Freakonomics Turns 20 and Why Business Still Needs Its Moneyball Moment

Twenty years ago Freakonomics hit the shelves and reshaped how I think. It reignited my love of decision sciences and reminded me of a simple truth: the world makes more sense when you measure it.

The book’s unlikely duo, a world-class storyteller (Dubner) and a world-class data wonk (Levitt), made economics fun, encouraged curiosity, and revealed the hidden side of so many everyday decisions.

Listening to Dubner recently on a 20th-anniversary podcast brought back why the book mattered then and as much today. Three lines stood out:

• “Everything is worth examination.”

• “Data are really useful, especially to understand what incentives people respond to.”

• “Use the data to understand why people make the decisions they do.”

  
  

Simple. Powerful. And still far too rare.

A couple years before Freakonomics came Moneyball, another book built on questioning assumptions through data. Together, they showed what happens when you: Measure what’s really happening. Challenge long-held beliefs. Change behavior using evidence.

Baseball was transformed. Every modern sport is now heavily instrumented.

Here is something to think about. An F1 car produces more telemetry than most companies produce in a year. If sports can be transformed by instrumentation and incentives, why can’t business?

The Fear of "Metric-cution"

Across my career, I tried to bring more measurement into organizations, how work gets done, how teams operate, how decisions are made. The resistance was rarely logical. It was emotional.

One leader told me, “Some are calling this death by metric-cution.”

A funny yet revealing turn of phrase. Many fear being measured more than they fear underperforming. Yet many of us:

• Track every step they take

• Analyze sleep with Oura

• Step on smart scales that confirm yesterday’s bad decisions

• and of course many, like me, love all the data around sports teams

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Meanwhile, companies with billions of dollars and thousands of employees still operate with shockingly little instrumentation.

It’s Time to Instrument Business Like F1

In the AI era, performance breakthroughs will come from:

Instrumenting work the way sports instrument athletes.

• Analyzing incentives the way Freakonomics taught us.

• Measuring processes instead of assuming we understand them.

• Using evidence, not instinct, to put people in roles where they truly excel.

• Letting technology amplify human strengths and automate the rest

  
  

This isn’t surveillance. It’s empowerment

This isn’t “metric-cution.” It’s clarity

It’s not about replacing humans. It’s about helping them and their organizations achieve better outcomes

Moneyball transformed baseball. Telemetry transformed F1. Freakonomics transformed how we think about incentives. Maybe it’s time business finally has its own Moneyball moment, using more technology and data to reveal the hidden side of everything.

Happy 20th, Freakonomics and thank you Stephen and Steven