I went to see my primary doctor, Rebecca Kurth, whom I’ve been seeing for years. The very first time I saw her, she noted in my medical history that I was allergic to penicillin. “How do you know?” she asked, and I told her that I’ve been allergic since I was a little kid, based on what my mother told me, based on what our family doctor told her. Kurth told me that this kind of story is very common, and that the vast majority of people who think they’re allergic to penicillin are not. She told me I should try to get my penicillin allergy “cleared,” or “delabeled” — but I never bothered. And so, last year, when I presented with a mystery illness and a cough that wouldn’t go away, Kurth gave me azithromycin, an antibiotic that’s used for patients allergic to penicillin. It didn’t help. I kept getting sicker. I began to wonder what would happen if I could take penicillin: would it fix me — or maybe kill me?

The penicillins are in fact a family of antibiotics, including amoxicillin, ampicillin, and methicillin. Almost 100 years after they were discovered by Alexander Fleming, they are still among the safest, cheapest, and most reliable drugs around; they have saved hundreds of millions of lives. Even with all the new antibiotics since then, penicillin is still prescribed more than any other antibiotic. But there is one big problem: 10 percent of Americans, more than 30 million people, are allergic to it. At least, that’s what the conventional wisdom says. But the new year is a good time to tear down conventional wisdoms, especially if they are disastrously wrong. And this one is.

So on this week's episode of Freakonomics Radio, we look into this widely held misdiagnosis and what it costs — socially, economically, and medically. I hope you'll give it a listen.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Are You Really Allergic to Penicillin?” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

I also wanted to say a big thanks to the Freakonomics Radio fans who joined us at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on January 3rd. It was a great way to kick off 2025. Special thanks to KQED and SiriusXM, our partners in the show, and to our incredible guests: San Francisco Mayor London Breed, economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Koleman Strumpf, and our very own The Economics of Everyday Things host Zachary Crockett.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

People I (Mostly) Admire: How to Have Good Ideas

Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and Steve talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how to approach hard problems, and why brainstorms are so annoying.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Butchers

Before beef ends up at your favorite steakhouse, it passes through the hands of a trained specialist with an encyclopedic knowledge of bovine anatomy. Zachary Crockett chews the fat.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

Fortunately, some people are trying to push back. We spoke with several of them for this episode, including Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, who heads the Center for Open Science; and Leif Nelson, a professor at U.C. Berkeley who contributes to the blog Data Colada, which has exposed what looks like fraud on the part of some prominent researchers. In October, Nosek and Nelson were themselves called out when a paper that they published (about why researchers should preregister their hypotheses) had to be retracted. It turned out that Nosek and Nelson and their coauthors hadn't properly preregistered their hypotheses.

For this update, we talked to Nosek about the incident:

I am just as vulnerable to error as anybody else. One of the real lessons, I think, is that without transparency, these errors will go unexposed. It would have been very hard for the critics to identify that we had screwed this up without being able to access the portions of the materials that we were able to make public.

I hope you enjoy our update to this story, and that you're having a happy new year. We’ll be back with a brand new episode of Freakonomics Radio next week.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update),” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

By the way, we’re making a change to our publication schedule. Starting next week, new episodes of Freakonomics Radio will come out on Friday mornings (rather than Wednesday evenings) — which means this newsletter will also come out Friday mornings. See you next Friday!

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

The Economics of Everyday Things: Pistachios

How did a little green nut become a billion-dollar product, lauded by celebrities in Super Bowl ads? Zachary Crockett cracks open the story.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

A couple years ago, Francesca Gino was an academic superstar. She has been a professor at Harvard Business School and a researcher in the field that’s variously called behavioral science, decision science, or organizational psychology. She gave talks or consulted for Google, Disney, Walmart; for the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy and many more.

But that’s all over, for now. In July of 2023, Harvard Business School — responding to an analysis by academic whistleblowers — investigated Gino's work and found that she had “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly committed research misconduct.” Gino was suspended without pay. Those same whistleblowers have also produced evidence of what they call data fraud by an even more prominent behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely of Duke University. Ariely has enjoyed the spotlight for many years, going back to his 2008 book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely claims that Duke investigated and cleared him — although Duke has declined to say anything publicly about the investigation.

Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino have both maintained that they never fabricated data for their research. On today’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, we’ll hear from one of their co-authors, as well as the three data detectives who blew the whistle on them.

In Freakonomics, which Steve Levitt and I published in 2005, we wrote: “Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor... Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.”

