn't?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're in contact with their company throughout the flight, so they know what they need to do. But we don't, until we ask. And so you just have multiple ways of thinking. And as you're pushing through your plan, if things aren't going as you expected them to, you're going to have to make adjustments. You're going to have to recognize that Plan A is not going as expected. Now, can you force it to work? Maybe, you know, maybe it's not that far off and it's just going to take some minor adjustments. But there's times where you look at it and you go, man, this plan just is not working and I'm going to have to do something different. So you go into Plan B or Plan C.

• 11:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you tell any of your colleagues or is this just you on your own?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  It could involve other people, it could just be you. Because if you're just inside your own jurisdiction, then you're good.

• 12:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  And are you starting to stress a little bit? You think your blood pressure is rising a little bit or no?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  No. Again, this is what we're trained to do. Is there some unknown stress there in the background? There's a little bit where you're like, I'm going to have to do a little bit of extra work. But this is what we do, right? You gotta make sure that aircraft are at the altitude that they're supposed to be at. You gotta make sure that they're flying at the speed you expect them to fly at. And if anything is happening that doesn't add up to what you expect them to do, you need to be on it. As a human, we don't spend a lot of our time thinking like controllers do in these multiple dimensions with moving pieces of the puzzle. It's a new thought process. It's a new way of using your brain. It's different.

• 12:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  What Levin is describing here is what most of us would call multitasking. And most people are not good at multitasking. Last year, we published an episode called "Multitasking Doesn't Work, So Why Do We Keep Trying?" One of the people we interviewed was, at the time, a product manager at Slack. If you don't know Slack, it is a workplace communications platform that almost forces you to multitask. Her name is Olivia Grace. The weird thing is that earlier in her career, Grace tried to become an air traffic controller. And here's how she remembered the first round of testing.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  You're sat at a computer and they're like, hey, the main screen is going to show you simple math. And they made it clear that there's going to be multiple tasks. So they're not just judging you on the speed at which you do simple math. They're judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do simple math, whilst also judging you on the speed and accuracy with which you do other tasks. You start with two plus two is four, three times three is nine. Yeah, I'm doing it. It was going great. And then they're like, okay, every time this light is red, push the other button. You're like, okay, two plus two is four, light is red, push the button. Two plus two is four, light is red, push the button. And then they're like, okay, the last one, and this is the most important one, is there's a third area of the screen where two dots are going to fly across a square. The two dots are effectively planes. If they are going to collide, push the button. If they are not going to collide, do not push the button.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  If you get it wrong and they do collide, very bad, very bad.

• 14:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another guest in that episode was a research psychologist named David Strayer, who has done a lot of multitasking experiments. He has abundant evidence that most people are bad at multitasking. In fact, he says we're not actually multitasking even when we think we are.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  What we're really doing is switching our attention between task one and task two and task one and task two. When you're doing task one, you're not paying attention to task two and there's a switch cost involved in switching the mental architecture from one task to the next.

• 14:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Strayer, during his years of research, found that a select few people really are what he calls supertaskers.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  We didn't believe they existed early on. When we found the very first supertasker, I thought, there must be something wrong. We must have actually miscoded the data.

• 15:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how rare are these supertaskers?

• 15:12Speaker 04

  When I tell people about the supertasker research, I begin by saying, in a classroom of, say, 100, how many of you think you're good at multitasking? How many of you think you're a supertasker? Maybe half the class raises their hand. Then, when we actually test them, only about 2, 2.5% are in that category.

• 15:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, does an air traffic controller like Kenneth Levin necessarily lie on the supertasker end of the spectrum? I asked David Strayer if he had any data. He said he has never directly tested air traffic controllers, but he said, given the extensive selection, training, and washout that air traffic controllers go through, I would be surprised if the frequency of supertaskers isn't much higher than the base rate in the general population of around 2.5%. The reality is that a controller does have to seamlessly juggle dozens of variables with lives on the line. Levin says this ability goes back to the training process.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  A lot of people have no idea what goes on to train an air traffic controller. They think, you go to this facility in Oklahoma for three months, you get out, next thing you know, you're just talking to planes. That's not the case at all. The training could take anywhere from three to five years. You train at the academy for several months. When you graduate from the academy, you get sent to a local facility. You're going to train there in a classroom for another several months. And then they're finally going to send you down to the floor where you'll do on the job training where a seasoned veteran is sitting behind you, coaching you through how to do it and letting you get your feet wet and make mistakes.

