184. What Can Vampires Teach Us About Economics?

A lot! “The Economics of the Undead” is a book about dating strategy, job creation, and whether there should be a legal market for blood.

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment. Visit SNHU.edu/freakonomics to learn more. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it.

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life? Like banking, for example. Well, PNC Bank did, since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: Brilliantly Boring Since 1865. Brilliantly Boring Since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. With Mint Mobile's Summer Sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited.

• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Free yourself from big wireless and switch to Mint for high-speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com/freak. That's mintmobile.com/freak. Upfront payment: $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 2:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time, you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt, you know, I feel like I know you pretty well. And yet, there's one essential fact about you that I have no idea. And I could guess, and I'd be, I'd have a 50/50 chance. But I'm just going to ask you.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Edward? If you ever touch her, she will again. Don't do this. She's not sure what she wants. Don't do this. Let me give you a clue. Wait for her to say the words. Fine. And she will. Jacob, just go, okay?

• 3:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Team Edward, for sure.

• 3:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  So it was a long time ago that I read Twilight. But I had a reaction to it that was different than any other person I've ever met, which is somehow Twilight had a very calming effect on me, almost like, like enlightenment. Somehow, when I read the book, it just allowed me to be completely at peace with the world. It was completely bizarre. It was very noticeable, though. And I think it related to Edward and the, the life of the vampires. So, so in the book, the vampires live forever, and they basically have nothing to do. And they also have decided to make choices about not following their deepest desires

• 4:10Speaker 02

  of, of drinking human blood, but instead making do and being civilized and in drinking only animal blood. And there was something about that whole portrayal of the vampires, which, which made me feel a kinship with them.

• 4:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  It inspired you?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  It did. No, it made me very calm and kind towards people for about three months. And then, you know, things always fade after that.

• 4:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you like to be a vampire if you could?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  I think I would want to be a vampire. That wouldn't be so bad.

• 4:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  And would you rather be a vampire or a werewolf?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  I think I would want to be... Well, the werewolf... Yeah, I think I would want to be a vampire. I think that the vampires... I'm much more a vampire in spirit than a werewolf.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He teaches economics at the University of Chicago. We were talking about the appeal of being a vampire.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I like the idea of the timelessness of it. And one of the things that's happened to me, and I think maybe happened to you as well, is that as I've gotten older, the amount of free time I have has shrunk to nothing. And I wish I had much more time to invest and to learn. And the vampires have nothing but time. They just sit around. They don't sleep, and they can get everywhere in a few seconds. And so they're very patient and well-learned. And I would like to have the constraint of time lifted, at least for a while. But on the flip side, then, you get stuck that if you get attached to things other than vampires, then you know that they're going to disappear very quickly. So you have to turn them into vampires.

• 6:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, considering that stories of the undead are fiction and supernatural fiction at that, what ideas or themes strike you as an economist as noteworthy?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  So to be honest, I've never thought for two seconds... About the economics of the undead. But in general, it seems like the operative motivation in many of the fantasy and science fiction genre is the removal of the normal constraints. And so in Twilight, for instance, all sorts of constraints have been removed. So there's no need for sleep, and there's no need for money for the cullens, and they live forever. And so, and they can get everywhere so quickly that, that you can then begin to fantasize about what you do when you have no constraints. Of course, you need conflicts, so they have a bunch of other things you have to worry about, like other mean vampires and werewolves and stuff like that. But what I find interesting in fiction is when the author can create an alternative

• 7:18Speaker 02

  universe that has enough similarities in it that you kind of can get on board with it, and yet it allows you to get excited about things. And so, so Harry Potter would be the best example of that, because that's a universe that's very parallel to ours, and yet somehow, things are very different, and it's fun and playful to investigate that.

• 7:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Steve Levitt, an economist, had never really thought about the economics of the undead, but, you know, he's hardly the only economist out there.

• 7:53Speaker 04

  Both Jim and I had an interest in zombies and vampires and other forms of the undead going back many, many years.

