179. Outsiders by Design

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[13] No one took his ideas particularly seriously.

[14] And he was ostracized and isolated.

[15] They thought he was mad in the Australian parlance, a complete nutter.

[16] You know, there were people who called him a great American humorist within the profession.

[17] He was intellectually alone.

[18] He had got this idea.

[19] And no one was particularly interested in it.

[20] And by God, he was going to do it on his own if it killed him.

[21] Does that sound like anyone you know, maybe even sounds like you?

[22] If so, you might be interested in today's show.

[23] We tell the story of three people whose lives, let's just say, their lives did not proceed in a perfectly straight line.

[24] This episode is called Outsiders by Design.

[25] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

[26] Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

[27] This episode was inspired by the recent death of Gary Becker.

[28] Now, since you listen to Freakonomics Radio, you may have heard of Becker, but most people probably haven't.

[29] He was born in 1930, grew up in Brooklyn.

[30] He was a good student.

[31] At 16, he faced an important decision.

[32] join the handball team or the math team.

[33] He was better at handball, but he chose math.

[34] He got into Princeton, where he studied economics, even though the fit wasn't quite right.

[35] When I first started taking economics, I almost left it in my senior year because it seemed to me it didn't deal with important problems.

[36] Sociology, for example, did.

[37] And I tried thinking about sociology, but I finally decided it was a little too hard.

[38] Well, he said that when he went to college, his interest was in the traditional subjects that sociologists study.

[39] That's Richard Posner.

[40] He's a judge on the U .S. Court of Appeals in Chicago.

[41] He also teaches law at the University of Chicago.

[42] He and Becker were longtime friends.

[43] But he thought that sociology was a weak field analytically, where his economics had a great deal more rigor.

[44] And he thought that the methods of economics could be used to deal with sociological issues.

[45] Becker went on to get his Ph .D. in economics at the University of Chicago.

[46] He took a course with Milton Friedman, who was in the midst of redefining the field.

[47] So 20 years earlier, economics meant money and banking, meant international trade, it meant finance, it meant a very clearly defined set of topics.

[48] That's the Harvard economist Ed Glazer.

[49] But there was no clear methodology.

[50] I mean, economics was as much moral philosophy as, you know, modern social science during those early years.

[51] But there you have Friedman who comes along and says, no, economics is about science.

[52] It's about science to do with human beings.

[53] And Becker, before anyone else, sees the implication of that, which is, well, if it's about science applied to human beings, why do I have to work on money and banking?

[54] Why can't I work on something that seems like a more pressing social problem like discrimination?

[55] I would tell myself It's so obvious that discrimination is such an important topic that economists don't see it I mean eventually they're going to have to see it So Becker's approach is what's called rational choice sense that's assumed that people are rational trying to maximize their utility or in other words, you know, their welfare, their happiness, so forth in all domains of life.

[56] I think it's impossible to overstate how radical it was.

[57] Their famous stories, the Becker told, about people leaving the room when he was giving a seminar, you know, Hoff saying, I thought this would be about price discrimination.

[58] So it's clear that this was something that was not at all treated with some degree of reverence because it doesn't look or feel like economics.

[59] It wasn't regarded as an economic feel.

[60] And Gary was actually laughed at.

[61] He was rather bitter about the reception that his...

[62] work had received.

[63] Becker believed that any domain of human activity was worthy of an economist scrutiny.

[64] So it wasn't just discrimination.

[65] He studied the economics of marriage and child bearing.

[66] He wrote a paper called A Theory on the Allocation of Time.

[67] At Harvard today, Ed Glazer still teaches a 1968 Gary Becker paper called Crime and Punishment, an economic approach.

[68] Here's how Glazer introduces the idea to his students.

[69] We are all criminals, right?

[70] I certainly did not drive at 55 miles per hour all the way to work today.

[71] And I cannot promise that I have, you know, stopped at the red light on every street getting to this lecture.

[72] And I'm sure that all of us have things that we have violated to a greater or lesser degree.

[73] And I think that sort of respect shown for people who have chosen to violate the law is really crucial.

