These days, many Americans — including Mike Bloomberg and Chuck Schumer — fear the answer to that question will soon be “no,” if it isn’t already; London is poised to take over. An article [gated] in today’s Wall Street Journal about the credit crunch’s effect on the U.K. economy offers this sobering fact: The financial sector accounts for more than . . .
Gold farming to hit the big screen (Earlier) Islamic hedge funds on the rise Do we know what our kids are doing online? Recession upon us? Mac & cheese sales spike
The conventional wisdom holds that men and women have different abilities when it comes to competition (a view that’s certainly being challenged in the current Democratic primary). Labels like “lacking the killer instinct,” “peacemaker,” and “avoiding confrontation” are commonly assigned to women in competitive environments, while the supposed male knack for thriving in competition is cited as a reason for . . .
As mentioned on MarginalRevolution, the economist John DiNardo has been quite busy over the last few years criticizing Freakonomics. He has written no fewer than three papers on the subject. It’s too bad that he didn’t offer the standard academic courtesy of sending his criticisms directly to me before writing them up; if he had, I could have helped clarify . . .
That is the promise being made by a company called QLess, which offers “virtual queue management” via cellphone* alerts. Its home page makes this alluring statement/threat: “On average, Americans spend almost 3 years of their lives waiting in line.” This is one area (perhaps of many) in which I am way below average. I hate lines, and waiting in general, . . .
Virgin to become the first airline to test biofuels. (Earlier) The “6 degrees of separation” theory fades under pressure. Is obesity really so bad? Sex workers expect business boom from DNC, though less than from GOP. (Earlier)
I have heard from plenty of nervous friends around the country, anticipating the results from Super Tuesday. Truth is, I haven’t a clue who will win. But I thought it worth offering up my own forecast: My key forecast for tonight is that the televised pundits will reveal all sorts of confusion. Tracking results across more than twenty states, and . . .
A new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll has Mitt Romney ahead of John McCain by 37 percent to 34 percent in a poll of 1185 likely Republican voters in California (2.9 percent margin of error). But what is the probability that more likely voters in the state actually support Romney? Given the 2.9 percent margin of error, it’s possible that Romney just got . . .
The odds are pretty good that if you are a reader of this blog, you’ll have the opportunity to vote today in one of the Super (Duper) Tuesday primaries. Here are today’s Democratic primaries and here are the Republican primaries. Two Novembers ago, we wrote a column headlined “Why Vote?” that discussed the rationality of voting. One point we made . . .
University suspends blood drives to protest federal ban on gay blood donors. (Earlier) Can chimpanzees trade commodities? Smoking and SIDS link explained. States brace themselves for voting technology upgrades.
Inspired by a recent trip to London, this recent Times article about England’s reluctant search for a national motto (suggestions range from “No Motto Please, We’re British” to “One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used”), as well as by this new book on six-word memoirs (which we teased not long ago here), I invite you all to attempt the following: Write a . . .
A fun game to watch yesterday, with the Giants winning 17-14 over the Pats. More to the point, a clear victory for Steve Levitt, whose advice to punters was to take the “under.” A total of 31 points were scored, well below the 54.5 point “line” in Vegas. Congrats to all who followed Steve’s Freako-tip. Ian Ayres‘ successful tip was . . .
Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not . . .
The parties who are suffering from the subprime crisis are vast and varied, as well as in the newspapers every day. One reason the crisis has gotten so much attention, in fact, is because these parties are so vast and varied. The typical financial crisis has one or two big villains (think Enron) and a vague coterie of victims (think . . .
What Hitwise can say about mortgage rates. (Earlier) Will the housing bubble lead to baby bundles? (Earlier) What will become of the “Tipping Point”? Climate change and impending doom? (Earlier)
The Patriots are playing the Giants in Sunday’s Super Bowl. I thought it would be fun to put together a short Super Bowl preview. I’ll go first (Justin Wolfers): Cheering for: The Patriots. My first four years in the U.S. were spent in Boston, and that’s where I learned to love the sport that you guys call football. If it . . .
Here’s our latest guest post from “Indexed” creator Jessica Hagy. You can find past posts here and Jessica’s own site here. She will soon be publishing a book of her work — and yes, I blurbed it. But once again, despite my general low disregard for book blurbs, this time I really meant it. Anyway, she calls this latest Freako-Indexed . . .
What the stimulus package could do for a slump (Earlier) What computer science is doing for the elderly What the Super Bowl can do for your portfolio What the Super Bowl might do to your heart (Earlier)
One of the really fun innovations in this election cycle is the extent to which the speech of the candidates has now become grist for statistical analysis. For instance, the Times’ “Caucus” blog reports that Reagan’s name was invoked 53 times last night, and by this measure Romney beat McCain 19 to 12. The Times has now set up a . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, who’s got a dialog with Alex Kotlowitz over at “Slate” about his new book “Gang Leader for a Day,” is back now with his fourth installment of watching “The Wire” with a group of New York-area gang personnel. His previous entries can be found here. “Pay up fools!” Shine cried as Marlo entered Prop Joe’s kitchen. After the . . .
Patricia Cohen has an article in today’s Times about a recent American Enterprise Institute panel on the notion of repugnance and how it affects markets. In other words, why are some behaviors considered repugnant while others are acceptable, and how and why do such demarcations change over time? Three of the panel’s five participants — Arthur Brooks, Sally Satel, and . . .
I have often heard people say that robots will prove immensely useful in performing household tasks, but I have had a hard time understanding how. I have also wondered why so much scientific effort goes into making robots look like humans. It is not easy to design robots that walk on two legs, for instance. But after reading this interview . . .
Victims of India’s ‘Kidney Kingpin’ speak (Earlier) Are midlife crises a global phenomenon? (Earlier) The ethics of execution More on the ‘R-word’… (Earlier)
John Tierney has writen an interesting column about competing online dating sites and the squabbles between them over whose matchmaking algorithm is more scientific. A recently divorced friend of mine just dipped her toes into the online dating world for the first time. She entered her information: lives in a large city, late thirties, divorced, well-educated, loves to dance, etc. . . .
Adam Liptak has an excellent article in the Times that looks at an example of American exceptionalism: the Bail Bond Dealer. This really is a pariah industry. As Liptak put it: Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, . . .
A Cal Tech grad student put together a list of the most popular books across college campuses and then correlated those book choices with S.A.T. scores at those schools. His results reveal that the five books with the highest average S.A.T. scores are Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Atlas Shrugged. Among those five books, I . . .
If you go into the cafeteria at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, you will come upon a rather extraordinary display in the soda case: It reminded me of a Mondrian painting, maybe “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” As it turned out, the man responsible for the display was standing nearby, and we fell to chatting. His name is Derek . . .
The link between cannabis and cancer (Earlier) A scientific approach to tort reform What’s the optimal time of day for a psych test? (Earlier) Does junk food make prisoners more violent? (Earlier) (And earlier)
Now, this is disappointing: three mathematicians go to the trouble to model bus waiting strategy — is it better to wait or to walk to the next forward stop? — and conclude that waiting is the best option. Why am I disappointed? Because they didn’t even consider an alternative bus waiting strategy discussed earlier on this blog: walking backward one . . .
Levitt blogged the other day about Yale Law student Aaron Zelinsky‘s proposal for ending steroid use in Major League Baseball. Now here’s an anti-doping counter-proposal from Joe Lindsey, a sports writer and blogger/contributor at Bicycling magazine. You may remember Joe from another guest post, in which he also countered an earlier Freakonomics doping post. So this is getting to be . . .