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Now welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with clips today from On the

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Android app users from Slate.com.

The bedrock belief in modern politics is that money corrupts.

The axiom plays out from C to shining C or from Michael Bloomberg to Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We seem to like the idea, the elegant simplicity of the notion that money buys elections.

I will tell you this, Brooke.

If you go on the air as you're doing here and tell people that campaign spending matters

much, much, much, much less in electoral outcomes, then they think people will hate you

for it.

Steven Dubner is a journalist, co-author of Freakonomics and host of the Popular Freakonomics

podcast.

You have written about some research that your partner in crime, Steven Levitt did back

in 1994.

Can you tell me about his methodology?

This was back when he was in graduate school and as an economist in training, he was doing

a little bit of futsal round in the political science realm.

Because he was manually typing in from the congressional record, the names of candidates

who ran against each other in years and years and years of congressional races, he began

...