[74] And if you think about just how immediately obvious, you know, the power of that observation to solve the puzzle, the supposed puzzle of recidivism, the fact that, you know, you sent people to prison and then they decided to go back doing crime again.

[75] Well, if you have some view that they are sadly misinformed subhuman people who, with a little bit of right thinking you can convince to go straight, well, that is a puzzle.

[76] But if you view criminals as being people who made a decision to undertake a particular profession, why should sending them off to be a guest of the state for a couple of years to choose them to change that choice of profession?

[77] That's what made sense beforehand is what makes sense afterwards.

[78] And that's an immediate implication of this viewing criminals as being rational.

[79] Becker had his supporters, but more common were the detractors who thought his work lay somewhere between silly and worthless.

[80] You know, there were people who called him a great American humorist within the profession.

[81] There's that famous article on the economics of brushing your teeth, which is clearly sort of mocking the Becharian approach.

[82] So clearly there were people who, you know, for whatever reason, thought this was embarrassing to the profession or, you know, beneath what economists.

[83] should be about.

[84] He argued a lot or was criticized a lot by another very distinguished economist, University of Chicago, Ronald Coase.

[85] Because Coase said economics is the study of the economic system, period.

[86] Not of the entire social system.

[87] And, of course, Gary had a very more expansive view of the scope of economics.

[88] So that was a big disagreement.

[89] I think it probably stung him more than he would usually admit.

[90] I mean, he was a pretty, I mean, Gary was not a let -it -all -hang -out kind of guy.

[91] Becker preferred to keep his head down, do his work.

[92] He wasn't big on self -advocacy.

[93] I was always a shy person, particularly when I was younger.

[94] So I wasn't one of these aggressive persons who went out there and I was talking about everything they knew.

[95] It wasn't my nature.

[96] What does the universe do with someone like this?

[97] Someone who's out there on his own, following his own off -kilter curiosities and sensibilities?

[98] You know what the universe does.

[99] It ridicules them or beats them up, maybe just ignores them.

[100] As we all know, if you want to get ahead in life, you have to color inside the lines.

[101] No excuses, no exceptions, no papers on the economics of crime.

[102] No more crazy ideas of any sort.

[103] Thank you very much.

[104] They thought he was mad in the Australian parlance, a complete nutter.

[105] Around the time Gary Becker was getting beaten up for papers like on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children, a young Australian doctor named Barry Marshall was just getting his career underway.

[106] I think it's important to actually set the scene a little bit in terms of Barry and his personality.

[107] That's Norman Swan.

[108] And he's a renowned medical journalist in Australia who trained as an MD himself.

[109] There's a word in Australian English, which is larrican.

[110] And it just means somebody who's a bit of a lad who doesn't respect authority, but is honest and straight, but doesn't mind irritating people and annoying people.

[111] And that was Barry.

[112] He came from essentially a working class family.

[113] and he got into medicine, but he wasn't a star in medical school.

[114] He didn't win any medals, and then he started training as a specialist physician.

[115] To get his specialist exams, he needed to do a research project, and he was looking around for one, and he came across this shy, retiring, geeky pathologist called Robin Warren, who had noticed when he was doing biopsies of ulcers, there were these bacteria there.

[116] What were they doing there?

[117] But he needed some help.

[118] And just by happenstance, Barry was looking around for his research project, and this was a meeting made in heaven.

[119] The notion that bacteria might be causing an intestinal illness seemed far -fetched.

[120] It had long been held that the gastric environment was too acidic for bacteria to thrive.

[121] They were thought to be incidental to the action.

[122] It is tempting, in the modern age, to think about medicine as a massive body of known, provable science.

[123] But the more one knows about medicine, the more one will acknowledge how much is not known, even about something as seemingly straightforward as the ulcer.

[124] So all these ideas floating around.

[125] But as you know, Steve, the medicine is not very good on mechanism.

[126] Doctors post hoc invent mechanisms in many ways to explain phenomena that they see.

[127] And the mechanisms did not easily explain.

[128] ulcer disease.

[129] So nobody had an idea really of what caused them.

[130] There were all sorts of theories.