• 16:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you love it the minute you started really working toward becoming an air traffic controller?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely not. To the young people out there who are thinking about becoming controllers, I want to tell you something. It is an amazing job. You work with some of the finest people. The teamwork is amazing, but the first couple of years of training and learning to think like a controller and then learning to not apply that kind of thought process to the rest of your life, it's very difficult.

• 17:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  You don't want to be bossing around your family and friends, you're saying?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Make sure to keep your marriage intact. Your family, I think they probably have it harder than you do as a controller in training.

• 17:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  How much of that is intentional as a weeding out process? Like what ratio of trainees get through eventually?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  No, don't take this the wrong way. It's a huge challenge, but a lot of people are up for the challenge. All those challenges that you face become some of your most memorable moments.

• 17:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  It turns out that roughly a quarter of the trainees who enter the FAA Academy in Oklahoma don't make it through the program. Even for the ones who do graduate, about 20% of them won't get certified as a controller at the first facility they're sent to. At Oakland Center, where Levin spent most of his career, the failure rate for first time hires is 45%. This is all another way of saying that it is a challenging job, which makes it hard to fill staffing shortages. We talked a bit about these shortages in last week's episode. The US has around 14,000 air traffic controllers right now. Some estimates show that is about 3,000 short of what's needed. The job also has age requirements. You have to be younger than 31 when you enter

• 18:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  the workforce throughout your career. You have to pass rigorous physical and mental health checks. And at age 56, there is mandatory retirement. Ken Levin is 50.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  So I retired just a couple of months ago. The last day of March was my last day in my career. I retired because it worked for me. Every controller knows that the end of the road is 56. When you turn 56, you're going to be done.

• 19:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  My first thought, Ken, was that, well, we're talking about raising retirement age everywhere else, especially for social security benefits. Why not for ATCs, especially when there's been a shortage? What is it about the job that past 56 is going to make it very hard to do?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Air traffic controllers, the job that they are doing day in and day out, the attention to detail, the stress, the cognitive abilities that are required to make these things happen in a safe and efficient manner. There's a select few people out there who can go well past the norm. Everybody's unique. Everybody's physiology and cognitive abilities are different and the way they work is different. But for me, that time between my mid 30s to young 40s, it was the sweet spot. There will be months on end where you are just crushing it. You can just see things further out. You can see the way the winds are working, how the planes are moving. And it's easy to make good calls. But all of a sudden, who

• 20:09Speaker 01

  knows what happens? But something transpires?

• 20:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  You get in a slump?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you're not hot anymore. It's like you were batting like, you know, a thousand and now all of a sudden you're like, just slow. You go through these moments throughout your career where you have to muddle through and you have to do what it takes. There's times when you're going to add a little extra protection in. You're saying, hey, I'm not having the best day. I might use a little more space than I would on my normal day just because I might not make the best call here.

• 20:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, but it's generally agreed that there is a shortage of controllers. You have any thoughts on that?

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Well, I'm just an air traffic controller. I was just an air traffic controller. There has been a push to hire that needs to continue. This is a critique I would have is that we're not fast. We like to take things slowly and incrementally. And in air traffic, that's a huge benefit. But at the same point, you have to be able to wear a couple of different hats. And there are certain times where you need to be able to adjust on the fly. Like, take an airport that's just exploded. I mean, Vegas has always been busy, but it's become incredibly busy. Even if you took a seasoned controller and moved him to Vegas, it's still going to take at least a year, if not two,

• 21:27Speaker 01

  to train that controller up and get them ready to go.

• 21:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why is that? What do they have to learn?

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Every airport is different. Somewhere like Denver or Dallas, these airports were built on these huge swaths of land. The runways are spread out and they're designed to operate a huge number of aircraft efficiently. Then you go somewhere like the East Coast. San Francisco is similar. A lot of these older airports were designed a long time ago, and they don't have the space to spread these runways out. So you have intersecting runways. You have crossing paths. And then there's geography. Some have mountains in the way. Some have other airports in the vicinity. You're not speaking a different language, but maybe it's like you're speaking a different dialect. The core is the same.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  You're using the same rules. You're using the same principles. But the angles, the spacing between aircraft is different. You're going to have to learn all those delicate balances.

• 22:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about your tools and technology, Ken? I mean, we've all seen the pictures by now. A little desk fan cooling an old radar system, paper flight strips, radios that aren't working. Did you have that kind of experience? Or did you find that most of your tech and tools were in good working order?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  A huge part of the reason that I wanted to come on the show, Stephen, was I hear this stuff out in public. I hear people talking about air traffic on the news or on some other podcast.