So why shouldn’t we expect cheating, even among scientific researchers? The general view — and the view that I’ve long held — is that academic research exists in a special category: It is a fact-finding coalition that operates under a set of rules built around the accurate gathering and analysis of data, with the entire process subject to fact-checking and peer review. (Good journalism operates under similar rules.)

But the things we found out in this series — about high-profile researchers who allegedly fudged their findings, and about the pervasive incentives to cheat throughout the academic world — suggest that my faith in academic research has been misplaced. This is of course concerning to me, and if you are a fan of science (any kind of science), it probably concerns you too.

I hope you enjoy revisiting this series with us, and that you’re having a happy holiday season. We’ll air the second part of the story next week, with an update from one of the researchers who’s trying to fight the tendency toward misconduct in his field.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update),” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

I want to also let you know that Freakonomics Radio is coming to California in 2025. We have two live shows — one in San Francisco on January 3^rd and the other in Los Angeles on February 13^th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. I’ll be there — and I hope you will too.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

People I (Mostly) Admire: Is Your Gut a Second Brain?

In her book, Rumbles, medical historian Elsa Richardson explores the history of the human gut. She talks with Steve about dubious medical practices, gruesome tales of survival, and the things that medieval doctors may have gotten right.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Cashmere

Once a luxury good, the soft fiber is now everywhere — which has led to a goat boom in Mongolia. Zachary Crockett tugs at the thread.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

He was the founding editor of 7 Days, a clever and slightly transgressive arts-and-culture weekly. From there, he went to The New York Times Magazine, and after many years there, he took over New York magazine, which he radically remade for the digital era.

He won all the awards an editor can win. He directly shaped the careers of hundreds of writers and editors; indirectly, he did the same for millions of readers.

He left New York in 2019, still on top but feeling a bit too old for the game, a bit burned out, and ready for something new. The something new eventually took the form of a book, called The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. (It could have just as easily been called The Art of Work — more on which later.)

Many people who know Adam were surprised that he wrote a book. He was one of the few magazine editors who didn’t start out as a writer, or want to be a writer, or think of themselves as a writer. He was a full-fledged editor.

An editor is mostly backstage; there’s a lot of power and a bit of risk. A writer, meanwhile, is out front, directly in the line of fire — you work on a thing for months or years, and then it goes out into the world with your name on it. If people hate it, they know where to find you. That’s why it was so intriguing that Adam Moss would write a book.

The Work of Art is a set of interviews with a variety of makers — Stephen Sondheim, Twyla Tharp, David Simon, Samin Nosrat, Will Shortz — and their stories unfold on pages that are packed with sketches and graphics, sidebars, footnotes. It’s very much a magazine in book form. But it’s more than that.

In this episode of Freakonomics Radio, we’ll talk about the book, and some other things too — especially Adam’s tenure at The New York Times Magazine, where he happened to be my boss. This was in the late 1990s. I was what’s called a story editor, which meant I came up with ideas, assigned them to writers, and then shepherded those pieces through the editorial and publishing process. The Times Magazine was considered a great magazine during this era, and it was a thrill to be inside of that. Also terrifying, sometimes, but mostly a thrill, because our boss was really good at his job, and we all got to watch and learn.

That said, I quit the Times after about five years. It used to be that when someone left that place voluntarily, and was relatively young — I was in my thirties — people would think you were crazy. I was doing well as an editor and an occasional writer; the bosses told me I might be a boss before long. That was the last straw. I didn’t want to be an editor, or a boss. I just wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to work on my own, not within a hierarchy.

When Adam’s book came out in early 2024, I read it right away. For me and for many others who worked for him, it was a bit like discovering his journal: Everything that made him tick as an editor, as a boss, was right there on the page.

At the time, I was trying to make a podcast series about mentorship. The idea was that mentorship is this standard and successful practice in many realms — in education, sports, the military, the medical and legal professions. And yet, in other realms, mentorship isn’t standard practice at all. I wanted to know why not, and whether something should be done about that.

That series never came together; we just couldn’t find a center of gravity, and eventually we gave up. Which is fine — that happens all the time in this kind of work. But there was one interview we did for the series that I wasn’t willing to ditch: the one with Adam Moss. Was he in fact a mentor to me? Or maybe more like the master who teaches an apprentice? Or was he just an old-fashioned boss, trying to extract labor?

That’s what today’s conversation on Freakonomics Radio is about. It’s the latest in our series of one-on-one conversations to end the year.