[131] Stress and indeed acute stress can cause ulcers, but people thought that maybe chronic stress did.

[132] People thought that smoking increased the risk and smoking in fact does increase the risk.

[133] At the time, ulcers weren't cured.

[134] They were merely treated or managed.

[135] Not all that well.

[136] So when I trained in medicine, there really was only one effective treatment.

[137] If you had, a gastric or duodenal ulcer, and it was surgery where they cut nerves to the acid -producing areas of the stomach to reduce acid.

[138] And then they developed drugs, which actually turned off the acid.

[139] And these were massive industries, not just for treating ulcers.

[140] Well, they didn't treat ulcers.

[141] They actually treated the symptoms and settled them down.

[142] But it was very hard to get ulcer healing.

[143] This was a multi -billion dollar international industry.

[144] But Barry Marshall suspected that all this conventional wisdom might be wrong.

[145] He wondered if the ulcer, the foundation of a multi -billion dollar industry which didn't even cure it, if the ulcer were perhaps related to this squiggly bacteria that he and Robin Warren were studied.

[146] This bacteria came to be known as helicobacter pylori.

[147] Marshall was working hard in the lab, trying to learn the bacteria's properties.

[148] Well, we did some animal experiments, but we could not make the human bacteria infect animals such as rats or pigs.

[149] To Marshall, the next step was obvious.

[150] So I said, I have to test it out on a human.

[151] Hmm.

[152] Feeding a potentially dangerous bacteria to human test subjects.

[153] Not so easy.

[154] And therefore...

[155] Well, I decided that I was going to have to drink the bacteria myself.

[156] And I thought what would happen, I would just be having no symptoms for a few years, and then I would have an ulcer, and then, hallelujah, it'd be proven.

[157] Marshall first had to make sure his own gut didn't already contain any of this bacteria.

[158] He asked a colleague to give him an endoscopy.

[159] And I think he knew what was going on, but he said, as he put the scope down me, he said, Barry, I'm not going to ask why I'm doing this.

[160] So he took some biopsies from me, and then they were all clear, no bacteria.

[161] Marshall didn't tell anyone what he was about to do.

[162] Not his wife, not his research partner, Robin Warren.

[163] If it was successful and I did develop an ulcer or stomach problems from the bacteria, that proved that they were harmful and possibly I was right they could cause ulcers.

[164] But if nothing happened, that means that my two years of research by then was wasted.

[165] Barry Marshall drank the bacteria.

[166] The two years, it turned out, were not wasted.

[167] After about five days I started having vomiting attacks.

[168] I had another endoscopy, and the bacteria were everywhere.

[169] There were absolute millions of them in the lining of my stomach.

[170] So at that point, I'd proven the bacteria could infect a healthy person and cause gastritis.

[171] Having studied the bacteria in the lab, Marshall knew what kind of antibiotic he could treat it with.

[172] So he took the antibiotic, quickly made himself well, Norman Swan again.

[173] They've done what they call now the killer experiment.

[174] I suppose in Barry's case, it almost was the killer experiment.

[175] Barry Marshall had proved, at least to himself, that bacteria was the true cause of ulcers.

[176] So what happened now?

[177] Did the worldwide medical community immediately hoist Marshall on their shoulders and praises breakthrough?

[178] No, they didn't.

[179] His research was ridiculed, dismissed.

[180] Bad -mouthed?

[181] The response, I think, at least in Australia, was dominated by their response to Barry.

[182] He wasn't from the establishment.

[183] He wasn't one of them.

[184] He'd made this discovery before he was even, before he'd even got his specialist qualifications.

[185] He wasn't a card -carrying researcher.

[186] And Barry's a bit odd.

[187] Barry's, he's, he's odd.

[188] He's very amusing.

[189] He's remarkably candid and outgoing.

[190] He can be quite manic.

[191] And he would present and people would think, who's this nutter?

[192] Because it was with almost a religious fervor from this good Catholic boy that he was promoting this because he believed it so strongly.

[193] And then there was this question in their mind that if he was selling it this hard in this kind of odd way, was there something fishy about the research.