• 23:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some inferior podcast, you meant to say.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I mean, spoiler alert here, the flying public should feel safe. The system that we have is acceptable. I started in 1997. It's grown. It's gotten better. It's continually evolved and we're at the point where it needs to evolve more. But it's not unsafe. We have the ability to do our job. Now, the place where people might get hung up is to keep things safe. We might have to introduce a little bit of delay because we're going to take action to make sure that things stay inside the framework of safety.

• 23:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm just curious, what's it feel like to be responsible for all those people in the air?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Okay, that's very difficult to put into words. But what I will say is every day of my career that I worked for the FAA, it was an absolute honor and privilege to show up at work. It's such a unique place to go into. There's no phones. Everybody's very focused. There's so much positive energy into getting the job done. It's amazing, all the trust that the public puts in us. The fact that they count on us to get them or their loved ones home safely each and every day. Most controllers take a lot of pride in that. It's not like you sit there and when you're working traffic, you're thinking, oh, you know, here's this plane with 240 people on it. That's not going through your head.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  What's going through your head is I'm going to do what I was taught to do. I'm going to execute. I'm going to stay ahead of the game.

• 24:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you one kind of small, narrow question. Is a plane, a plane, a plane? In other words, is a business jet and a triple seven and whatever else might be in there? Are they essentially equivalent?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  They get treated equivalently. You're basically on a first come, first served basis.

• 25:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  The position of some people is that the business jets, they kind of free ride off the system because the way the payments go to the trust fund, they're paying a lot less. I know this isn't your end of the business. But I'm just curious what you think about that. I mean, this country has a lot of aviation. All different kinds, all different routes. I'm curious if that's complicated for you as a controller.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, it adds complexity to the system. Is that a problem? Absolutely not. That's what we love to do. Controllers are creative people. We find solutions that work. Challenges are not a bad thing. Having a little bit of stress allows people to grow and become better at what they do. As far as the financial aspect to it, I've never really thought about it in detail. I'll leave that to the experts to determine what the right thing to do is.

• 25:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so let's hear from some experts. One important thing to know is that about 85% of the relevant funding here comes from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which lives inside the Treasury Department, not the FAA. The trust fund was set up in 1970 and it's funded by taxes on passenger tickets, cargo and aviation fuel. Last week, we heard from Dorothy Robine, a transportation scholar who spent time in two presidential administrations. She thinks the system needs serious reform. One big reason is that commercial flights pay a lot more in taxes and fees than private planes, even though some private planes, like corporate jets, may consume just as many air traffic control resources as a commercial flight.

• 26:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  The current system, she says, subsidizes private aviation by around $1 billion a year. And this makes them reluctant to change things.

• 26:48Speaker 05

  The National Business Aviation Association.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  They perceive that they have something to lose because they pay almost nothing to use the current system.

• 26:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robine would like to see air traffic control set up as a corporate entity with government input, but disconnected from the funding and borrowing hurdles it now faces. Canada has a similar system that she admires. The US has flirted with this model before. The first attempt at corporatization was in the mid 1990s during the Clinton administration. It was considered again during the first Trump administration. Robine worked on the first effort and testified in favor of the second. She says the corporate jet lobby, as well as the lobby representing smaller private planes, opposed the reform.

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Their standard argument is that size matters, that yes, you can do this in Canada where it's a small, fairly straightforward, simple aviation system, but in the United States where it's really big and complicated, you need government to run it. That's kind of the reverse of what I would argue, but that's the standard argument.

• 28:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Robine said we should speak with one of the groups that she thinks has been stalling reform, so we made that call.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  Ed Bolin, I'm the president and CEO of the National Business Aviation Association.

• 28:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the National Business Aviation Association does what exactly?

• 28:16Speaker 06

  The National Business Aviation Association represents thousands of companies all over the United States of all different sizes, small, medium, and large, that rely on general aviation aircraft, private aircraft, to get where they need to be when they need to be there for business purpose.

• 28:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me an example. What kind of firms are we talking about?