Even if you are not a big fan of magazines, even if you’ve never held a paper magazine in your hands, I suspect that you will benefit from hearing Adam Moss’s perspective. Because all of us, at some point, try to make something from nothing. So you might as well learn from a good teacher. Like I did.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “How to Make Something from Nothing,” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

I want to also let you know that Freakonomics Radio is coming to California in 2025. We have two live shows — one in San Francisco on January 3^rd and the other in Los Angeles on February 13^th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. I’ll be there — and I hope you will too.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

People I (Mostly) Admire: Turning Work into Play (Update)

How psychologist Dan Gilbert went from high school dropout to Harvard professor, found the secret of joy, and inspired Steve Levitt’s divorce.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

No Stupid Questions: What About All the Questions We Haven’t Answered?

How can you learn to love uncertainty? Is it better to cultivate acceptance or strive for change? And, after 223 episodes, what is the meaning of life?
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Fonts

Behind almost every character you see displayed on a page or a screen, there’s a complex — and sometimes lucrative — web of licensing deals. Zachary Crockett is just your type.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

If his last name sounds familiar to you, that may be because you’ve heard his brothers on the show: Rahm Emanuel, a former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayor (who was U.S. ambassador to Japan when we last interviewed him); and Ariel Emanuel, who runs the entertainment-and-sports firms Endeavor and TKO.

Zeke is the oldest of the Brothers Emanuel, and I wanted to speak with him about the state of American healthcare, and particularly the new class of GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, that may be about to upend it.

These drugs were developed to treat Type 2 diabetes. What made them blockbusters is that they’re also effective at helping people lose weight. But, as Emanuel tells us, that’s just the beginning: There’s evidence that they can protect patients from heart attack, stroke , kidney disease, cirrhosis, addiction, depression, and even cancer. They’re also expensive — more than $1,000 a month in the U.S. — which raises the question of who should have access to them.

When I started doing that research, my thinking was, it’s got to be the diabetic patients — they’re going to benefit the most. Well, who loses the most years of life? It turns out it’s the people with obesity, and they’re the people who are going to benefit the most from these drugs.

But as we've seen in the response to the killing of UnitedHealthcare C.E.O Brian Thompson, our healthcare system doesn’t always allocate scarce resources to the people who need them most.

Most insurance companies don’t want to cover it because it’s a big expense. The consequence is, who’s getting GLP-1s? Rich people.

You might think insurance companies would be eager to cover drugs that have so many benefits, in hopes of saving money over the long run. But that’s not how it works.

It’s not in the healthcare system’s interest to make those long-term cost savings. Say you’re sitting at United, or Humana, or a Blue Cross and Blue Shield. You have a person who you’re insuring. You’re going to spend money today for them, and the payoff’s going to dribble out in five, six, seven years. The problem is, by the time the cost savings come, they’re no longer being insured by you. The churn is so much in the insurance market that the investment horizon tends to be one year, maximum two years. We’ve created a system that perfectly disincentivizes long-term investments.

I asked Emanuel how healthcare policy might change in the upcoming Trump administration:

If I were a betting man, having worked with Donald Trump: This isn’t going to be a priority of his. He may make another run at repealing the Affordable Care Act, but that’s a joke, it’s not going to happen. Even Republicans want everyone to have health insurance. We’re not repealing the Affordable Care Act.

And we revisited a controversial essay Emanuel wrote for The Atlantic a decade ago, in which he said he’s turning down life-saving treatments once he turns 75:

People are, “Oh, the golden years!” And all the advertisements for Medicare Advantage health plans make the golden years look like I’m hiking in Montana, and beautiful vistas, and all that. That’s not what they’re like. What happens for most people is that they end up watching a lot more TV. They tend to be homebound. They get a lot of disabilities over time. That seems like a very passive life. I’m not a passive person, and I don’t think anyone wants to or should want to be a passive person.

Emanuel recently turned 67, so he still has plenty of runway. He’ll be spending some of that time working on his interpersonal skills:

I think one of my deficits, if I had to put it this way, is I can be slightly not-sufficiently-empathetic. I can be a little too dismissive. And I would like to improve those. I’d like to be more empathetic to the people around me and the people I talk to, and decrease the sarcasm in my responses.

Give this episode a listen and let me know if you think he is achieving his goals.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Is Ozempic as Magical as It Sounds?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

I want to also let you know that Freakonomics Radio is coming to California in 2025. We have two live shows — one in San Francisco on January 3^rd and the other in Los Angeles on February 13^th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. I’ll be there — and I hope you will too.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

People I (Mostly) Admire: Is There a Fair Way to Divide Us?

