Freakonomics Radio Sets Sail on ‘Everything You Never Knew About Whaling’ Series

The only time I think about whaling is a once in a decade re-read of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Then I immerse myself in the novel, swimming around with Captain Ahab, Queequeg, Ishmael, Starbuck, and the mighty white whale.

This month, Freakonomics Radio voyages from New England to Japan to Norway on a special three-episode series titled “Everything You Never Knew About Whaling.”

“You may be surprised to hear that there is still whale-hunting going on,” host Stephen Dubner says in the introduction to episode one, "The First Great American Industry." 

In fact, researchers estimate that, between 1900 and 1999, 2.9 million whales were killed by the whaling industry: 276,442 in the North Atlantic. Even today, over a thousand whales are killed each year for their meat and body parts to be sold for commercial gain.

Whales are only in the news because they are politicized by those who spuriously claim that offshore wind farms are killing whales in large numbers. Somehow, these same people are even unaware of the malicious impact of the whaling industry.

Dubner continues: “When people go out on boats these days in search of whales, they’re usually just whale-watching… On the other hand: for centuries, people all over the world hunted whales; in some places — especially the U.S. — the whaling industry was a central part of the economy, and of life, in ways that can be hard to fathom today. In a way, the story of the whale is the story of our economic history.”

Along the journey, Dubner and his team will visit the last remaining American whale ship; look at the rise of the environmental movement in the U.S. and its connection to Save the Whales; and speak to, among others, a Moby Dick scholar, a journalist in a remote Japanese whaling town, and the infamous "eco-warrior" Paul Watson, who confronted whale-hunting ships on the TV show Whale Wars.

The first episode, “The First Great American Industry,” is now available at freakonomics.com, and the next two episodes will come out on Wednesdays July 19 and 26 at 11:00 PM ET.

The whaling miniseries follows other recent special programming across the Freakonomics Radio Network, including multi-part series on art repatriation, air travel, and Adam Smith (all on Freakonomics Radio) and the seven deadly sins (on No Stupid Questions), as well as the launch last month of the network’s newest show, The Economics of Everyday Things.