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Think Small to Solve Big Problems, with Stephen Dubner | Big Think

Big Think | December 15, 2025



Think Small to Solve Big Problems, with Stephen Dubner
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Stephen Dubner talks about the importance of thinking small in order to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems piece by piece. Dubner is the co-author of Think Like a Freak http://goo.gl/LVlHtk
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STEPHEN J. DUBNER:

Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and radio and TV personality. He is best-known for writing, along with the economist Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics (2005) and SuperFreakonomics (2009), which have sold more than 5 million copies in 35 languages. Their latest books are When to Rob a Bank… and Think Like a Freak (2014).

Dubner is also the author of Turbulent Souls/Choosing My Religion (1998), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003), and the children’s book The Boy With Two Belly Buttons (2007). His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Writing, and others.

Freakonomics, published in April 2005, was an instant international best-seller and cultural phenomenon. It made numerous “books of the year” lists, a few “books of the decade” lists, and won a variety of awards, including the inaugural Quill Award, a BookSense Book of the Year Award, and a Visionary Award from the National Council on Economic Education. It was also named a Notable Book by the New York Times. SuperFreakonomics, published in 2009, was published to similar acclaim, and also became an international best-seller.

The Freakonomics enterprise also includes an award-winning blog, a high-profile documentary film, and a public-radio project called Freakonomics Radio, which Dubner hosts. He has also appeared widely on television, including a three-year stint on ABC News as a Freakonomics contributor. He also appeared on the reality show Beauty and the Geek. Alas, he played neither beauty nor geek.

Dubner’s first book, Turbulent Souls, was also named a Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Koret National Jewish Book Award. It was republished in 2006 under a new title, Choosing My Religion, and is currently being developed as a film.

The eighth and last child of an upstate New York newspaperman, Dubner has been writing since he was a child. (His first published work appeared in Highlights magazine.) As an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, he started a rock band that was signed to Arista Records, which landed him in New York City. He ultimately quit playing music to earn an M.F.A. in writing at Columbia University, where he also taught in the English Department. He was an editor and writer at New York magazine and The New York Times before quitting to write books. He is happy he did so.

He lives in New York with his wife, the documentary photographer Ellen Binder, and their two delicious children.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Stephen J. Dubner: One argument that we make is that we could all benefit a little bit from thinking more like children, okay. Now you could say well, we’re — first of all everybody’s biased in a lot of ways and we have our set of biases too. It may be that we embrace the idea in this book of thinking like children because we’re kind of, you know, childlike. We have kind of obvious observations sometimes. There’s observations that strike people as obvious. We ask a lot of questions that are not considered, you know, the kind of questions that people ask in good company or smart company. But one of the most powerful pieces of thinking like a child that we argue is thinking small. So I realize that this runs exactly counter to the philosophy of the arena in which I’m appearing which is thinking big, Big Think, but our argument is this. Big problems are by their nature really hard to solve for a variety of reasons. One is they’re large and therefore they include a lot of people and therefore they include a lot of crossed and often mangled and perverse incentives.

But also a big problem — when you think about a big problem like the education reform. You’re dealing with an institution or set of institutions that have gotten to where they’ve gotten to this many, many years of calcification…

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/think-small-to-solve-big-problems

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Comments

This post currently has 41 comments.

  5. @realvanman1

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    If you think about the majority of the things the people in power try to do to "solve" problems, they're almost always big, elaborate, and, frankly cockamamie ideas that do nothing but waste enormous sums of someone else's money and grow the government to be even BIGGER. In almost every case the exact opposite of whatever they did is simple, cheap, and effective, and most importantly the most respectful of human rights. Simple is almost always MUCH better!

  6. @harrypearle9781

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    EASY vs HARD School Challenge Division?
    EASY and NO buttons are available, and they could be used to remind students of EASY vs HARD.
    (Easy tasks may be done right away, but still appreciated) Hard tasks are frustrating, but need time
    ===============================================================================

  9. @julioalarmo839

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    Well explained. Ive been thinking on this from a design perspective. Some problems could be solved taking away the origin of the problem. Sometimes we try to put solutions one after another instead of removing the source of the problem. Example we want to pass thru a door a washing machine but it doesnt fit. So we come up with a bunch of solutions. When we could just remove the door frame. Sometimes the solution requires to remove somethin that since has been there so long we dont want to touch .

  17. @jnighs8380

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    I think we should make school work harder actualy if we want to keep up with asia. Though we could offer harder material if you got to pick the teaching method.

  20. @Original50

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    This combines nicely with the Covey 4 Disciplines of Execution. Strategic goal-setting by management with no insight into the workplace conditions fails and over-complex goals are generally never realised.

  21. @tracylemme1375

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    My dad said that when you have a job (He had a machine &welding shop) that you don't know how to fix, just do what you know what to do and the rest will fall into place.

  23. @anuradason9542

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    Do schools do that? If there’s x number of kids in a classroom who need their grades improved, what are the observations of y number of teachers as they come in the classroom over time? Try n solutions. For solution i observe if grade improves, if not then try solution i+1. 🤷🏽‍♂️

  27. @kirtisharma5404

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    𝕞𝕖𝕣𝕚 𝕝𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕞𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕚𝕘𝕖 𝕚𝕟𝕟 𝕘𝕦𝕣𝕦𝕛𝕚 𝕜𝕚 𝕧𝕒𝕛𝕒𝕙 𝕤𝕖 𝕤𝕒𝕗𝕒𝕝 𝕙𝕠 𝕡𝕒𝕪𝕚 𝕘𝕦𝕣𝕦𝕛𝕚 𝕤𝕒𝕔𝕙 𝕞𝕖 𝕤𝕒𝕓𝕜𝕚 𝕙𝕖𝕝𝕡 𝕜𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕖 𝕙 𝕘𝕦𝕣𝕦𝕛𝕚 𝕜𝕖 𝕟𝕠."""""""…… 𝟾𝟽𝟻𝟶𝟿𝟹𝟺𝟽𝟷𝟾

  28. @matthewbrown7572

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    So let me get this straight.The teacher creates 5 different lesson plans with different learning modalities for each of their 180 students ,figures out which modality works best for each of the 180 students each day and writes 180 lesson plans each day for each student, for the school year. Why didn't I think of that? It's so very simple.Thanks for the tip.

  32. @PathanSahab-y2f

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    सर मेरे पास हेल्थ न्यूट्रिशन है जिसे आप की बीमारी को जड़ से खत्म कर देंगे। यह 100% रिजल्ट देता है। matlab koi bhi bimar ho ghar mein ya rishtedari mein aap ki friend circle main to kisi Ko kuchh bhi problem ho to mujhe Bata Dena main aapko dawai bhej sakta hun ok ji बाकी पूरी डिटेल के लिए आप मेरे नंबर पर कांटेक्ट कर सकते हैं। 9352580744 ok 👍

  35. @mainesw7

    December 15, 2025 at 2:54 pm

    Maybe the fear of breaking those glasses for children in living in Poverty is the problem. My parents. were always saying don't. Break your glasses. They are so expensive !!!

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