Bill Bennett, apparently. Or was it Good Morning America? Or World News Tonight? Or an ad in USA Today? Causality is not always easy to identify. The following chart, kindly supplied by Bill Tancer from www.hitwise.com, documents Freakonomics’ share of the web traffic from the millions of internet users that Hitwise tracks (and for fun, Bill Bennett’s too): Last week . . .
To all who enjoy this blog, I apologize for the onslaught of comments from Steve Sailer and the various pseudonyms he operates under. Apparently he believes that if he says the same thing over and over it will turn into the truth, or at least direct some traffic to his website. As far as I can tell he is still . . .
Welcome to the new Freakonomics blog. We have changed content management systems. The old blog can still be found at www.freakonomics.com/blog.php. If you have subscribed using FeedBurner, then your feeds should stay the same. http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlog Also, you now have the option of subscribing to the comments at http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlogComments
Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem . . .
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is interesting as always. It is about Ivy League admissions. I particularly like this quote (especially the last sentence): The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for . . .
In yesterday’s New York Times, Mike McIntyre writes about the reasons crime has fallen in New York City. Most of the article is about how Mayor Bloomberg claims credit for his police department. The article then goes on to say: Academic experts cite several plausible contributors to the nationwide trend, including an aging population (young men are responsible for most . . .
I found this list of what is supposed to be the future winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics on a blackboard at the U of C, for what it is worth. Who knows whether the people who made the list know what they are talking about. There are about 40 people on the list, and about 2 people get . . .
Most of the events described in Freakonomics took place, or still take place, in the continental U.S. — except for the chapter describing how sumo wrestlers collude to throw matches. We’ve gotten a surprising number of e-mails from readers in Japan with interesting sumo comments but most of us don’t have regular access to live sumo. At least we didn’t . . .
Several years ago, Steve Levitt and Ian Ayres wrote a paper about Lojack, the silent anti-auto-theft device. They found that crime theft falls overall in areas where even a small percentage of the cars carry Lojack. I got to thinking about Lojack when we received this e-mail the other day from a reader frustrated with the volume of bicycle thefts . . .
The October 2, 2005, Freakonomics column appeared in the annual New York City issue of the New York Times Magazine. In keeping with the Freakonomic tenet that few topics are too trivial for dissection, Dubner and Levitt turn their attention to the essential New York City issue of dog poop. Click here to read the column. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Our latest New York Times Magazine column, appearing in the Oct. 2 issue devoted to New York City, concerns a long-standing problem: dog poop. We propose a fairly novel solution. And, as always, we’ve posted a page full of supplemental information, some of it inevitably more interesting than what ends up in the column.
A host of commenters on my Bill Bennett post get very agitated over the question of “crimes” vs. “the crime rate.” The term “crime rate” implies a denominator, typically “per 100,000 residents.” So the number of crimes can fall, but the crime rate can rise if the population shrinks. Bill Bennett said, “But I do know that it’s true that . . .
On Friday, Sept. 30, ABC’s “World News Tonight” (6:30 p.m. Eastern) will feature a segment on Freakonomics, the first of what may be several such segments. The ABC website goes so far as to declare today “Freakonomics Friday.” Linda Jines, who is Steve Levitt’s sister and who came up with the title Freakonomics, should feel especially proud of herself today.
Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We’ve both written about crime (his “superpredator” theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original “drug czar” and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it . . .
In Freakonomics, we talk a lot about catching cheaters using data. Based on a newspaper clipping that Stephen Stigler (a well-known professor of statistics at the University of Chicago, author of a wonderful book on the history of statistics, and son of the great Chicago economist George Stigler), there is a long history of using data to catch bad behavior . . .
Levitt and I are scheduled to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America tomorrow (Thu., Sept. 29), somewhere around 7:30 a.m. EDT, to talk about Freakonomics. We do have a pretty dismal record of getting bumped by breaking news, so maybe we’ll never actually appear on the airwaves chatting face-to-face with the splendid Diane Sawyer — but by God, that’s what . . .
Years ago, I got an M.F.A. in fiction writing, thinking I’d be one of those novel-writing university professors who wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. But I gave up on fiction, and here’s why. The novel I was writing at the time was about a family very much like my own. Although I knew a good bit about my . . .
Emergency rooms serve as the front lines in the world of medicine. Many (most?) visits to ERs are not emergencies at all, but rather, routine visits by people with limited access to health care. As a consequence, waiting for hours to be seen is not uncommon. Forced to take all patients, the ER raises the “price” by making you wait. . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. A few days ago, we made this offer to send a signed bookplate, free, to anyone who wants one. The good news is that a whole lot of people took us up on the offer. The less-good news is that, because of the volume, it’ll take . . .
The Berkeley psychologist Seth Roberts was good enough to guest-blog here all last week. A lot of people still have questions for him. He can be reached at shangriladiet@gmail.com; you can also click here to read about his research.
… to come hear me (Dubner) give a non-Freakonomics reading, on Mon., Sept. 26, 7:00 p.m., at the Half King. It’s an event to celebrate the publication of The Best American Crime Writing 2005, an anthology that includes a New Yorker article I wrote about a cunning silver thief. (Oops: I just showed you the free version of the article . . .
We have twice blogged — here and here — about Moodgrapher, a mood-tracking site built by Gilad Mishne at the University of Amsterdam. It tracks the blog entries of Live Journal users and aggregates their mood indicators to see how a given event (a terrorist act, a natural disaster, an election) influences societal mood. Levitt proposed that corporations might employ . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Once in a while, someone writes to ask if we would autograph his or her copy of Freakonomics. And we say: sure, thanks for asking. But the logistics aren’t very smooth. A person would have to mail the book to one of us, and include a . . .
A while back, there was discussion, only half in jest, that Levitt might make a good Supreme Court Justice. Now things have gotten even crazier: he has been nominated (again, only half in jest) by the BBC to help rule the world: click here for the opening page, then the “click to start” tab and then “Economists.” (It is telling . . .
I’ve had the chance to meet a lot of smart people in my life. Without question, Kevin Murphy is the smartest of them all. Not only is he smart, but he is also one of the kindest, most loyal, and most generous people I’ve known. So I could not be happier that the MacArthur Foundation today named him as one . . .
Here is the final post from our guest blogger, Seth Roberts. If you need to get up to speed on Seth’s unorthodox research with weight-loss, mood, acne, and sleep, click here (our N.Y. Times article about him), here (research extras and pix), here (the first round of reader comments), and here, here, here, here, and here for his earlier blog . . .
For a long time, the pro-life movement has had a keen sense of how people respond to incentives. Protesters outside of clinics proved to be a very effective strategy for raising the social and moral costs of seeking an abortion. Now a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia has come up with a very clever strategy for fighting back, called “Pledge-a-Picket:” . . .
Here is the latest (and maybe final) post from our guest blogger, Seth Roberts. If you need to get up to speed on Seth’s unorthodox research with weight-loss, mood, acne, and sleep, click here (our N.Y. Times article about him), here (research extras and pix), here (the first round of reader comments), and here, here, here, and here for his . . .
Okay, how’s this for an example of crime prevention: transcendental meditation. Several years ago in Washington D.C., 3,000 people got together to meditate and … yes, drove drown crime throughout the city. That’s their story, at least. For all I know, this is an old story; it may also be totally insane. But it makes for interesting reading: click here . . .