How About a Free Market for College Athletes?
…NCAA adopting a free-market approach to college sports, currently works and benefits from a free labor market. And if these people were told that their wages were capped by a…
Humans, it has long been thought, are the only animal to engage in economic activity. But what if we’ve had it exactly backward?…
How did an affable 18th-century “moral philosopher” become the patron saint of cutthroat capitalism? Does “the invisible hand” mean what everyone thinks it does? We travel to Smith’s hometown in…
Humans, it has long been thought, are the only animal to engage in economic activity. But what if we’ve had it exactly backward?
He argues that personal finance is so simple all you need to know can fit on an index card. How will he deal with Steve’s suggestion that Harold’s nine rules…
…NCAA adopting a free-market approach to college sports, currently works and benefits from a free labor market. And if these people were told that their wages were capped by a…
…a commitment to markets, on the one hand, and doing good, on the other. We found that our friends who were market advocates tended to ridicule our commitment to doing…
Trump says it would destroy us. Biden needs the voters who support it (especially the Bernie voters). The majority of millennials would like it to replace capitalism. But what is…
G.M. produces more than 20 times as many cars as Tesla, but Tesla is worth nearly 10 times as much. Mary Barra, the C.E.O. of G.M., is trying to fix…
America’s top colleges are facing record demand. So why don’t they increase supply? (Part 2 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)…
Trump says it would destroy us. Sanders says it will save us. The majority of millennials would like it to replace capitalism. But what is “it”? We bring in the…
In three stories from our newest podcast, host Zachary Crockett digs into sports mascots, cashmere sweaters, and dinosaur skeletons….
David Keith has spent his career studying ways to reflect sunlight away from the earth. It could reduce the risks of climate change — but it won’t save us.
…market in a number of cities for years. Finally, a story of a very niche hitchhiking market comes from reader Chris Gorman, whose email is posted below, along with a…
Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, EatWith, and other companies in the “sharing economy” are practically daring government regulators to shut them down. The regulators are happy to comply.
He was handed the keys to the global economy just as it started heading off a cliff. Fortunately, he’d seen this movie before.
The mathematician and author sees mathematical patterns everywhere — from DNA to fireflies to social connections….
…not fair. However, I’m not sure it’s so black and white. Here are the benefits of making insider trading legal: The more information in a market, any market, the more…
Google and Facebook are worth a combined $2 trillion, with the vast majority of their revenue coming from advertising. In our previous episode, we learned that TV advertising is much…
…not the other way around? The answer turns on the particularities of the drug market and the regulatory system drug makers operate in. Generic drugs are those that are copies…
The “beauty premium” is real, for everyone from babies to NFL quarterbacks.
For lots of things, price is an indicator of quality. But what about in health care? Bapu Jena gets some clues from Steve Levitt’s wine tasting experiment, and looks at…
Is booing an act of verbal vandalism or the last true expression of democracy? And: when you drive a Prius, are you guilty of “conspicuous conservation”? This is a “mashupdate”…
…about prediction markets and here is the famous Iowa Electronic Market, which will be a very busy place as the upcoming elections unfold. And who doesn’t love a good poker…
Conspicuous conservation is about showing off your environmental bona fides. In other words, if you lean green, there’s extra value in being seen leaning green.
…step will be increased lending to the consumer. C) Mark-to-market accounting was removed in March 2009. Guess what? That’s when the market went straight up; and it’s still 90% higher…
…currently not available). b) Others say that such a market would be impossible to properly design and regulate (although this “kidney exchange” program, created by market-design expert Al Roth of…
…are sharp adverse market movements, but then not taking the decisive actions necessary to calm the markets, leading to adverse market reactions, etc. In contrast, after the passage of TARP,…
Labor exploitation! Corporate profiteering! Government corruption! The 21st century can look a lot like the 18th. In the final episode of a series, we turn to “the father of economics”…
Markets are hardly perfect, but the results can be ugly when you try to subvert them.
In just a few weeks, the novel coronavirus has undone a century’s worth of our economic and social habits. What consequences will this have on our future — and is…