668. Do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny Have Blood on Their Hands?

Hey there. It's Steven Dubner with a quick announcement. We have just published an audiobook called Making Messiah, how Handel got his mojo back and created a masterpiece. The publisher is Simon and Schuster, and the audiobook is adapted from our recent Freakonomics radio series about the history, legacy, and economics of George Frederick Handel's Messiah. You can buy Making Messiah now wherever you get your audiobooks. For more information, go to makingmessiah.com. Over the years, we've made a bunch of Freakonomics Radio episodes about the risk that comes with an activity that billions of us do every day, get in a car. Those risks have fallen over time. But because more people drive more miles than ever, the number of deaths from traffic crashes is very high, more than a million people per year globally. And that's just deaths. There are many more injuries and the financial costs are massive. Traffic deaths are more likely in low income countries. But among high income countries, The US is an outlier with more than forty thousand deaths a year that works out to roughly one death by car crash every thirteen minutes in The US. Why so many? Well, it's complicated. Here's what we heard in an episode we published a few years ago called Why is The US so good at killing pedestrians? The cars we're driving are bigger, hotter, faster. The problem of distraction has gotten much worse. In The United States, we've decided that car movement is really the supreme consideration when it comes to designing our streets. And in another episode we made called why is flying safer than driving, we learned how the aviation industry devoted itself to safety. If you go back thirty or forty years, air crashes were not uncommon. It was something the industry spent an enormous amount of time collaborating together, sharing information, sharing learnings, working closely with the FAA to understand best practices and how we could have an open book with our regulator. And in our last couple episodes, our friends at the Search Engine podcast looked at the contested future of driverless cars. Personally, I believed for a long time that driverless cars will save a lot of lives. But until that's the norm, we, the drivers, are still behind the wheel. And why is that a problem? We've engineered a world where the most distracting device ever made is also the one that we use to listen to music in the car. Today on Freakonomics Radio, talk about a new research paper that looks at traffic deaths on a very specific set of days. Album release days are basically a natural experiments. So what they find? That's coming up. For now, eyes on the road, please. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. The study we are talking about today was just published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. There are four …