• 8:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Glenn Whitman. He's an economist at California State University, Northridge.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  And I also have a second career as a TV writer. I wrote for the TV show Fringe for many years, and now I'm writing for the TV show Matador.

• 8:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Jim he mentioned is Jim Dow, who teaches finance at Northridge.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  In fact, the two of us bonded over Buffy the Vampire Slayer when we discovered that we were both fans of it.

• 8:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so Glenn Whitman and Jim Dow decided to put together a book called Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science. It contains 23 essays by a variety of scholars with titles like Tragedy of the Blood Commons: The Case for Privatizing the Humans, and Investing Secrets of the Undead. I am not kidding. These are serious people taking on serious topics.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  For instance, whether a zombie apocalypse could actually be good for the economy.

• 8:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right? That's worth thinking about, isn't it? After all, we spend a lot of time thinking about the economic impact of war and natural disasters.

• 9:03Speaker 05

  We saw, for example, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and parts of the Northeast after Sandy, that unemployment rates dropped when labor is being devoted to cleaning up a mess.

• 9:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Steve Horowitz.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Charles A. Dana, professor of economics and department chair at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

• 9:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  The chapter that Horowitz wrote, along with Sarah Squire, is called "Eating Brains and Breaking Windows." This refers to a famous 19th-century story called "The Parable of the Broken Window" by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat. It was part of an essay called "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen." But it's not just a parable about a broken window. To economists, it's known as "The Broken Window Fallacy."

• 9:48Speaker 05

  In the original essay, Bastiat imagines, you know, we have a small, quiet village, and a young hoodlum throws a brick through the window of a house, right? Shattering, shattering the window.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  And, of course, the owner of the house that had the broken window is unhappy about it.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  And the people gather around and they cluck their tongues about how terrible this is, and, you know, kids today and all that. And then finally, someone says, "Well, this is actually good, because it's going to be generating business for the glazier, the window maker." And that's income for the glazier, and the glazier will have, you know, maybe $100 that he can spend on maybe a new pair of shoes, and the shoemaker will have some money.

• 10:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  This line of thinking leads people to say...

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Well, maybe it's not such a terrible thing after all that the young hoodlum has broken this window.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  And so, that's an argument for why you might think that a disaster could actually be good for the economy.

• 10:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  But remember, it's the broken window fallacy.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  The fallacy, of course, is that...

• 10:38Speaker 04

  You cannot look just at what is seen. You also have to see what is not seen. In other words, the business activity that would have happened if it hadn't been for that disaster.

• 10:48Speaker 05

  If the homeowner doesn't have the window broken, the homeowner's got $100 to spend on something else and has a functioning window.

• 10:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can see where the economists are going with this theory as it relates to the undead.

• 11:00Speaker 05

  How does it work for the zombie apocalypse? Well...

• 11:02Speaker 04

  It's absolutely the case that if there were an invasion of zombies, there would be a great deal of economic activity generated.

• 11:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sure, people might rush to fill up their gas tanks and buy a lot of groceries, probably stock up on supplies, like axes to crush the zombies' brains.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  You know, all the preparations that it would take to prepare for that apocalypse.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  We'd have to have cleanup of the bodies and the property destruction and so forth.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  All those expenditures, while, sure, they create jobs and they create economic activity, they don't really create wealth.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  If we hadn't had to spend all of those things fighting off zombies, we would have been able to spend all of those resources doing other things to make our lives better.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Food, clothing, shelter, flat-screen TVs, whatever it might be, right?

• 11:46Speaker 04

  And so, on that level, it's, in a sense, a wash. Plus, of course, there's the fact that we have all of the death and destruction wreaked by the zombies.

• 11:54Speaker 05

  All those exchanges of, you know, from buying shotguns at Walmart to cleaning up the bodies to rebuilding houses afterwards are all about either maintaining or getting us back to where we were before. What we want, what economic progress means, is people trading and exchanging in ways that continually get them new and better things that they desire more.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  And so, we are actually worse off for the zombie apocalypse, which is, of course, what common sense should tell us. But sometimes people will find a way to talk themselves into some pretty unusual propositions when it comes to economics.

