Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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Today is March 18, 2014, and before introducing today's guest, I want to mention that we've been

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And I'd love your feedback at any time about how you find that new material if you find it useful

or interesting. Now onto our regularly scheduled programming. My guest is Megan McArdle. She writes

at Bloomberg View and she is the author of the Upside of Down. Megan, welcome back to econtalk.

Thanks for having me. One of the main themes of your book is the value of failure, which when

you're in the middle of it is often hard to perceive. That is the upside of down. Why is failure

valuable, valuable, and why is it actually a good thing? Well, I mean, it's valuable because that's

how we get information. You know, we like to think that there's some way that we can just plan

our way around failure that will just sit down and think it out really carefully and then we'll

have a really good theory and then we'll succeed. And when you see the cover of a business magazine,

it's always this genius with a folded arm staring at you and the piece goes through all of this

brilliant ideas. But in fact, when you talked entrepreneurs that isn't how they experienced it,

usually how they experienced it was. We had this great idea and then it turned out that didn't

...