Hello and welcome to the cautionary tales edition of Slate Money, your guide to business, finance,

and all manner of weird two and a half thousand

year old cautionary tales. I'm Felix Hammond of Axios, and I'm in a fabulous recording studio in

Oxfordshire with none other than Mr. Tim Harford. Hi, Tim. What are you plugging?

So, as you know, Felix, I work for the Financial Times,

but I am plugging a new podcast called Cautionary Tales. It is out in a first season of eight

episodes and it is full of stories about all kinds of mishaps, fiascos, heists, crashes, disasters, catastrophes, and in each case, a little bit of

zesty social science. What can we actually learn from what went wrong, from these true stories

of disaster? And how can we avoid meeting such terrible fates ourselves?

And of course, we are joined from Brooklyn by Anna Schumanski

of Breaking Views. Hi, Anna. Hello. We are going to talk about all of these weird cautionary tales,

or at least a couple of them on this episode. We're going to talk about Christmas cards,

because tis the season. And I kind of want to talk about the black market in

Chinese sand, which is one of my favorite stories of the year. All of that coming up on Slate

money. So, Tim, you are applying social science and some kind of economics and that kind of thing to a bunch of stories of, as you say, thefts and disasters.

And whenever people do this, I think of a conversation I had with Danny Kahneman once, the great economist and behavioral economist.

Well, the psychologist, really we should say, but a psychologist so awesome they gave

him the Nobel Prize in economics anyway.

Exactly. And he did a whole bunch of research into our biases and the things which we kind

of just wind up doing even though, like, really we know we shouldn't do them and probably

don't even want to do them.

And I said, well, you've discovered all of these biases.

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