[194] So that was, if you like, the subtext that people didn't quite articulate, but it was certainly there that Barry was not seen as a credible researcher.

[195] And regardless of his finding, because he wasn't credible, because he just wasn't one of them, he was rough and ready.

[196] And I think that was a major part of it.

[197] And then the pharmaceutical industry found every angle they could to oppose it.

[198] And how did he respond?

[199] Well, I think Barry just got angrier and angrier.

[200] So, in other words, he didn't tailor his message to the boys.

[201] You know, he wasn't a good old boy sat around the table.

[202] You know, he wasn't going to tailor his message.

[203] The message was the message, and he just kept on banging away at it and didn't compromise.

[204] Which must have made him seem even more of a nutter to his opponents, yes?

[205] I think so.

[206] Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, one more heretic who tries to bucking the establishment.

[207] These early maps evoked enormous hostility because the received wisdom of the day was that the earth was created at a very specific point in time.

[208] And are all these outsiders doomed for lifelong despair?

[209] People would always say, Dr. Marshall, do you feel vindicated?

[210] Well, we won, but we knew we were going to win.

[211] We knew we were going to win because we had the truth.

[212] One more thing.

[213] Did you know you can subscribe to this Freakonomics Radio podcast for free on iTunes?

[214] You can.

[215] It has not been shown to prevent ulcers yet, but you never know.

[216] New research in this field every day.

[217] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

[218] Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

[219] Today we've heard the stories of Barry Marshall and Gary Becker, one a doctor, the other an economist.

[220] They both followed their own light and paid for it.

[221] In each case, the establishment treated them like rank outsiders.

[222] Well, if you want to see how an even more established establishment can marginalize someone who dares to try something new, let's go back to 19th century England.

[223] Among a certain portion of upper crust gentlemen, the rage of the day was collecting fossils.

[224] They were considered objects of beauty and fascination.

[225] And they'd have rather genteel dining clubs where they would pass.

[226] around.

[227] You know, we've found a new trilobite and have a glass of sherry, but don't you think this is absolutely beautiful, Your Honor?

[228] That's Simon Winchester, an author and journalist.

[229] His best known book is The Professor and the Madman about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.

[230] Winchester has also written a book about a man named William Smith, who was born in 1769 into a farm family in Oxfordshire.

[231] Smith was nothing like the gentleman who drank sherry in clubs.

[232] He did, however, love to collect fossils.

[233] So he became interested very much in the earth and the kind of things that were to be found in the earth, not only relics of former living things like fossils were, but the actual sandstones and limestones of which his neighbouring countryside was constituted.

[234] Smith took a job as a land surveyor, which got him acquainted with the topography and got him curious as to what lay beneath it.

[235] Working for a coal mining company, he got a chance to take a look.

[236] Smith observed a sequence that few before him had noticed.

[237] Siltstone, mudstone, sandstone, limestone, coal.

[238] Siltstone, mudstone, limestone, coal.

[239] Not only that, but he noted that each layer contained different kinds of fossils.

[240] And he began to have thoughts about geology, and particularly sedimentary geology, the laying down of sedimentary rocks, which were, quite revolutionary.

[241] No one else had really begun to think like this.

[242] And then there was this extraordinary epiphany.

[243] Smith traveled all over the English countryside.

[244] He noticed that the sequence of lairs and their corresponding fossils were the same from place to place.

[245] Sandstone with an ammonite, limestone with a brachyapod, and then you've got another limestone or another sandstone with a trilobite.

[246] So that three unique rocks, if he found them a hundred miles away, those same three rocks, same order, same colour, same fossils.

[247] Then he said, these are clearly the same strata of rock, and all they're doing is they're disappearing beneath the surface of the earth and then coming up and reappearing 100 miles away.

[248] I can therefore draw a map showing where these things outcrop, showing how they slope down and at what angle down below into the subsurface of the earth and I can draw a map which will enable people to predict where when they dip down in that hundred miles how deep below the surface they will be.

[249] In other words, I can draw a map of the invisible underneath of the British Isles.

[250] A map of the invisible underneath of the British Isles or of any Isles would be, as you can imagine, revolutionary.

