You know what I love? I love a good boomerang story. What's a boomerang story, you say?

All right, here I'll tell you one. This one's about the price of horse manure. So back in the 19th

century, when cities around the world began to grow like crazy, they were mostly powered by horse

or more than 200,000 horses in New York City alone. Now, all those horses produced about five tons

of manure a day. When the cities were smaller, there had been a healthy market for manure because

farmers from the surrounding area would buy it as fertilizer, but as cities grew and took on more

and more horses, there came to be a manure glut. The price of manure fell from strong positive

to zero and then to negative. You actually had to pay somebody to get rid of the manure. Now,

not surprisingly, most people weren't willing to pay to have their manure taken away, so it piled

up on the streets. It was a nightmare and every way it was a health hazard, it sank, it made it

hard to get around. Thankfully, the automobile and the electric streetcar came along and replaced

the horse as the engine of cities. Decades passed. The horse population declined so therefore did

the supply of horse manure. What rose, however, was a boom in home gardening and among a certain

type of connoisseur, a demand for primo fertilizer like horse manure. So today, a 25 pound bag of

manure mulch can sell for about $15. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a boomerang story,

something that starts out in one place and then goes far away and then ends up right back where

it began. On today's show, another boomerang story. This one is about a house, my house, the house of

dreams. From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Frekenomics Radio, the podcast that

explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Steven Dupner.

So I grew up in an old farmhouse in upstate New York outside of Albany in the back of beyond.

The nearest town was called Quaker Street. There was one stoplight, a general store, a diner.

There were eight kids in my family, four girls and four boys. I was the youngest, so even Steven,

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