• 28:39Speaker 06

  Oftentimes, general aviation aircraft are flying to or from communities with little or no commercial airline service. So if someone, for example, was going to fly from Salina, Kansas, to Des Moines, Iowa, that would be an example where a construction company, maybe a medical company, a manufacturer, may be bringing people. To another area for a sales call or bringing people in to discuss a project. So you see all of these companies all over the United States using general aviation aircraft to be efficient, to turn travel time into productive work time, to move products that may be too big to fit in an overhead bin

• 29:22Speaker 06

  or too sensitive to go in a cargo hold, maybe trying to hit three cities in one day as opposed to one city in three days.

• 29:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, you didn't happen to choose Kansas as a starting point because you're from Kansas, did you?

• 29:34Speaker 06

  I might have.

• 29:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  When a lot of people, and I would probably raise my hand here myself, see the name of your organization, the National Business Aviation Association. I might think not so much of those small businesses, the physicians, construction firms and so on. I might think of just corporate jets. How much of your membership is comprised of corporate jets? And how do you define a corporate jet, et cetera?

• 29:57Speaker 06

  Eighty-five percent of the business aviation companies in the United States are small and mid-sized companies. But there are Fortune 500 companies, for example, that are relying on general aviation aircraft, a business aircraft, to get where they need to be safely, securely, flexibly. And so a number of the best companies, whether you look at that as earnings per share, most admired brands, best places to work, through the years, companies that utilize and leverage business aviation outperform those companies that do not.

• 30:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you help me draw that pie a little bit? What share of all flights, let's say, or maybe contributing revenue, contributing to the trust fund are coming from the business travel or the corporate travel?

• 30:45Speaker 06

  Contributions from all general aviation aircraft are contributing to the Airport and Airways Trust Fund. They do it through a fuel tax. There are two different primary types of general aviation aircraft. Those that are powered by piston engines. They use what is known as avgas. And then there are turbine-powered aircraft. And that includes turboprops and turbojets. They burn jet fuel and there is a different higher fuel tax associated with those operations.

• 31:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  How would you describe the role of ATC and the role of the FAA for general aviation versus commercial aviation? Is it a similar relationship or is it quite different?

• 31:29Speaker 06

  Most pilots begin in general aviation. Most maintenance technicians begin in general aviation. Most controllers begin at some of the less capacity constrained airports. Safety technology, sustainability technology is also incubated in general aviation. Composite technologies have come from general aviation aircraft. Winglets came from general aviation aircraft. GPS was adopted early by the general aviation community. It's both the foundation of aviation and it is a technology incubator that often proves its way into the commercial airline service.

• 32:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Critics say that business travel, corporate jets, contribute just 2% or so of the FAA's trust fund revenue while they make up around 16% of flights. And then they'll say, well, to an air traffic controller, a flight is a flight is a flight, whether it's carrying, you know, five people or 300 people. What's your response to that?

• 32:31Speaker 06

  What we have found is when the issue has come up, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate have rejected that. They recognize that the cost inherent in the system are driven by the commercial airlines. The idea that we're all equal with every movement ignores the fact that certain groups drive in more cost. The hub and spoke system is what drives the cost in our air transportation system. So it would be a little bit like saying, well, everybody went out to dinner. One person had an appetizer, a salad, they got dessert, a couple of sides. I had a salad and everybody wants to, hey, let's pay the same thing. It's just dinner.

• 33:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, how legitimate is Ed Boland's check splitting claim?

• 33:21Speaker 07

  There's been lots of work over the years which have discussed whether or not they pay their fair share.

• 33:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. By the way, we will soon be celebrating the 20th anniversary of our book Freakonomics and the 15th anniversary of Freakonomics Radio, which means I will be doing a few live events. If you are interested, go to Freakonomics.com/liveshows. Maybe I will see you there. We'll be right back.

• 33:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  John Strong is an economist in the business school at William & Mary. He has been studying the airline industry for a few decades now, and he has a good grip on the sometimes uneasy alliance between the commercial airline industry and what is called general aviation.

• 34:13Speaker 07

  One thing we have to keep in mind is a lot of general aviation is kind of low level, doesn't really affect the nation's busiest airports, and it's kind of out there on its own. It's crop dusters in Kansas, right? What's true is that business aviation increasingly has had improved performance characteristics. So if you look at Teterboro or White Plains, the busiest business aviation airports are operating corporate jets which are of similar capabilities to commercial aviation. And increasingly, I think, business aviation has realized that the air traffic control system is slowing and making their operations less efficient as well. And so they have come a long way.

• 34:56Speaker 07

  In the last year, the airline industry associations and the business aviation have sort of been on the same page. So I think the idea that general and business aviation has been the problem about why we haven't done that is less true now than it's ever been.