Moon Duchin is a math professor at Cornell University whose theoretical work has practical applications for voting and democracy. Why is striving for fair elections so difficult?
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

No Stupid Questions: What Makes an Idea Interesting?

What do Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Malcolm Gladwell have in common? Are interesting theories more significant than true ones? And what has been keeping Angela up at night? Plus: an important announcement about the show.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Used Bookstores

Americans throw away 320 million books every year. How do some of them find a second life? Zachary Crockett is just browsing.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

A crucial moment on the way to that wreck was a meeting between President Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin, on June 16th, 2021, in Geneva. This was only the second time that Putin and Biden had met face-to-face. Sullivan was there.

At the time, relations between the U.S. and Russia were rocky: The Russians were increasing their troop presence in southwestern Russia, near the Ukraine border. Biden had called Putin a killer; Putin had withdrawn the Russian ambassador from the U.S. The Biden administration arrived in Geneva hoping the meeting would help establish “guardrails for our relationship with Russia.”

What Sullivan saw was not what he or anyone from the U.S. delegation expected. Putin, he says, "was relaxed, cracking jokes, some of them at our expense." What did they talk about?

The headline is: What did they not talk about? Ukraine. I look back now and I say the way Putin conducted himself, he had decided he was going to invade Ukraine. He was going to take what he thought was his.

Sullivan came out of his experience in Moscow with a strong sense that Putin's Russia poses a serious threat to America and the West, and that American politicians aren't taking that threat seriously enough:

Something is coming that is going to shake the establishment and the American people. We’re asleep! And our politicians aren’t leading, Republicans or Democrats.

But Sullivan isn't just shouting a warning in this episode. He offers sharp analyses of how Russia's actions are constrained by its relationship with China:

Putin meets with Xi at the start of the Olympics in 2022. They issued this extraordinary document, lengthy statement, page after page, declaring how they’ve got this [relationship] — it’s stronger than an alliance. “Dear friends.” The Russians have since used that phrase frequently. My recollection is that Xi and his government haven’t used that phrase since. And what happened since? It started the day of the invasion: Putin’s threats to use a nuclear weapon.

And how Donald Trump is constrained by the U.S. system of government:

When he gets confirmed on January 20th, 2025 at 12:01 p.m., he’s a lame duck. Now, he’ll have lots of influence. He’s got coattails. But he’s never running again. He is, by the terms of the amended constitution, limited to two terms.

I learned a great deal from this conversation with John Sullivan, and I suspect you will too. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Is the U.S. Sleeping on Threats from Russia and China?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

No Stupid Questions: Is It Weird for Adults to Have Imaginary Friends?

Why does listening to No Stupid Questions feel like you’re hanging out with your best friends? Why did the whole world take it personally when Princess Diana died? And how do “parasocial relationships” affect your mental health?
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Greeting Cards

The tradition of sending cards to loved ones was in decline — until it was rescued by a new generation. But millennials have their own ideas about what sentiments they want to convey. Zachary Crockett is thinking of you on your special day.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

On Thanksgiving morning, roughly 30 million people catch at least some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV. For a lot of them, it wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving without the parade. When I spoke with the parade’s executive producer, Will Coss, I asked him why it’s so popular. His answer was ... pure Tevye:

“Tradition, tradition, tradition is at the core. It’s really about having this thing, this giant thing that shows up for you every Thanksgiving morning, and it's going to be a little bit of spectacle, a little bit of kitsch, a little bit of art. It's become a moment in time for all of us to drive back to.”

But even our favorite traditions are not guaranteed their place in the future. The Macy’s department store has been around for 166 years, and they’ve put on a parade for the past 100. We spent last week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio trying to figure out how much money Macy’s spends to produce the parade, and how much they earn from sponsorships and TV ad sales. (Short answer: a lot.) That was one part of the Macy’s story that interested us. The other was the future of retail itself, or at least the kind of retailing represented by Macy’s. They like to call the parade their annual gift to the nation, which is a nice sentiment, but there are two things you should know about that: This gift is likely quite profitable for the giver, which is unusual. Also, the Macy’s parade may be one of the most valuable assets that Macy’s still has.

