(Freakonomics) Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “We the Sheeple.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.) The gist: politicians tell voters exactly what they want to hear, even when it makes no sense — which is pretty much all the time.

Caplan is, to put it gently, not a fan of our current political system. At he puts it in the podcast: “You know, if you’re a successful politician, you know you don’t succeed by figuring out what’s really going on in the world and trying to explain it to people. You need to find out what people what to hear and then tell it to them. That’s what you see in debates. That’s what you see voters, successful politicians instinctively are trying to read people, trying to read their faces, what does this person want me to say to him, and that’s how they win.”