• 35:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, because they understand that if they don't contribute to the system, the system will continue to deteriorate and they're sharing the system.

• 35:21Speaker 07

  Right. And if you look at the rest of the world, for example, if you look at Canada, or if you look at Australia, or if you look at Europe, the way that air traffic control is funded, there's a charge for taking off, there's a charge for flying through the airspace, there's a charge for approach and then for landing, and those charges go to the airlines, to the general aviation aircraft, or to the business aircraft, and it's based on the activities that you used in the system. So it is actually closer to a true user fee system.

• 35:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you saying that I get charged the same if I'm landing a Cessna as I am a 747?

• 35:59Speaker 07

  No, the formulas are generally based on size and weight and the time in the system, like flying through the airspace. So a 747 is going to pay more than a 737 will pay more than a Cessna 172. But what it does is it says that the user of the system is actually the aircraft, and we charge the aircraft. What the airlines do in the rest of the world is they pass those through in the form of the ticket prices that passengers pay, rather than a separate tax on the ticket that we do here.

• 36:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you like that specific à la carte charging system?

• 36:36Speaker 07

  I think that the system in the rest of the world is much more of a direct user fee. The idea of charging ticket taxes or cargo waybill taxes is really an indirect sort of secondary system. It doesn't really reflect the true cost of using the system in the same way.

• 36:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  This brings us back to the argument made by Dorothy Robine and others, that the FAA should be reorganized, removed at least in part from its government home. I went back to Ed Bolan of the National Business Aviation Association to try to understand his objections to this idea. Ed, there's been ongoing debate for years about different models for ATC governance, keeping it within the FAA versus corporatization or privatization like many other countries have done. Tell me why you feel corporatization is not the right way to do that. Why is it better to keep ATC within FAA?

• 37:35Speaker 06

  Well, let's just look at some of the other countries. You'll see a couple of things, including airlines attacking some of the ATC providers for mismanagement. You see controllers and pilots talking about the shortage of air traffic controllers. You see significant delays. We see in some countries, I think Canada is a prime example, where the safety audit that was done by a UN body, Canada had an A rating in 2005. 20 years later, they scored something like 65 out of 100. So if you're looking at safety, including

• 38:18Speaker 06

  the ability of the regulator to affect changes in the operating environment, if you're looking at controller training, if you're looking at the quality of the management, these are outcomes that we are seeing. The studies have shown that they're not able to invest in times of an economic crisis, so they don't have the resiliency. There's no other country in the world that has as many diverse aircraft in operations as the United States, and there's no country in the world that has a safer system.

• 38:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, I gotta tell you, Stephen, I don't know that there is a quote unquote villain in a system like this.

• 38:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Polly Trottenberg. During the Biden administration, she was the number two official at the Department of Transportation, including a brief stint as acting administrator of the FAA.

• 39:06Speaker 08

  There are a lot of different players, a lot of different political pressures. The infrastructure that you don't see every day, that isn't fun and sexy, we tend politically to underinvest in it. Nobody ever wants to pay more. That's sort of the human condition.

• 39:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some people argue that corporatizing the system, giving it more borrowing capacity and so on, is a better way to go. The Canadian system, NavCanada, is often held up as a good example. Do you like that model or no?

• 39:35Speaker 08

  There's been a lot written over the years about how NavCanada does things better. Now, NavCanada is struggling with some of the things that we are too, including not so easy to keep staffed up on air traffic controllers. There's a lot of different models around there, and I think in any given moment, you can point to one and say it's doing better or it's not doing better. But I think for us right now in the US context, I'm not for doing big disruptive things, and that seems to be a pretty broad consensus on both sides of the aisle in the aviation stakeholder world as well.

• 40:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're not advocating for any kind of teardown. You're advocating for what sounds like smart targeted reform? Am I paraphrasing you essentially correctly?

• 40:15Speaker 08

  I think that's correct. In American politics, and we're watching this play out a little bit, big teardowns don't always produce good results. This is a safety critical 24/7 system, and you want to continually improve it. You want to proceed very carefully and thoughtfully. It's always been a challenge here in the US, and particularly, I think, in our complex politics at the moment, to take basically big revolutionary changes in the way we're operating things. I don't know in the FAA that anyone thinks we should at this point. There's pretty big consensus, though, we need to do a much better job on the investment front. One thing I'm very happy and want to make sure I say good things about is, in the most recent bill that Congress passed, they did include 12.5 billion

• 40:58Speaker 08

  to start really to chip away at the FAA's facilities, equipment, technology.