For most of the 20th century, Macy’s was a retailing giant, but it’s been in trouble for years. If it were to disappear — the way that Sears and Montgomery Ward and Lord & Taylor and many other department stores have disappeared — the parade would likely disappear as well. How likely is that? Macy’s is a publicly traded company worth a bit more than $4 billion. That is not very much. Target is worth about $60 billion; Walmart is worth $720 billion. Macy’s real estate alone is thought to be worth roughly double its $4 billion stock-market value. You could take that to mean that Macy’s simply is no longer very good at being a department store, or that department stores in general are doomed.

Over the years, I have interviewed a number of C.E.O.s, most of them in thriving industries: biotech and software, energy and entertainment. We haven’t talked much about the retail industry on Freakonomics Radio, but the retail economy is a huge share of the global economy. So this week on the show, I spoke with Macy’s very optimistic C.E.O. Tony Spring, who makes his best case for a Macy’s turnaround. I spoke with a dissenting voice as well — Mark Cohen, a longtime retail executive and the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. Cohen is not nearly as optimistic.

In the process of making this two-part podcast series, we stumbled on a surprising connection between the Macy’s parade and another, much smaller retailer who is hoping to bring back brick-and-mortar. Jeff Kinney is the author of the wildly successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid series — so successful that Kinney has had a Wimpy Kid balloon in the Macy’s parade since 2010. With that success, Kinney is bankrolling the revival of Plainville, Massachusetts, the dilapidated town where he lives. His effort began with the creation of a large, thriving bookstore called An Unlikely Story. But now he’s trying to revamp the whole town, on all his own dime. Both Jeff Kinney and Tony Spring desperately want to fight the retail headwinds, and get footsteps in the door. But is wanting something enough to make it happen?

I hope you give this episode a listen, and — parade or not — I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Dying Is Easy. Retail Is Hard,” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

No Stupid Questions: Why Are We So Pessimistic?

Are things really as bad as they seem? Has Gen Z given up hope for the world? And why was the father of positive psychology a lifelong pessimist?
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Helium

It’s unreactive, lighter than air, and surprisingly important to the global economy. Zachary Crockett goes up an octave.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

People I (Mostly) Admire: Neil deGrasse Tyson Is Still Starstruck

The director of the Hayden Planetarium is one of the best science communicators of our time. He and Steve talk about his role in reclassifying Pluto, bad teachers, and why economics isn’t a science.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | transcript

I really only started paying attention to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade about 10 years ago, when my family and I moved into the neighborhood where the parade starts, and where, the night before, they stage everything. This is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

They take over two extra-wide streets to lay out the giant balloons. Each balloon arrives in its own small rolling cart, folded up flat. It gets unpacked, unfolded, laid out on the pavement — and then comes the helium. There’s a truck nearby with big canisters stacked horizontally on a rack. Up close, the balloons are really big. You see this as soon as they start drinking up some helium and puff up to full size.

But on this night, Erev Parade — “inflation night,” they call it — the balloons aren’t allowed to rise to parade height. Each one has a net thrown across the top, and the net is held down by sandbags. If you happen to be passing by on foot, this can provide an unusual view of your favorite balloon character — a bulging eyeball, a massive derrière, some very chubby fingers.

Many thousands of people come see the balloons on inflation night. It is an unusual and joyful scene — for the visitors and locals. For many people, myself included, it is the best New York night of the year. A lot of people who live on these blocks throw inflation parties up in their apartments, and when you look straight down out of your window, you get another unusual, and wonderful, view of the balloons.

I’ve watched this whole operation for several years now, and every year I’m a little bit more impressed. The parade people execute the mission with a blend of military efficiency and childlike glee. You can’t help but marvel at how much planning must go into it and how good the execution has to be — not just from the parade side of things but from the city side and the broadcasting side. And it’s not like they have weeks, or even days, to set up. On Wednesday morning, the streets are normal, full of cars, trucks, jaywalkers, dogs, bikes — and then the balloon people come, and you get to see the real, up-close version of the thing that everybody else has to watch on TV, in miniature.

The cleanup starts as soon as the last balloon enters the parade, on Central Park West, and by the time they reach the Macy’s flagship store, down in Herald Square, our street is back to cars and trucks again — although not so many, since it’s still Thanksgiving morning.

Like I said, it’s only recently that I began paying attention to the parade. I do remember it being on TV when I was a kid, but I guess I just wasn’t a parade person. Seeing it up close made me curious, and after last year’s parade I took a look at the TV ratings. There were nearly 30 million viewers! Another three-million-plus people watch in person from the sidewalks and grandstands. It was the TV numbers that blew me away. As you may know, the television juggernaut these days is the National Football League; of the 100 most-watched broadcasts last year, 93 were NFL games. The Macy’s Parade was one of the remaining seven, beaten out only by the State of the Union address.

