Farewell to Freakonomics

The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

Steven D. Levitt, best known for co-writing the bestselling 2005 book Freakonomics, is retiring from the University of Chicago with a bang. On the Capitalism and Freedom podcast, Levitt gave a farewell interview where he detailed many internecine feuds in the discipline and examples of toxic abuse, with particular focus on his long-time colleague and nemesis James Heckman.

The economist Marshall Steinbaum, a University of Chicago graduate who now teaches at the University of Utah, returns to the Time of Monsters to elucidate not just the Levitt/Heckman spat but also the question of why economics is a notoriously toxic discipline, how economics has changed over the decades rendering both Levitt and Heckman anachronistic, and the recent backlash against anti-racist politics in the discipline.

To supplement the article, listeners can read: Noah Scheiber’s 2007 article on the intellectual origins of Freakonomics, Marshall Steinbaum’s 2020 post about racism in the University of Chicago economic department, and a recent Bloomberg story on racism and sexism in economics.

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