Episode · Freakonomics Radio · 2014-07-10
Books mentioned on 174. What Do King Solomon and David Lee Roth Have in Common?
It isn’t easy to separate the guilty from the innocent, but a clever bit of game theory can help. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company.
Stephen Dubner discussed Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and others.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Superfreakonomics
SuperFreakonomics by Steven D.
Discussed“And that wasn't the only kind of challenging part of that because when we went on a book tour in the UK in, I guess, 2009 or 2010, you had a lot of people saying to us in interviews on TV and in newspapers and so on,”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (6) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Plugged Think Like a Freak
“In our book, Think Like a Freak, we give this practice a different name. We call it teaching your garden to weed itself.”
“King Solomon, meanwhile, is thought to have written several biblical books, including Ecclesiastes, which the folk singer Pete Seeger used as lyrics to his song, Turn, Turn, Turn, which, when recorded by the Byrds in 1965, was a number one hit.”
Passing Jewish Literacy
“That's Joseph Telushkin, author of many books, including Jewish literacy. But she claims that that isn't her baby.”
Plugged Superfreakonomics
“You remember that story we wrote in Super Freakonomics about why terrorists should buy life insurance? Yeah, that was one of my favorite things of all time.”
Plugged Superfreakonomics
“So in Super Freak, we described this algorithm that was loaded into the computers of a big bank and which was able to sift through billions of data points and identify a relatively teeny handful of potentially deadly terrorists.”
Plugged Superfreakonomics
“And there was one variable that we wrote about in Super Freakonomics that we, I would say, highlighted above all other variables, and that was whether or not a given bank customer had bought life insurance from that bank.”