• 12:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, let's say you love vampires, but you don't love the violence that comes from vampires attacking humans for our blood. Might there be a solution?

• 12:52Speaker 06

  If vampires had the choice to buy blood, they would probably do so.

• 12:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you're a vampire-loving economist hoping to meet a vampire-loving mate, where's that supposed to happen?

• 13:04Speaker 04

  In the nerdiest of possible ways, I met her at Comic-Con.

• 13:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  One more thing. If you enjoy the biting commentary offered by Freakonomics Radio, why don't you subscribe? It's free and easy at iTunes and with other podcast apps.

• 13:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat? The sweater that goes with everything? The perfect pair of pants or the tea you somehow always reach for first? Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. And it's not just clothing. Quince brings that same approach to everything they make, from hotel-quality bedding and bath to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. Find your next fall favorites at Quince.

• 14:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com/freak. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash freak. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com.

• 15:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by hotels.com. Hotels.com helps you find and book the right stay for work faster. With business preferences, save your travel must-haves like gym access or breakfast just once, then get tailored results whenever you search for work travel. Plus, with a free membership, you can save up to 20% on hotels and earn rewards on every stay for future travel. Book now at hotels.com. Visit hotels.com for details.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 15:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hello, Professor Guerra Pujol?

• 15:57Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 15:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, it's Stephen Dubner. How are you?

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Oh, hi, Stephen. Very well, thank you.

• 16:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Enrique Guerra Pujol is a professor of law at the University of Central Florida. His chapter in Economics of the Undead is called "Buy or Bite." As a legal scholar and as a professor of law, let me just ask you this. What's the problem with vampires? And how would you propose to fix it?

• 16:23Speaker 06

  Well, when we look at vampires, what I call the vampire world, I would put my thumb on the main problem: violence. It just, you know, when it comes down to it, you see a lot of gory stuff going on in the vampire world. But here's what it comes to. As a legal scholar, right, I'm not just here to describe a problem. On a normative perspective, I'd like to solve it. And I think obvious solution is right there under our nose. It's let vampires buy blood. And so I wrote a piece where I talked about this possibility and explained how markets work, why black markets tend to be violent, not just in the vampire world, but generally, and described, hey, why it makes sense for vampires to want to buy blood, and why some

• 17:07Speaker 06

  of us, probably not all of us, why it would make sense for us to sell blood.

• 17:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. I'd like to read to you a portion of the introduction to your piece. You write that "Most members of the vampire race resort to coercion, compulsion, and confiscation to get what they want the most: blood. But why?" You write. "Why are vampires such parasitic predators?" Maybe we are asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking, why don't vampires offer to buy our blood instead of taking it by force? So do you have an answer to that question? Why don't they, in the literature, offer to buy blood?

• 17:44Speaker 06

  Two words: legal failure. Economists often talk about market failures when certain voluntary transactions impose costs on others or on society. Here, I'm talking about legal failure. And what I mean by that is when the law, for a wide variety of reasons, prevents transactions from taking place in the first place, prevents market transactions. And what it really comes down to is this intuition that, you know, if vampires had the choice to buy blood, they would probably do so.

• 18:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  You think so, really? You don't think that that goes against the nature of vampires? Isn't what makes vampires fun or attractive? If one is attracted to them, the fact that they go and take via the neck the living hot blood, as opposed to walk into, you know, the equivalent of a California pot dispensary and buy a little packet, or a tablet, or a capsule? That wouldn't be any fun, would it?

• 18:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I am certain that some vampires do obtain a thrill, right? A rush of sucking people's blood by force. But what I'm getting at is that not necessarily all vampires. In fact, sort of a subtext of my piece is that vampires may not necessarily be all evil or all bad.