[251] for science, for industry, for history.

[252] The church, for instance, disapproved mightily.

[253] These early maps evoked enormous hostility because the received wisdom of the day was that the earth was created at a very specific point in time.

[254] That was the church's belief that the earth was, let's say, in the 1800s, 4 ,04 plus 1800s, or that's 5 ,804 years old, and that was that to challenge that in any way as these maps did because these maps were based on the evidence of fossils which when you look at them carefully changed so imperceptibly slowly you had to be completely oblivious to reality to assume that all of these could be created and change and evolve and create you and me in 5 ,804 years it simply was not possible so these early geologists drove a horse and cart through the biblical teaching that the earth was only 6 ,000 years old.

[255] And so there was great hostility, and these maps were seen to be instruments of heresy.

[256] But William Smith pressed on almost entirely by himself.

[257] He created a massive hand -drawn, hand -colored map.

[258] At his own great expense, he had it printed to be sold to the public.

[259] Its name alone was quite descriptive.

[260] A delineation of the strata of England.

[261] and Wales with a part of Scotland, exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fenlands, originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil, according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names.

[262] And out it came.

[263] It was uttered for publication, as they say, on the 1st of August 1815.

[264] And what then happened is the sort of central tragedy of this story.

[265] The tragedy, as Simon Winchester, tells us, emanated from London.

[266] I mentioned earlier that geology was a calling of the upper classes.

[267] And the Geological Society of London was peopled entirely by men, aquiline -nosed, refined dandies who would pass around fossils and mineral samples for the sheer delight of looking at them and collecting them.

[268] And who came from the kind of families that William Smith did not come from?

[269] Precisely.

[270] They saw this map that was produced by a man who wore rough old boots and workmen's clothes and had dirt under his fingernails and didn't know how to hold a teacup properly as a gross impertinence.

[271] And one of their number, a man called Greenough, said, I'm going to copy this map and I'm going to sell it under the authority of the Geological Society of London.

[272] And I'm going to sell it more cheaply than this up.

[273] Starts map, which is on sale in the bookstores in London and Oxford and Cambridge, if he's charging £7 for it, we're going to charge £5 for ours.

[274] And so you had this extraordinary situation in the winter of 1815, 1816, where two maps, almost identical, one by William Smith, but another unresearched and plagiarised, but with the imprint of the Geological Society of London on it being sold for less money, well, the outcome was obvious, that the Green Off map sold to those people that were interested and a growing number of people were, because this was not only beautiful, but everyone knew that it would allow you to dig for minerals and therefore possibly make yourself wealthy.

[275] And Smith's map didn't sell.

[276] He had to pay his money back, his loans back.

[277] He went into a financial tailspin, and he went bankrupt.

[278] And he went, how humiliating for this decent human being, he was sent to debtor's prison.

[279] I mean, it's a terrible story.

[280] So William Smith works creatively and tirelessly and usually singly for all these years, creates and publishes this astonishing map that turned out to be prescient on many dimensions, that turned out to be revolutionary on at least a few dimensions, and yet the publication is essentially sabotaged by people with greater means and access to, well the public and access to good reputation and so on he gets thrown in debtor's prison he comes out he's lost his home his possessions have been bought up yes he had to sell off his collection of fossils is that right yes indeed so it's incredibly heartbreaking that a man who worked so hard and so brilliantly nearly always alone creating this work of such lasting usefulness was so deeply unrewarded for his life's work.

[281] But the story doesn't end there, does it?

[282] Yes, it doesn't end there.

[283] The years pass.

[284] William Smith, poor, aging, dispirited, takes a job in Scarborough in North Yorkshire.

[285] He's working as a surveyor for a man named Johnston.

[286] Smith creates one of his elaborate hand -drawn maps of Johnston's property.

[287] So Johnston looks at this map that this old man, because he's now a, pretty, at least he's suffered mightily, he's stooped and he's weary and somewhat asthmatic and he gives him this beautifully produced map of his estates and a light bulb goes on in Johnston's minds.

[288] He says, wait a minute, he said, this map, I recognise your style.

