2022-11-24
52 分钟No — but he does have a knack for stumbling into the perfect moment, including the recent FTX debacle. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we revisit the book that launched the analytics revolution.
It was so much fun to go back and read the book.
Gosh, I just love the book.
So thanks.
You just did something I've never done.
I was gonna ask you if you've ever read it.
Uh uh, no, I never sat down and read it.
I wrote it in pieces and sent it in.
So, no.
That is Michael Lewis.
He may be one of the few people who doesn't read his books.
He's perhaps the most prominent nonfiction author of our generation.
It doesnt hurt that several of his very good books have been turned into very good movies, including the big Short and the Blind side.
Hes written a lot about finance and sports, but hes also written books about the systemic vulnerabilities of government agencies and of our public health system.
As for this book, the one were talking about today, I asked him to read a bit aloud, apparently for the first time.
This is from the preface.
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story.
The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball.
This book is called Moneyball.
It, too, was turned into a good movie.
As for the book, Lewis didn't know it at the time, but he was writing about a revolution that would soon spread not just throughout baseball and other sports, but but into a great variety of realms.