• 18:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're saying that vampires are essentially driven to violence by the lack of a legal market in blood?

• 19:00Speaker 06

  Exactly right. Exactly right.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  So his solution is an obvious one: a legal market for blood, so that vampires don't have to attack us.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  When you take blood by force, you run the risk of retaliation. And so what I describe is that a lot of vampires, you know, might say, "Well, wait a minute, you know, taking blood is not necessarily free, right? I'm generating a risk of retaliation by vampire slayers. And so maybe if I have the choice of buying blood, I might just prefer the peace of mind, right? So the same reason why somebody buys pot down the dispensary as opposed to, you know, in some shady, dark alley.

• 19:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a great point. As Milton Friedman might have said if he were in on this conversation, "There ain't no such thing as a free blood suck."

• 19:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let me ask you for a moment to describe the legal status of blood sale or purchase in the US and elsewhere.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Just to put it simply and lay it out there, really, blood transactions are under what I call the shadow of the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization, though it's merely a private organization, right, does actively encourage all nation-states to prohibit the sale of blood. And some countries, for example, our friends in the United Kingdom, have acted on that prohibition, and it's unlawful to sell blood. In the United States, though, it's a little trickier. We have something from 1984, the National Transplant Organ Act, which prohibits the sale of human organs, human tissues, but does not address the question of blood or

• 20:46Speaker 06

  ova, sperm, those type of genetic material. And so, in the United States, technically, right, you own your own blood, and you could say there's no express prohibition against the sale of blood, but at the same time, you have this sort of dark looming shadow where other types of genetic material and human organs, the sale of which are prevented. And so, it's this, and this is why I address in the paper, one category of legal failure, simply uncertainty, right? Not saying one way or the other, which sales are allowed and which are not.

• 21:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when there's a legal uncertainty, how do people tend to behave? I realize it's too broad of a question, because people behave in a lot of different ways, but what sort of incentives or disincentives or tendencies toward antisocial behavior are created by legal uncertainties?

• 21:34Speaker 06

  Two points. Number one, if there's a demand for a given good or service, the demand doesn't just go away just because the law's unclear, or just because the law, in fact, prohibits a certain transaction. And of course, a case in point would be drug transactions, or prostitution, or what have you. So, demand is there. In the vampire world, of course, the demand is all the more compelling, because it's, the need for blood is a part of the vampire physiology. But here's what else happens. Not only does demand not go away, lawbreakers will crowd out law abiders. What do I mean by that? I mean that a lot of persons will say, "Well, you know what? Law's unclear. I'm not going to sell my blood. I'm not going to buy blood. It's not clear. What if the deal goes wrong? What if I'm not given the type of blood that I was promised?

• 22:18Speaker 06

  I can't really sue in the courts to enforce this type of agreement. If I do, the outcome is uncertain." And so what ends up happening is people who are willing to take this type of risk, lawbreakers, generally speaking, will come in and fill this demand. And when you have lawbreakers filling in the demand, that's sort of another source of violence, right? And so that's why I think it's important that the law get it right. And if we want to address violence, consider legalizing this type of market.

• 22:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. I love your idea. I love the idea that the violence of vampires is created by a legal failure by which there's no blood for them to purchase or barter for, whatever. But I hate to rain on this awesome parade of yours, but wouldn't fixing the problem as you propose also destroy the literature itself? Isn't the whole beauty of vampire literature the illegal and dangerous and violent procurement of said blood? And are you willing to live, Professor Garapujo, with being the person responsible for killing off the vampire genre?

• 23:39Speaker 06

  That is a great question. But here's the deal, right? Just like we have legal markets in, you know, selling and buying cars, right? There's still car theft, right? There's always going to be people who, for whatever reasons, right? And that's a whole other literature, may want to still steal cars. So I still think, I still think I may kill off some small part of the literature, but I still think, you know, there will be cunning and thrill-seeking vampires who will want to live outside the law. And so there should still be hope for aspiring writers and whatnot.