• 41:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  That $12.5 billion in federal funding is part of what President Trump called his one big beautiful bill. This is a much bigger and more focused boost than the FAA has received in the past. As part of overall infrastructure spending, $12.5 billion isn't very much, but it is being pitched as a much-needed down payment on a very expensive plan to modernize air traffic control. Here again is Ed Bolan of the National Business Aviation Association.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  We've got $12.5 billion. We've got a brand-new FAA administrator, a very seasoned and accomplished deputy administrator.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  In my opinion, probably not since 1970, when we created the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, has there been this much public, private, congressional, industry support for enhancing our air transportation system?

• 42:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  The new FAA Administrator is Brian Bedford, the longtime CEO of Republic Airways. He reports to Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation. We asked both Duffy and Bedford for interviews, and their teams did express interest, but we weren't able to make it happen for this series. Maybe we'll get to them in the future. In the meantime, here is Ed Boland's position on the state of things.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  We all know that on January 29th, we had a commercial accident that took place over the Potomac River in the shadow of our nation's Capitol. It was the first major commercial airline accident in 15 years, and it was horrific, tragic, and it broke our hearts. But it also steeled our resolve to build a brand-new air traffic control system and not be distracted by other issues that have come up in the past. We also have seen that the President of the United States, the Secretary of Transportation, Congress, and the general public is saying this is a national imperative.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  The Secretary of Transportation came forward on May 8th, proposed a plan to build a brand-new air traffic control system that is unique, not something we've seen before in terms of its scope, its specificity, its accountability, its funding requirements, and importantly, a deadline. We now have a four-year deadline.

• 43:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I look at the plan, let me run past you some of what looked to be the key components. The first one I see is replacing antiquated telecommunications with new fiber, wireless, and satellite technologies at over 4,600 sites, including 25,000 new radios and 475 new voice switches. So how antiquated? Is the system and how systemic, how widespread will the upgrade be?

• 44:03Speaker 06

  The goal is to replace the entire telecom infrastructure. For a lot of the world, the copper wires have subsequently been replaced with fiber optics, cellular networks and so forth. But the FAA system has been built one on top of the other. Through the years, while we have bought some very advanced technology, it still has to be kind of dumbed down, moving only as fast as the slowest boat, because we haven't done this kind of huge refresh and had an all new system.

• 44:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  I see another component of the plan is replacing over 600 radars that have gone past their life cycle. Describe that for me.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  So the radars have been in use for a long time. They're used by both the Department of Defense and our air navigation system. Most of them were built in the 70s or 80s. Newer radars have a lot more capability and much less cost to maintain them.

• 45:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some people have told us that radar should not be the foundation of the system anymore at all. It should be satellite navigation. What's your view on that?

• 45:12Speaker 06

  The foundation of our system today is what's known as GPS or satellite navigation with ground enhancements to it. But radar continues to be an essential part. It is partly a redundant system. What happens if GPS fails? It is also used by the military. So there will always be some type of minimal system, a reduced level of radar. But we have to keep radar.

• 45:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another part of the new plan is building six new air traffic control centers for the first time since the 1960s. Where will those new control centers be? Why are they needed?

• 45:53Speaker 06

  When we talk about a brand new air traffic control system, we're talking about people, we're talking about facilities and we're talking about equipment. When we get to facilities, we're talking about buildings that were built. In the 1960s, the 1970s, and so as you can expect from older buildings, they're not designed for modern communications. They're not designed for some of the realities that we have. In some cases, there are leaky roofs. Some cases, that's not enough room for large scale cooling systems. Moving from analog to digital in every aspect of air transportation is going to open up

• 46:35Speaker 06

  a lot of opportunities, but we've got to have the people and we have to have the facilities to support that equipment and that technology.

• 46:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  As I've heard it described in the past, a lot of the regulators, if not the commercial airlines themselves, have seen your organization as an opponent to the kind of reform they want. But that now, especially now that this new $12.5 billion has been made available for a new air traffic control system, I'm told that your group and the commercial airliners and the regulators are more on the same page. Is that an accurate characterization?

• 47:12Speaker 06

  I don't think there's been any question for many, many years that everybody in the air transportation system wants the US to have the largest, the safest, the most efficient air transportation system in the world with the most diverse aircraft and aircraft operations. That has never been the issue. The question has been, how best do we get there? At times, commercial airlines, business aviation, a lot of business organizations, some conservative think tanks, a lot of small town mayors and city council people have been very concerned about effectively giving the system to a group of unelected officials and creating kind of a monopoly.