A TV audience of 30 million must generate a lot of ad revenue, and I got to wondering: How much? Then I got to wondering how much it costs to produce the parade.

Simple questions, right? As it turns out, they aren’t simple to answer. Macy’s is one of the oldest department stores in the U.S., and it has a lot of traditions. One of those traditions is not talking about the economics of its Thanksgiving parade. Macy’s likes to call the parade its “annual gift to the nation,” and we all know it’s not polite to ask how much a gift costs.

But this week on Freakonomics Radio ... we ask anyway. This episode is part one in a two-part series we’re calling “Can the Macy’s Parade Save Macy’s?” We look into the cost of the raw materials, like helium, and all the ways in which New York City pitches in. We talk to Jeff Kinney, author of the acclaimed Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, about what it’s like to have a giant balloon in the parade and what that exposure means for his brand. We hear from the people at Macy’s who produce the parade, from Macy’s broadcast partner NBC, and from the New York City agencies that pitch in. We also hear from the C.E.O. of Macy’s, who is trying to keep an old store alive when so much retail is dying.

I hope you give this episode a listen. It was a lot of fun to make — almost as much fun as sucking the helium out of a giant balloon.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Is Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade Its Most Valuable Asset?”, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

We have two upcoming Freakonomics Radio live shows on the West Coast: one in San Francisco on January 3rd, and one in Los Angeles on February 13th. For tickets, go to freakonomics.com/liveshows. I’m told that tickets are going fast, so you might want to do this soon.

And we have a new listener survey that I would love you to take — we’re always trying to get better around here, and feedback helps. So, if you have a few minutes, please go to freakonomics.com/survey.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

No Stupid Questions: Is Your Attention Span Shrinking?

Does a surplus of information create a shortage of attention? Are today’s young people really unable to focus? And do goldfish need better PR?
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Mannequins

Mannequins may be made out of plastic or fiberglass, but for retailers they’re pure gold. Zachary Crockett strikes a pose.
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

People I (Mostly) Admire: “What If Monsters Really Do Exist?”

Pete Docter is the chief creative officer of Pixar, and the Academy Award-winning director of Soul, Inside Out, Up, and Monsters, Inc. He and Steve talk about Pixar’s scrappy beginnings, why wrong turns are essential, and the movie moment that changed Steve’s life.
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

He is only the second president in U.S. history to lose the White House but win it back later; the other was Grover Cleveland, in the 19^th century.

This is one of many ways in which the 2024 election was a historic one — and a dramatic one, the kind that generates a lot of bloviating from a lot of people. So you may have had your fill of that. I was thinking we might want to have a different kind of conversation this week, with someone who isn’t a bloviator; with someone very smart, and thoughtful, with a wide perspective; someone who maybe has a Ph.D. in political science, and who is maybe an immigrant.

All of that describes our guest on Freakonomics Radio this week: Fareed Zakaria. He is host of the CNN show GPS (Global Public Square), and he writes a Washington Post column. We had him on the show earlier this year to talk about his recent book The Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

Zakaria argues that we are in the midst of a global backlash right now: a backlash against economic change, against technological change, and against cultural change. He calls this a rejection of the era of openness.

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum (and on the spectrum of info consumption), I think you will find a lot to take away from this conversation. As much coverage as there has been of the election and the aftermath, I still walked away having learned a lot from Zakaria. A few examples:

• There have been rumblings about a new GOP for some time, and this election pretty much confirms it. Zakaria says we are witnessing a realignment in American politics where class trumps religion and race.

• This realignment means Democrats are left trying to figure out what and who they stand for: Are they the party of the working class? The party of the educated urban elite? When your old coalition stops working, where do you go shopping for a new one?

• The second Trump term — minus the shock of his first election — will likely get off to a much different start than his first term. We’re already seeing that with appointments coming in thick and fast:  Susie Wiles, Tom Homan, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, Lee Zeldin, Matt Gaetz — and Elon Musk. These are largely Trump loyalists, and Trump loves loyalty.

While it’s impossible to predict exactly what Trump will do at home and abroad, Zakaria has some thoughts:

• We should expect a crackdown on immigration. Trump campaigned on the issue and, as Zakaria says, “he’s going to have to do something big” — although he may be held back by economic and market realities.

• Trump’s soft spot for Vladimir Putin may yield a deal in the Ukraine war that essentially forces Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms.