• 24:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Earlier, you will remember, we spoke with one of the book's editors.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  My name is Glenn Whitman, and I'm an economist and also a TV writer.

• 24:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Whitman wrote two chapters about romantic relationships between human girls and vampire boys.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  I've always been fascinated by applying economics to understand relationships, specifically speaking as a guy who is now married, but I had a long period of singlehood. And it took me a while. I spent a while out there on the market.

• 24:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wonder if you could share with us anything that you've learned, whether as an economist or just a plain old human being, from studying vampires. Something that's changed the way you live your life or think about anything.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  It's going to make me seem like one of those people who never changes and never learns a lesson. But the perspective that I brought specifically to the chapters about vampire-human dating were really the lessons that I had already applied. They were already the way that I thought about human-human relationships. And now, that's something that changed. It was as a result of thinking in those terms, thinking about search-matching theory when I first learned about it sometime in the late 90s when I was in graduate school. And that had an effect on me at that time. It made me realize the degree to which the

• 25:48Speaker 04

  idea of "the one," the single person that you are destined by the universe to end up with, is kind of a silly concept. So instead, it's a much more reasonable way to think about it, to say, "Look, even if..." The kind of person I could be with is only one in a million. That's still a huge number of people in a world of billions of people, right? And so that means what there really is, is a set, not the one, but the set. And what you're hoping to do is to land somebody who is in that set. And so that made me think in terms of my dating strategy, how I would meet people,

• 26:30Speaker 04

  in terms of trying to maximize the number of people that I could meet, or at least find out about enough to know whether they could conceivably be in the set. So doing that decreases the cost of actually finding somebody. Now, talking about it this way makes it sound like I was sitting around with pencil and paper and a spreadsheet.

• 26:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, it does. Yes, it does.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  And that's not accurate. That's not accurate at all. What my dating life actually looked like when I had one was much like other people's. It involved a lot of going out to bars and meeting people. It really was just a mindset.

• 27:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how did you meet your wife ultimately?

• 27:10Speaker 04

  In the nerdiest of possible ways, I met her at Comic-Con.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  And-

• 27:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  We've got to stop now. It doesn't get any better than that. Sorry, go ahead.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  At the Wrath of Khan party, we bonded talking over Buffy and Angel.

• 27:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, man. That is a beautiful story. What is her name?

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Bryn.

• 27:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bryn, you're a lucky lady. And Glenn, I'm sure you're a lucky guy, too.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Extremely.

• 27:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thank you so much for talking today. It was a blast.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 27:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. On the next Freakonomics Radio, given the fever for corporate mergers and acquisitions, we were wondering, maybe the US should merge with Mexico? Jim Cramer likes the idea.

• 28:03Speaker 07

  Look, that IPO, I want everyone in, and I'm willing to pay 20% above the price talk because I think people are short-selling Mexico because they think it is just a place where you just have lawlessness. They've not been to Mexico. They don't realize the immediate premium this deal is going to go to.

• 28:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Sente Fox, former president of Mexico, he isn't so sure.

• 28:22Speaker 08

  I see that close to impossible. It's not the wish either of the United States and its wonderful people, nor is the desire of Mexicans and our great culture.

• 28:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  We try to persuade him anyway. And we asked former White House Chief Economist Austin Goolsbee what he thinks the idea.

• 28:42Speaker 09

  You'd have all the people in Mexico going, wait a minute. Why do I have to listen to these bozos in the Senate anyway? Is that really better than what we had?

• 28:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm, Goolsbee's got a point. But what if the benefits outweigh the costs? Welcome to a Mexico. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Greta Cohn, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Joel Werner. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 29:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting, and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place, and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com.

• 30:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic Pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9 milligrams, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic Pill.

• 30:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 31:28Speaker 10

  This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Is there a right time to sell a stock? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often, your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Join host Mark Reapy as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the cognitive and emotional biases that may affect your investing decisions. Listen at schwab.com/financialdecoder.