• 47:55Speaker 06

  What we have seen since January 29th is a unified aviation industry. Airlines, labor, business aviation, all of general aviation. We've all united in a coalition known as modern skies. There's a unanimity of purpose and resolve. We've got a deadline. We've got the leadership and we've got the first kickstart of money.

• 48:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  The entire US aerospace industry generates about $1.25 trillion in economic activity, which represents 5% of GDP. So how far will that $12.5 billion go? That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.

• 48:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I went back to the economist John Strong to ask him about the new $12.5 billion in funding that the Federal Aviation Administration will be receiving and how that may affect air traffic controllers.

• 49:04Speaker 07

  The controller's job is a job that it's always been stressful. It will continue to be stressful. We have to make sure that we manage the operating environment for the team as best we can.

• 49:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Strong recently co-authored a report for the National Academies of Sciences called "The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative."

• 49:26Speaker 07

  The 12.5 billion that's in the bill is really useful because it provides incremental funds for capital investment, especially in some of the older centers and in the equipment. It's a down payment toward important modernization of the facilities and equipment. It's a down payment on things that we should be doing, but it's only a down payment. It has identified some key problems. It's put resources to them, but we have to continue to do that. This is an important first step, but it only gets us maybe a third of the way there, and it's probably over a 10-year period.

• 50:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  I also went back to Polly Trottenberg, the former Department of Transportation official, who was briefly acting head of the FAA.

• 50:17Speaker 08

  It's one thing to be handed a big sum of money. You have to be ready to spend it. You need the people in place who know what they're doing. Some of these systems are the most technologically advanced systems in the world. You need people who have that level of technological sophistication, who can help figure out how to design the contracts and the systems and hire folks. You need to have really good management in place to manage a sum of money like that. That is going to be very key to seeing if we succeed here.

• 50:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Based on everything you've been telling me, one thing that would really help is stability in leadership at the FAA, especially the administrator, him or herself. When I look at the record, in the past 20 years, there have been 11 FAA administrators, including yourself as an acting commissioner. And this is a position that's supposed to have five-year terms. So, A, how does this massively high turnover happen? And B, how does this massively high turnover contribute to the problems?

• 51:16Speaker 08

  You're right. I think stable leadership is an important part, particularly if you're going to do long-term capital projects. FAA administrator right now is a very challenging job. The expectations are someone who has deep industry experience, deep knowledge of all the aviation technologies, but someone also who can run one of the largest, most complicated federal bureaucracies and experience a lot of political demands on both sides of the aisle. In recent years, not a lot of folks have been able to do it for the full five years. We just got a new FAA administrator confirmed, Grant Bedford. I hope he'll really flourish in the job and be able to stay for a number of years and bring the agency stability. I would just add one thing, though. No one person has it all. You need a strong team.

• 52:02Speaker 08

  You need a whole leadership team to manage all the elements of that agency.

• 52:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I also went back to Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta, the world's biggest airline by revenue. He has been in that job for nearly a decade. I asked what he thinks about the new FAA funding.

• 52:18Speaker 09

  It's going to get through some of the most critical infrastructure needs, whether that's the telecom systems, some of the oldest facilities that need to be updated and rebuilt or moved, some of the basic technologies to be deployed. This has immediate payback. It's payback to customers of their time. It's payback to us in fuel savings. It's payback to the environment and sustainability. It's allowing more flying to occur, which will help keep prices lower with the more supply you allocate to a market. It's a win on every dimension you have. The challenge is it's a long investment cycle. I know the government would like to do it in three or four years and that would be great. The reality is this is probably going to take closer to five to 10 years to get everything

• 53:02Speaker 09

  where you need it to be. The amount of attention you bring a 10-year project to DC and get people to rally support in Congress, it's hard.

• 53:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's take a step back, though, and go to how the FAA has historically been funded. It seems as though the US is one of the very few wealthy countries where air traffic control and aviation oversight are purely governmental, right?

