20 Years of Freakonomics: How It Changed Business
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I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard and this is the HBR Idea cast. Alison, it's been interesting to live through the evolution in economics. You know, in the 70s and the 80s, you had this early exploration. Of behavioral economics, right, led by people like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler.
And then 20 years ago, we had the free economics phenomenon. So you had Stephen Levitt, an economist, and Stephen Dubner, a journalist, who wrote a book that popularized all of this thinking, that attempted to show the hidden side of everything, what truly motivates us as economic actors. And the field took off behind this basic tagline that conventional wisdom is wrong. Are you a fan?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was the book that made economics cool. Everyone wanted to read it. Everyone wanted to replicate it. And I do think it changed the way that companies think about consumer behavior and also the way that managers thought about getting the best out of their employees.
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