We’ve written a lot about the economics of drugs, both legal and illegal. There’s an interesting article in Popular Science about Pyrex bake ware, crack cocaine, and the unintended consequences of reducing a product’s quality.
Children in Armenia are now required to learn chess at school. For New York taxi drivers, economics is always on the mind. Cost benefit analysis of actions from the movie Star Wars. Royal wedding to add £1 billion to UK economy. 120 years later, an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published. Professor Charles De . . .
We’ve written a lot about gender on this blog, and the preference for boys over girls has been a hallmark of Asian societies for centuries. This has led to large gender imbalances across much of Asia, particularly in China and India. In China, there are 119 boys born for every 100 girls. According to India’s recently completed census, among children six and under, there are only 914 girls counted for every 1,000 boys.
According to a study published in the Journal of Human Capital, marriages among movie stars may help unravel the mystery behind why people tend to marry partners of similar education levels. It’s a question that’s been puzzling social scientists for years. Some reason that it is mostly due to monetary reasons: a partner with similar education should have similar salary . . .
A new report from the OECD paints a fascinating picture of how citizens from different countries stack up on an assortment of metrics: from who works the longest hours, who shops the most, to who is most trusting of others. The annual report, titled “Society at a Glance 2011 – OECD Social Indicators,” is chock-full with interesting data on all kinds of social behaviors.
Robot to throw out first pitch at Phillies game. Brown University study: Genes dictate whether we learn from own experience or from suggestions of others. German court sentences three men in Europe’s biggest soccer betting scandal. Charts on beer drinking: global consumption goes up.
If you’re going to court, you better hope that judge had breakfast. Or just a break. A new study looked into psychological effects in the courtroom from the supply side: the judges. Researchers evaluated results from more than 1,000 rulings made by 8 Israeli judges and found that favorable rulings peaked at the beginning of the day, then again after lunch or a food break.
A new study surveying elderly Taiwanese men and women shows that senior citizens who engage in daily shopping are likely to live longer than their counterparts.
P&G recently sold Pringles for $1.5 billion to Diamond Foods. But do you know why the chip is so easy to eat? University of Chicago mathematics professor Benson Farb explains why the Pringle is a relativistic chip.
What do actual drug dealers think about economists’ research on drug dealers? NPR’s Planet Money asks the question of drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross, and gets some illuminating answers.
t’s time for the annual Name of the Year contest. The 2008 winner, Destiny Frankenstein, is still our favorite, but there are some strong contestants this year. Among them: Sanmorteeno Battle, Yolanda Supersad, and Dr. Loveday Conquest. Cast your vote here.
Sometime around 1991, the standard coup d’etat morphed into something else entirely, according to a new paper by Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans: “[W]hereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed the leader durably in power, after that the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections.”
New York City Dept. of Education has been savaged over reports that it stows bad teachers in ‘rubber rooms’ rather than simply firing them. A new report says that many of those teachers are being returned to the classroom after having paid a fine.
Turns out, toking the green isn’t all that green. A new report from the Dept. of Energy uncovers the massive carbon footprint of the indoor marijuana industry. Smoking one joint is equivalent to 2 pounds of CO2 emissions.
A marketing first? A Montana RadioShack is offering customers who sign up for a Dish Network package a coupon for a either a pistol or a shotgun from a local sporting goods store.
Economists usually assume that doubling output more than doubles costs; or as textbooks say, there are increasing marginal costs. So economists naturally expect twins to be more than double the effort, stress, and out-of-pocket cost of a singleton.
Fans of the New York Times Sunday crossword might have come across a Freak-y clue this weekend. Check out clue 102 “Across”: 102. Steven who co-wrote “Freakonomics” The letters of Levitt’s name were used to spell the following “Down” words: 93. Sword lilies, for short : GLADS 94. Send, as a check : REMIT 95. Trump who wrote “The Best . . .
There’s a crime wave at London Zoo. We’ve blogged in the past about monkeys that can do amazing things: use money, be rational actors, even learn grammar. Add to that list baby Bolivian monkeys who have taken to stealing sunglasses from visitors. But, say their keepers, the monkeys’ motives have nothing to do profit-maximizing.
You can buy almost anything online these days — hotel reservations, books, movies, etc. — but how much does reviewer quality matter to online shoppers? A lot, according to research from Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. In a previous paper, the pair noticed that “demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.” In a more recent paper, Ghose and Ipeirotis find similar trends for products on Amazon.com.
Using alogrithms that weight values for more than three million facts including historical events, birthdays of significant people, etc, a sophisticated computer program has determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in human history.
The consequences of a donor kidney market, Libyan Revolution graffiti, and what were the odds at the Masters as of Friday night?
A new study finds that unemployment “increases the risk of premature mortality by 63 percent.” Eran Shor, one of the study’s authors, believes there’s a causal relationship: “In past research on the topic, Shor said it was hard to distinguish whether pre-existing health conditions, such as diabetes or heart problems, or behaviors such as smoking, drinking or drug use, lead to both unemployment and a greater risk of death. In the new study, controls were included to account for those factors.”
Okay, so hitch-hiking has plainly faded away — at least for human beings. But what about for cargo? German trucking companies are facing a big problem, according to ScienceDaily: “Around 20 percent of trucks on German roads are traveling empty, at a huge cost to the transportation companies concerned.”
Is America’s back-seat role in Libya evidence that the age of its uni-polar power structure is over? And if so, what comes next?
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running the second installment of an interesting two-part essay on the declining expectations and level of learning taking place among college undergrads.
Should we all be Yankees fans? The S&P has averaged a double-digit annual gain every year following a Yankees’ championship. Not bad considering they’re won 27.
A new study out of the University of Copenhagen suggests that engaging in distracting behavior, like watching college basketball on the internet while at work, does not reduce your productivity.
The FDIC has imposed a fee that makes it more expensive for banks to borrow in the overnight ‘repo’ market. The intent appears to be to reduce easy arbitrage profits for big banks and smooth credit markets in the long term.
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