• 53:26Speaker 09

  There's various forms, but yeah, I think we're certainly the example of where it doesn't work. We pay currently, as an airline industry, a significant amount into the trust fund or FAA user charges, airport infrastructure and customer service charges. The tax on an airline ticket averages over 20%. That's more than tobacco. That's more than alcohol. That's more than buying a gun. It's not that question that we're not paying in for the operating cost. The question comes back to what's the government going to do to raise the capital? Because there are capital costs to rebuild the system. Hopefully, this process will work, but historically, we've looked at privatization as being a good use of capital, where you would separate, bifurcate the actual funding and the capital

• 54:10Speaker 09

  allocation from the governance process in terms of the actual management of the FAA.

• 54:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's say we were talking five years from now, Ed, and there had been significant reform in the FAA, especially with air traffic control. What would you say would have been the specific improvements that were made?

• 54:29Speaker 09

  I'd say the reliability and the quality of the communication infrastructure between the towers, our individuals managing flights, our pilots in the cockpit. Those technologies, that communication technology will be secure and it will be reliable. The fact that you'd be able to then hire and recruit individuals into those roles would be better. I think you would have the ability to probably start seeing some tangible reductions in flying time. That's only going to be good for all parties concerned. I think we all agree, including the FAA, and I think including the leaders in DC, that that's a start, but it's going to take a considerable amount of additional funding to get us to where we need to be. Now, that said, $12 billion is more than the FAA's

• 55:14Speaker 09

  been allocated in years. So, let's get it going.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Throwing money into modernization, this bill with billions of dollars being added to the system, I think it's fantastic.

• 55:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that, again, is the recently retired air traffic controller, Kenneth Levin.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  We always need to evolve. We've got facilities that are degrading, equipment that's degrading, and it needs to be modernized, so we need to put money at it. What bothers me is, when we talk about these things, people will say, "Hey, like, this system's not working." It might not be working as it was expected to, but controllers know how to work with that. Is the passenger gonna feel it in the delay and not getting home on time? Sure, but they're gonna get home safely.

• 55:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds like the system that you've been in, it sounds like you're a huge fan of it.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  I am a big fan. We've come up with something good. You have to be willing to make adjustments. I just think you have to be able to look at yourself seriously and ask yourself the serious questions about what needs to be done to drive things.

• 56:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's hard, though, when you're good at something, and, like, you see this all the time. I think one of the most instructive lessons is to see how few companies make it more than 50 years in the Dow, you know, top of the S and P. The life cycle even of a very successful company is pretty short. It's hard to get good at something, but it's also really hard to stay good.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  In air traffic, we've been doing this for decades on end. How do you keep your workforce engaged and involved and relevant and able to expand, to evolve, to grow, and to change with the times, right? I think aviation has cracked the code in certain aspects of it.

• 56:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you say that aviation cracked the code, are you referring to how safe commercial air travel is?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think it's one of the great, underappreciated accomplishments of the modern era. It's bonkers, if you think about it.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  More than half the reason that I reached out is because... Aviation is amazing. I mean, I'm biased. I've been involved in it my entire life, but in 2024, there was something like 314 aviation-related deaths in the year of 24 worldwide. It's just a feat. One aspect that makes aviation so amazing is when there's a mistake, we dig into it and we learn from it. That's pilots, that's engine mechanics, it's all of us, it's controllers. When we see something difficult transpire, as painful

• 57:48Speaker 01

  as it may be, we have to know that we will be better on the other side because of it.

• 57:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what have we learned over these past two episodes? I would say it boils down to this. Aviation in the US is incredibly safe despite an aging regulatory and safety framework. We learned that corporatization or privatization of the FAA is unlikely, at least at the moment. And we learned that the $12.5 billion coming to the FAA will help a lot, but that it won't fix everything. I also learned that it is really worthwhile to read the emails that our listeners send in. I have interviewed a lot of people in a lot of occupations over the years, and I can't think of many people who have acquitted their own occupation as well as Ken Levin. This makes me feel pretty

• 58:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  good about the state of air traffic control. Maybe I'm a fool for extrapolating. Maybe there are a bunch of other air traffic controllers out there who don't have anywhere near the same level of accountability that Ken has, but I kind of doubt it. Thanks to him and to everyone who spoke with us for these episodes. I'd love to hear what you think. Our email is [email protected].

• 59:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next time on the show. Though two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese, they both have a sense of the future. They're both striving towards something. Dan Wong has written a book called Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. He points out that the Chinese government is dominated by engineers. The US, meanwhile, has always been and continues to be dominated by lawyers. Lawyers are really good at saying no. Lawyers block everything, good and bad. So what happens when a lawyerly society goes up against an engineering state? That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs and edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Eleanor Osborne with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Obawaji, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lepinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Louise Guerra.

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