Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is November 19th, 2020, and my guest is author and broadcaster Michael Blasland.

He is the author of the Hidden Half, the unseen factors that influence everything.

Michael, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you.

What's the Hidden Half?

What do you mean by that, your title?

One of the great human endeavors is finding all those regularities that govern the way

that people behave, the way that systems work, the way that one thing causes another.

I mean, that's what we spend most of our time doing.

It's a great part of our human instinct to look for the way that one thing leads to another.

You know, even the way my breaks work on my bicycle, you know, I'm pretty sure they're

going to stop it, and I know that because they usually do, there's some kind of regularity

there.

And also because I can look at that mechanism and I can say, well, it looks like the kind

of thing from previous experience that ought to slow my bike down.

...