[289] You're Smith, aren't you?

[290] Didn't you create a map of the whole of the British Isles?

[291] I've seen it in London.

[292] And Smith said, yes, I have the honour to, because he spoke in a sort of Oxfordshire accent.

[293] I have the honours to say it was me that done that sir.

[294] Mr. Johnson, as it turned out, was not only an influential gentleman, a member of parliament, but a geology enthusiast.

[295] He said, what are you doing here working as a jobbing surveyor on my estate?

[296] I mean, you should be being honoured and living in London in great comfort and be showered with medals and decorations and things.

[297] And Smith said, well, life didn't turn out.

[298] quite like that.

[299] And Johnson said, well, this is monstrous.

[300] I'll see what I can do and blow me down.

[301] He did.

[302] In short order, William Smith was brought to London, where he was welcomed into the Geological Society of London and was more generally hailed for his earlier achievement.

[303] And he got his due.

[304] In the end, he was recognized and honored as the father of English geology.

[305] Simon Winchester's book about William Smith, it's a wonderful book, I encourage you to read it, is called The Map That Changed the World.

[306] And it did change everything so far as humankind's search for minerals because it altered the economic landscape of the planet.

[307] What's most remarkable about this story is not how hard Smith worked to create his map, nor how wise and clever he was.

[308] What's remarkable is that this outsider whose reputation was taken from him lived to see that reputation rehabilitated.

[309] His ideas celebrated.

[310] It would have been so much more likely for him to die broken and bitter in the wilderness, utterly unrecognized.

[311] That is a risk taken by people who work outside the system, who challenge the conventional wisdom.

[312] Like Barry Marshall, the Australian gastroenterologist who had the audacity to suggest that he had found a cure for ulcers, even though the medical establishment didn't believe him.

[313] Here's the Australian doctor journalist Norman Swan.

[314] Medicine chose to ignore it.

[315] They chose to ignore it because it didn't suit their prejudices, because they didn't quite like the way the messenger was selling it, and because of a huge marketing push by a very influential, industrial industry, which told them it was bull.

[316] But after years and years of promoting his theory and of being ridiculed for it, Marshall finally, in 1994, saw his findings accepted by the National Institute of Health.

[317] People would always say, Dr. Marshall, do you feel vindicated?

[318] Well, we won, but we knew we were going to win.

[319] We knew we were going to win because we had the truth.

[320] If you look at the history of medicine, it's interesting how long it takes for evidence to get into the thick skulls of doctors.

[321] So when Pasteur proved the germ theory of disease, it took about 30 years for the medical profession around the world to accept the germ theory of disease.

[322] amazingly.

[323] It took 20 odd years for doctors to accept that aspirin reduced the risk of dying of coronary heart disease after you've had a heart attack.

[324] And it was well proven.

[325] It took 20 odd years for doctors to accept that.

[326] It takes a long time.

[327] It's a very conservative profession.

[328] It takes a long time to convince them of new ideas.

[329] And this was no different because it was so radically outside what they were expecting.

[330] Radical indeed.

[331] Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's work proved not only that helicobacter pylori was the true cause of ulcers, but of stomach cancer as well.

[332] In 2005, more than 20 years after Marshall swallowed that batch of bacteria, they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

[333] It's very rare in medicine to find a cure for anything.

[334] You can never really be sure you've cured cancer, even though the treatment for, say, breast cancer is effective these days.

[335] you certainly can't cure heart disease.

[336] Once you've got it, you've got it for life.

[337] You can't cure diabetes.

[338] I mean, yes, you can reverse it in some people, but it tends to come back.

[339] But you can cure infections.

[340] So antibiotics do get rid of infections and you can cure them.

[341] And this is a rare example, a really rare example in modern medicine, of a cure rather than an effective treatment.

[342] So what they had before was an effective treatment.

[343] It was expensive.

[344] It was for life.

[345] Here was something which got rid of the disease.

[346] And it got rid of the disease pretty cheaply.

[347] And what about Gary Becker, the rogue economist who led off today's program?