• Trump will likely make good on his promise to go after China with tariffs. The good news is that it shouldn’t hurt the U.S. much, at least in the short term, since so much of our economy is a domestic economy.

Zakaria’s biggest concern is how Trump positions America on the world stage — or, more concerning, whether he will withdraw from that stage. Zakaria believes Trump may well lead a charge to undo much of the institutional good work that has been done over the past century:

“What I worry about is that he doesn’t understand the larger picture, which is that the United States really has created a new world, that that world has been largely beneficial to the United States and enormously beneficial to the rest of the world. And that there are huge stakes here, that if the U.S. walks away and disengages from the world and retreats to isolationism, nobody can fill that role, and that this world is not natural and self-sustaining, and that we will quite possibly return to a kind of 19^th-century world of realpolitik and the law of the jungle. That's not in America's interests and that’s not in the world's interests. I don’t think Trump hears the music on that.”

And there’s one thing Zakaria wants you to hear the music on if you’re someone who’s thinking about leaving the country …

“If everybody who loses an election abandons the watchtowers, that’s not going to help democracy.”

You don’t want to hurt democracy, do you? Take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “Fareed Zakaria on What Just Happened, and What Comes Next,” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

Also on the Freakonomics Radio Network this week

No Stupid Questions: How Do You Identify a Narcissist?

What’s the difference between narcissism and high self-esteem? Does social media fuel arrogance or self-consciousness? And do people get less toxic with age?
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

The Economics of Everyday Things: Prison Labor

Incarcerated people grow crops, fight wildfires, and manufacture everything from motor oil to prescription glasses — often for pennies per hour. Zachary Crockett reports from North Carolina.
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

People I (Mostly) Admire: Feeling Sound and Hearing Color

David Eagleman is a Stanford neuroscientist, C.E.O., television host, and founder of the Possibilianism movement. He and Steve talk about how wrists can substitute for ears, why we dream, and what Fisher-Price magnets have to do with neuroscience.
Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  transcript

It was inspired by a new research paper from the Cornell economist John Cawley and five co-authors, called “The Role of Repugnance in Markets: How the Jared Fogle Scandal Affected Patronage of Subway.”

Do you remember Jared Fogle and his pants? This was a big story for a long time. Early in his college career, Fogle weighed 425 pounds. By sticking to a diet of Subway sandwiches (and walking a lot), he lost 245 of them. He became an everyman spokesperson for the chain and was featured in hundreds of commercials. Business boomed at Subway, and the firm claimed that Fogle was responsible for a significant part of that growth. Was he?

The paper by Cawley et al. looked at what happened to Subway sales after Fogle pleaded guilty to child pornography trafficking and sexual conduct with a minor. The surprising result: Subway didn’t seem to suffer from the association. Why not?

That’s a hard question to answer — in part because any question about the efficacy of advertising or marketing is hard to answer. The digital revolution has made measurement easier in some realms, but not all. Many of the evangelists for the power of marketing happen to work in marketing departments, or run ad agencies. So: caveat advertisor.

Here are a just a few of the many interesting things I learned while making this episode:

+ At the time O.J. Simpson was arrested, he was still being paid more than $500,000 a year as a spokesman for the Hertz rental car company.

+ When Adidas finally booted Kanye West after years of inappropriate and anti-Semitic behavior, they had more than a million pairs of his Yeezy sneakers on hand — and, rather than destroying them (or making a public art project?), Adidas sold the Yeezys and gave the money to charities. Zab Johnson, who runs a neuroscience project at UPenn and has studied celebrity endorsements, says this was “the right call.” Johnson also told us that when celebrity endorsements “work,” the reason is pretty simple: we are primates, and primates are status-hungry.

+ As the Cawley paper notes, the role of repugnance is a key factor in how the public will respond to a given scandal. It was the Nobel laureate Al Roth who got economists thinking about the role of repugnance in markets. Here’s what Roth said when we asked why he thought Subway didn’t suffer from the Fogle scandal:

It seems like a plausible hypothesis that if the spokesperson were really important, and then he turns out to be a terrible guy, then you might change your mind — in much the same way, but not with exactly the same consequences, that you might associate your feelings about Elon Musk and Tesla, and about Donald Trump and Trump hotels. If you don’t like Elon Musk, not buying a Tesla avoids giving him some of your money. But not buying a Subway sandwich — which you may have discovered you liked because of this criminal guy —  doesn’t harm him at all. It wasn’t that Subway sandwiches approved of molesting children. They were as much a victim as the general public was. 

