A few years back, I got interested in taxicab tipping – and what influences how much people tip. So together with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya, I collected data on more than 1,000 cab rides in New Haven, CT and crunched the numbers. The study (published in The Yale Law Journal) found — after controlling for a host of other . . .
The black-white gap in U.S. education is an issue that continues to occupy the efforts of a great many scholars. Roland Fryer and Steve Levitt have poked at the issue repeatedly; a recent study by Spyros Konstantopoulos looked at class size as a possible culprit, to little avail. We gathered a group of people with wisdom and experience in this . . .
We’ve written in the past about the very thin line that separates an acceptable expression of racial or ethnic bias from an unacceptable one — for instance, the tumult over Andy Rooney writing that “today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me.” As we wrote in Freakonomics, evidence from the TV show Weakest Link suggested that bias against . . .
My family has a tradition of reading the “I Have a Dream” speech on Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday. We pass it around, with each person reading one sentence. So in honor of today’s holiday, here’s a question about the speech: what is the second-most-used figure of speech or metaphor in the speech itself (“I Have a Dream” being the . . .
That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” Here is their abstract: This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, . . .
Dubner has blogged before about the difficulty of gathering accurate data from adults on subjects like racism. The problem, he noted, lies in people’s tendencies to give answers that are socially appropriate but don’t necessarily reflect their actual views. Children, however, are not often so guarded (or disingenuous, depending on how you look at it). As such, they can provide . . .
Don Imus is back on the radio, brimming with apology and announcing a new cast that includes two African-American comedians. He was run off the air a few months ago for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” I understand why he was canned. I understand why he is back. I understand that our culture loves the whole . . .
Controversy over corporate media consolidation has been brewing for decades. In 1975, the Federal Communications Commission enacted a rule prohibiting a single media company from owning both a newspaper and radio or TV station in the same city. Twenty-eight years later, the issue drew national attention when former FCC Chairman Michael Powell introduced a plan to overturn the ban. His . . .
How well has the Radiohead experiment fared? (Earlier) Employers adopting personality tests to avoid “hiring jerks”. A “How To” for corporate prediction markets. Are we more likely to vote for candidates we perceive as being “like us”?
PCs on the downswing in Japan. Can brain atrophies among the elderly lead to unintended racist views? The economics of death in the U.S. The Top 10 “wackiest” science experiments.
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on “acting white,” i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers. Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase “acting white.” The kids laughed at him and said, . . .
Some Red Sox fans are doubly happy this week: not only did their team win a World Series, but they also get a rebate on the furniture they bought during a special Red Sox incentive deal last spring. Hopefully none of them got a brown couch whose color is described, on its tag, with the use of the n-word. That’s . . .
Huge percentage of world’s births & deaths go undocumented. Making your baby smarter: the myths continue. (Earlier) Should paying line-standers to hold seats at Congressional hearings be banned? Happiness levels linked to race. (Earlier)
We’ve blogged in the past about the Undercover Black Man blog and its regular feature called Misidentified Black Person of the Week. Last week, I had the singular good (bad?) fortune to come across two instances of misidentification, in two different newspapers, within about 5 minutes of each other. The first was in a USA Today article about New York . . .
Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites. If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic question. Roland Fryer and . . .
Google creates digital fingerprinting to enforce copyrights. Is ambiguous racism more harmful than blatant racism? (HT: BPS Blog) U.S. cancer deaths on the decline. Are iPhones toxic to your health? (Earlier)
It isn’t easy to convey the intricacies of class warfare, housecleaning, immigration, a sci-fi classic, and the lottery in a couple of index cards. But Jessica Hagy, the proprietor of Indexed, has done it. (You can find her previous Freakonomics entries here.)
Do restaurants blacklist black customers? (Earlier) Higher emissions standards could give car inspectors more incentives to cheat. New Broadway play puts game theory into action. (Earlier)
That is the title of my latest academic working paper, written with Roland Fryer. It details the rise and fall of the Klan in the 1920s. Incredibly, the Klan had millions of members at that time, and most of them were reasonably well-educated. Based on a variety of data sources, we argue that, despite its size and education levels, the . . .
Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia, has written an interesting working paper called “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trade.” His abstract sums it up well: Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct . . .
A reader named LLP sent an e-mail early yesterday morning with an interesting question: I was reading this article regarding California farmers moving their operations to Mexico. The following quote struck me, and I’m trying to find an explanation for the difference in productivity: “Scaroni expects [to] recover his start-up costs because of the lower wages he pays farm workers . . .
September 6 is the day in 1927 when the Harlem Globetrotters were founded, with the team choosing to include Harlem in their name (even though the original members were from Chicago) because of its central role in African-American culture. By the late 1940’s, the Globetrotters were a big draw and a top-rate team, beating the (white) Minneapolis Lakers twice — . . .
Starbucks to take Russia by storm. Now in Travelodge rooms: the Bible and Alastair Campbell’s memoir. (Hat tip: MR.) Clothes beat computers in online sales. Medical Hypotheses journal trapped in the Dark Ages?
See? Even bacteria cheat. (Earlier) Dissed by Oprah: one author’s tale. Global warming hits the fashion industry. (Earlier) Can railroad track layouts show the causal effects of segregation?
In the wake of the Andy Rooney scandal and Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, Dubner takes a closer look at the social and political costs of discriminating against Latino-Americans.
Is data taking over the world? Ever wonder how Amazon knows what books you’ll like before you do? Melissa Lafsky discusses Yale law professor Ian Ayres’ fascinating new book, “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.”
“So You Think You Can Be President?” (Related.) From nose to wallet: sellers embrace “scent marketing.” It’s just business: new mob rises in Italy. In MA, minority teacher applicants hurt by licensing test. (Related.)
Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .
Mike Bloomberg regularly calls himself a “short, Jewish billionaire from New York” … but how Jewish is he? Here’s an interesting article from the Forward on Bloomberg’s brand of Jewishness in which an acquaintance calls Bloomberg something I’d never heard, but which is a pretty useful acronym: W.A.S.H., or a White Anglo-Saxon Hebrew. If widely adopted, this would give headline . . .
In today’s New York Times, Anthony Ramirez reports on the sharp decline in smoking in New York City. According to a study that interviewed 10,000 city residents, only 17.5% of the adult population now smokes, compared to 21.6% in 2002. What accounts for this huge drop? The article offers three potential causes: anti-tobacco TV ads, a smoking ban in restaurants, . . .