[348] He thought his field should look beyond finance and banking and consider all of human behavior from racial discrimination to mate picking.

[349] Well, Becker, too, after years of being marginalized, was ultimately celebrated, time caught up to his way of thinking.

[350] Becker 2 won a Nobel Prize in 1992, and in 2007, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

[351] How did he feel about the Nobel?

[352] Here's his friend, Judge Richard Posner.

[353] Well, he was pleased.

[354] I think he felt it was overdue.

[355] He should have gotten it earlier.

[356] That's a standard reaction on these things.

[357] And Harvard economist Ed Glazer, who studied with Gary Becker and still teaches his work.

[358] This is a person who, in some sense, felt that if he was being universally loved, he was screwing up, right?

[359] That he, in fact, wants to push you out of your comfort zone on this.

[360] All right.

[361] Let me just ask you maybe in summary.

[362] I'm curious whether you think that there are any lessons to be learned from Gary Becker's experience generally, maybe how anybody who's listening to this, whatever occupation or vocation they might be thinking about, could perhaps apply some of that determination of Gary Becker's to their own lives?

[363] It's the right question to ask.

[364] And I think Becker is different from many of the wilderness years type scientists that we think of in the sense that he was not somebody who came out of nowhere who had a brilliant idea and was mocked for it initially.

[365] He was someone who was part of a very well -established economics department who had early respect, early rewards in lots of different ways.

[366] But what's different from many of us is that he didn't in any sense rest on those.

[367] And he didn't rest on them, not just in the sense that he kept working, although he worked like Hank.

[368] He didn't rest on them a sense of which he decided to risk everything on every throw of the dice, right?

[369] He wanted to always be out there.

[370] He wanted to push as far as he could.

[371] He wanted to be as risky.

[372] He wanted to risk going back into the wilderness even though that he had gotten himself a seat in the throne room.

[373] And that's what's really special about him.

[374] It's being in the wilderness by design, by choice.

[375] Here's a guy who over and over again, you know, decided to take those risks to court disaster, to be on the very edge, to go into rooms, to enter fields in which he knew that people were going to think that he was outrageous.

[376] He knew that people were going to denigrate his work.

[377] And yet he still did it.

[378] And that's what made him so productive.

[379] And I think the challenge for all of us, particularly all of us, were in the idea business, is that it's a reminder that we should actually try to push ourselves as much as possible to be different, to be unpopular often, to do things that are.

[380] are troubling to the status quo that risk us being thought of as being, you know, less than we are.

[381] And I think that's the Becker lesson, is it's trying to be an outsider almost by design.

[382] I asked Norman Swan what the story of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren could teach the rest of us.

[383] I think the generalizable takeaway from Barry and Robin's discovery and the resistance to it is that people should judge things on their scientific merit.

[384] and not shoot the messenger and to make a discovery that this probably does take somebody who's out of the ordinary and somebody who's out of the ordinary may not communicate in the way that we expect or have become used to amongst our colleagues and therefore we really do need to go back to the science and finally Simon Winchester on Map Maker Extraordinaire William Smith Well, I don't want to get too sappy about this, but tolerance for the true eccentric is important.

[385] I mean, I think it's important for people like you and like me, writers who are interested in the unsung heroes to listen to these stories.

[386] Listen is important.

[387] Being kind and tolerant is important too.

[388] And you'll discover, I think, an unsung hero places where you have no thought that such a person would exist.

[389] Hey, podcast listeners, on the next Free Economics Radio, a New York apartment building with a gym that only certain tenants can use.

[390] I did the 60s already.

[391] I've done the dogs.

[392] I've done the water hoses.

[393] I've done it.

[394] I'm not doing that again.

[395] A physical fitness center cannot decide for me who I am.

[396] The tenants call it fitness apartheid.

[397] What do economists call it?

[398] We'll also talk about a building with a so -called poor door.

[399] That's where subsidized tenants and market rate tenants entered the same building separately, and whether first -class airline seating is somehow discriminatory.

[400] That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

[401] Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions.

[402] Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalski, Greta Cohn, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Fannan.

[403] If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics .com, where you'll find lots of research.

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