The Case of the $4 Million Gold Coffin (Update)

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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner and I hope you are having a great summer. We are, while we work away on our fall schedule, which is going to be excellent, but now it's time for a breather. So we are going to republish a three-part series we made a few years ago called Stealing Art Is Easy, Giving It Back Is Hard. We have updated facts and figures throughout. Whether you're hearing this for the first time or maybe the fifth, I hope you enjoy it. This first episode is called The Case of the $4 Million Gold Coffin. As always, thanks for listening.
When you visit a museum and look at all the magnificent art and artifacts hanging on the wall, mounted on pedestals, encased in glass, do you ever wonder how all that stuff got there? Often the answer would be this.

**Patty Gerstenblith** (2:48)
They were stolen. They were taken through brutal armed conflict and colonialism.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:55)
If you possess valuable artifacts, or if you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:01)
And power is not something that most people are eager to surrender.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:06)
The British Museum's silence is as loud as a gunshot.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:11)
Museums have begun to look more closely at their new acquisitions.

**Victoria Reed** (3:15)
It's a little bit like wandering into the middle of a traffic intersection without looking both ways. There might be a disaster about to happen.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:22)
And some museums are returning their long-held treasures to their places of origin.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:27)
It's like Olympic Games for Restitution. They are fighting to be the first to restitute important collections.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:36)
Today on Freakonomics Radio, we revisit a special series on this movement to return the world's treasures to the places where those treasures came from. It is a complicated story.

**Matthew Bogdanos** (3:47)
It ain't complicated. It's actually unbelievably simple. If you take morality and pompous, arrogant, holier than thou, out of it and stick to the law.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:59)
Well, some people think it's complicated.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:01)
The Benin artworks are 500 years old. They were taken 150 years ago.
There is no system where they can be returned in a way that is consistent with the values of a museum structure.

**Victoria Reed** (4:13)
Nobody ever asks when a work of art is returned to the family of a Holocaust victim, well, is it really going to be safer in their home than in the museum? But the minute museums consider returning works of art to African countries, that question is, like, the first to arise.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:31)
We will hear from museum curators and directors, from economists and historians, from legal scholars and prosecutors.

**Matthew Bogdanos** (4:40)
This office has recovered almost 4,500 priceless cultural treasures.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:49)
And we will hear from artists.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:51)
A funeral mask is supposed to be buried with somebody that is dead. Why are you having it in your museum?

**Stephen Dubner** (5:00)
Along the way, some rules will be broken.

**SPEAKER_9** (5:03)
I'm quite famous for not doing what I'm told.