When you visit a museum and look at all the magnificent art and artifacts hanging on the wall,

mounted on pedestals and cased in glass, do you ever wonder how all that stuff got there?

Often the answer would be this.

They were stolen.

They were taken through brutal armed conflict and colonialism.

If you possess valuable artifacts or if you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power.

And power is not something that most people are eager to surrender.

The British Museum's silence is as loud as a gunshot.

Museums have begun to look more closely at their new acquisitions.

It's a little bit like wandering into the middle of a traffic intersection without looking

both ways.

There might be a disaster about to happen.

And some museums are returning their long-held treasures to their places of origin.

It's like Olympic Games for a restitution.

They are fighting to be the first to restitute important collections.

Today on Frekenomics Radio, we begin a special series on this movement to return the world's

treasures to the places where those treasures came from.

It is a complicated story.

It ain't complicated.

It's actually unbelievably simple.

If you take morality and pompous arrogant holier than thou, out of it and stick to the law.

Well, some people think it's complicated.

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