How do you respond to endorsements — celebrity or otherwise? What are some other questions in this area you’d like to see us address in future episodes of Freakonomics Radio? Go give this episode a listen, and please spread the word. Coming up next week on the show, a question you may be asking yourself after last week’s presidential debate: What are the consequences of living inside of a political duopoly? See you soon.

I hadn’t planned to make a series on Stereophonic. We had been working for a while on a series about the overall economics of the theater industry. This was prompted by a listener who suggested we do for theater what we had done for the airline industry.

So we did some foundational interviews, and I started seeing a lot of shows, primarily in New York and London. Some of them I liked fine; some I disliked; only one of them did I love, and that was Stereophonic. My reaction turned out to be wholly unoriginal: Stereophonic just won five Tony Awards.

Our series features interviews with Adjmi as well as the performers Sarah Pidgeon and Tom Pecinka, and the producers John Johnson and Sonia Friedman. I hope you will listen to both episodes — “How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway” and “You Can Make a Killing, but Not a Living.”

Here are a few of the many interesting things I learned while making these episodes:

+ Producing a show in New York is about five times more expensive than producing the same show in London. Friedman says that everything in New York is more costly, including the rent on theaters, but that the top driver of higher costs is ... union labor: There are at least 13 unions with whom a theatrical producer will intersect.

+ Historically, the only people who shared in the profits from a successful Broadway show were the creators, producers, investors, theater owners — and occasionally a performer, if their name was a box office driver. But that seems to be changing. The cast members of Stereophonic — all of whom have been with the show since it opened Off Broadway, at Playwrights Horizons — collectively negotiated for a share of royalties as the show was transferring to Broadway. This may remind you of a much better-known show that also originated Off Broadway: Hamilton. Its cast members sent a letter to the lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, explaining why they deserved a share of royalties. Broadway economics being what they are, the Stereophonic performers should not expect this to be life-changing money. Here’s what Tom Pecinka had to say:

Even if you’re in a hit on Broadway — it’s hard. And so, unfortunately, if you just want to be a theater artist, you have to live a certain lifestyle. I don’t want to live that lifestyle. I want to live a different lifestyle. After this show, I want to get, like, on an HBO series, where I’m on 10 episodes or 13 episodes and I’m making tens of thousands of dollars per episode, so I can afford the life that I’ve decided — and I’m not ashamed of wanting.

+ Sonia Friedman, who has produced hundreds of shows all over the world, said she doesn’t go to bed in London until her shows in New York have at least raised the curtain. “And then,” she said, “I’ll usually wake up in the middle of the night just to check that they’ve gone okay.”

+ David Adjmi grew up in New York; one of the earlier shows he saw on Broadway was Sweeney Todd. He was eight years old. If you have seen Sweeney, you are probably thinking that eight is a terribly inappropriate age at which to see it ... or: it is a terribly appropriate age for someone like Adjmi, who was trying to figure out why people can be so bizarre, and where cruelty comes from. There is no obvious or visible connection between Sweeney Todd and Stereophonic, but as you speak with Adjmi, and read his memoir, and see Stereophonic another time or three, you may indeed find some connections, of the sort that only very good writing can create.

+ “Cost disease” is an economic concept that we usually think about in sectors like healthcare and education. The basic idea: In a typical industry, costs fall over time as firms become more productive by adding new technologies. But in industries that can’t exploit technology in the same way — in industries heavily reliant on actual, well-paid humans, for instance — their costs don’t fall. They go up and up and up. Coming into this series, I knew that the theater industry suffers from this cost disease; what I didn’t know is that the seminal academic paper on the topic focused on the theater and creative work.  The paper, written by the economists William Baumol and William Bowen, is called “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems.” It was published in The American Economic Review in 1965 and, despite its dry title, makes for a decent read if you are interested in this kind of thing. If would probably be even better if David Adjmi were willing to punch it up a bit.

Juliana Canfield, as Holly, in Stereophonic. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

We have made two podcast episodes about how the U.S. has a surprisingly high number of pedestrian deaths. The first one, called “The Perfect Crime,” came out in 2014:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime-2/

The second, called “Why Is the U.S. So Good at Killing Pedestrians?,” came out in 2023:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-u-s-so-good-at-killing-pedestrians/

And now, in 2024, comes a report that pedestrian deaths are still rising in most American cities: 

https://www.route-fifty.com/infrastructure/2024/05/spike-pedestrian-deaths-hits-nearly-all-metros/396974/

Does anyone have anything productive to say about this? We are all ears.

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