Back when I was an undergraduate, I took a class from the future Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling. One day in class, he was talking about commitment problems: when you want to achieve a goal, but lack the self control to do it. As I recall, he offered two pieces of advice for those trying to lose weight. The first was . . .
Did Obama lose, or did Hillary just win? Are the 2008 candidates “anti-business”? The stock market may fare better when it’s not in session. How does charity in the U.S. compare to that of the U.K.? (Earlier)
This is the time of year when a lot of people give to charity, in part because of the holidays and in part because of year-end tax considerations. Below you will find a few loosely connected observations about charity and then, at the end, some questions for all of you. It is probably not fair that I am not answering . . .
James Flynn discusses the phenomenon of IQs rising through generations. Prostitute auctions off services for Chilean charity. (Earlier) Genetics and intelligence not necessarily linked. Man attempts to open bank account with $1 million bill.
eBay structures micro-loans for businesses in impoverished regions. (Earlier) Is the “Kitty Genovese Effect” overblown? (Hat tip: BPS Research) Amazon quadruples profits from Harry Potter sales. (Earlier) Just how skin-deep is beauty?
A few months back I met a remarkable man named Gene Sit. He is a money manager in Minneapolis, with more than $6 billion under management, but that is not what makes him remarkable. He was born to a wealthy family in late 1930s China and, in the lawless years after World War II, was kidnapped and held for ransom . . .
September 5 is the day in 1997 when Mother Teresa died at age 87. No word on what she’d have thought of our quorum on street charity.
Play Warcraft, study pandemics. (Related.) “Bueller? Bueller? Retirement?” (HT: Consumerist.) Cell phones & driving not so dangerous after all? (HT: MR.) In Denver, feeding the meter feeds the homeless. (Related.)
A roundtable discussion about panhandling featuring, among others, Arthur Brooks, Tyler Cowen, and Barbara Ehrenreich.
While at this celebrity golf tournament, I met a lot of stars, from Kevin Nealon to Gale Sayers. None of them were as friendly as Super Bowl MVP Mark Rypien. He and I don’t have much in common. The one thing we share, I wish we didn’t. Just like us, he lost a young son named Andrew. The Rypien Foundation . . .
Can a charitable act truly be called charitable when the contributor wants or expects a reward? In a new study, Princeton economics professor Harvey Rosen and Stanford graduate student Jonathan Meer examined this question using a specific case of incentivized charity: alumni donations. They found that the size and frequency of an alumnus’s contributions to his alma mater rise in . . .
The answer is: they both have Cyril Wolf as a patron. Who? You may remember Wolf as the gentlemanly doctor in Houston who shared with me his research on how some drug-store chains charge 1000% more for generic prescriptions than Costco and Sam’s Club. (Yes, 1000% more.) The reason he was so distraught by this fact is that he has . . .
Here’s a creative solution to the stall in Army recruitment: the military and senior defense officials are trying to get a bill through Congress that would allow recruitment of illegal aliens. The main attraction for the recruits, besides the steady job itself, would be the prize of citizenship. Picking up where Second Life leaves off, IBM has developed Innov8, a . . .
Steven Landsburg is not known for having temperate opinions. An economics professor at the University of Rochester and a prolific writer, Landsburg regularly raises provocative theories in his Slate column: women choke under pressure, e.g., or miserliness is a form of generosity. He is the author of the books Armchair Economist and Fair Play, which are in some ways direct . . .
A reader named Jeff Stier wrote to inform us of the upcoming Angels in Waiting Third Annual Blood Drive in Memory of Joel Kirshner, for which Stier is the project director. Last year, the event was the largest mobile blood drive in the history of the New York Blood Center. For the past two years, the organizers have offered donors . . .
Tim Harford has generously chosen to donate to charity the proceeds from the Ebay auction of the first copy of Freakonomics I ever signed. He was even kind enough to let me pick the charity, SmileTrain. I don’t think he ever dreamed it would go for what the current bid is on Ebay. My best guess would have been one . . .
Just before Freakonomics hit the bookshelves, a reporter from the Financial Times named Tim Harford flew out to Chicago to write a profile about me, which you can read here. At the end of the interview, he asked me to autograph his book. I was surprised because no one had ever asked me to sign anything ever before. But I . . .