After I graduated from college, I took a job in strategy consulting at a small firm called Corporate Decisions, Inc. The guy who had the desk next to mine could hardly have been more different than me. He was an athletic, good looking, Dartmouth frat boy. When he shook my hand that first time, he practically broke it in half. . . .
If you are a retailer, setting a policy for handling shoplifters isn’t simple. Do you call the police for every shoplifter, even a kid who pockets a box of crayons? What about a senior citizen taking some batteries? Do you treat first-timers the same as pros? Wal-Mart has long been known for a very strict policy: call the police on . . .
Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has a long-running website called The Long Tail. Now he has just published his book of the same name, and it’s doing great. (Congrats; I haven’t read it yet, but it sounds good.) What caught my eye on his website was this fascinating note (end of the post) from an anonymous writer regarding . . .
Entourage is my favorite TV show in — well, forever. Sure, I have my quibbles. In last week’s episode, we learn that Vince and Eric don’t know until well after Aquaman is released that James Cameron hadn’t signed on to direct the sequel. That’s not very believable. And a couple weeks ago, when Vince and his entourage visit the high-schoolers’ . . .
Bobby Fischer, the chess genius and super-self-hating-Jew, is such a ranter that it might seem sensible to have brushed aside his long-ago charges that Soviet chess players used to collude to ensure a Soviet champion in international chess competitions. But the economists Charles Moul and John Nye, both of Washington University in St. Louis, argue convincingly that the Soviets did . . .
A lot of my friends play chess, some of them very well. I’ve never taken to it. (I’m not even a very good backgammon player, Levitt’s claims notwithstanding.) But I was totally smitten by a new book about chess called The Immortal Game. It was written by David Shenk, a guy I know via e-mail and maybe a party or . . .
So I’m playing poker online tonight and one of the players at my table has the moniker “NolimitFreak.” On one of the first hands he plays, on the final round of betting I make a big bet, he raises me, I reraise him “all in,” and he folds. He then proceeds to call me a “turd” in the area where . . .
The World Cup final was both predictable (Italy’s comeback and eventual triumph after the early French goal) and bizarre (Zinedine Zidane’s farewell head-butt). Not a great game but not bad. The consolation match on Saturday, between Germany and Portugal, wasn’t much more exciting — except for the hometown German fans, who saw their young team secure third place in the . . .
The July 9, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine examines a simple supply-and-demand gap with tragic implications: the shortage of human organs for transplantation. This blog post supplies additional research material.
We have a new “Freakonomics” column out in the current New York Times Magazine. (For a year, we wrote the column once a month), but we’ve just scaled back to once every two months.) This one is about organ transplants — specifically, how the huge success of transplantation in recent decades has created a surge in demand for donated organs, . . .
A lot of people have been worried lately that MySpace has become a playground for sexual predators. And a lot of these worried people blame the technology itself for affording sexual predators an opportunity they might not otherwise have. As is often the case with a new, scary technology, an even newer version of that technology turns out to be . . .
A few days back some dastardly Coca-Cola employees got nabbed trying to sell corporate secrets to Pepsi. Pepsi turned the bad guys in and cooperated in the sting operation. Did the executives at Pepsi give up the chance to make huge profits at Coke’s expense in order to “do the right thing?” I had lunch with my friend and colleague . . .
A quick cruise through this morning’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times yielded a few remarkably interesting articles: 1. The Journal‘s Jonathan Eig reports on a poverty program in Chicago that uses an incentive program to give low-income people the chance to earn rewards like high-income people who rack up frequent-flier miles or bank points. “For the past year,” . . .
According to CipherTrust, a company that makes its money protecting computers from viruses and spam, all the phishing attacks in the world are issued by a mere five “zombie” networks. Even more interesting is the fact that their targets are just as concentrated. Here, from CipherTrust’s page of spam statistics, are the top 5 targets and the percentage of phishing . . .
Hello everyone. I’m Nicole, the new-ish Freakonomics assistant. A few weeks ago, Dubner blogged about Chicago School District 214, where the campaign of one board member to ban Freakonomics (among other dangerous books such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening) was successfully thwarted. The publisher, William Morrow, happily gave away 50 signed copies to students in appreciation. Someone commented that it . . .
No one has ever accused any publisher of making too-subtle a book jacket for Freakonomics. For those of you not keeping score at home, here is the Norwegian cover, e.g., and here is the U.K. paperback. But it seems that the good folks at ValeNovak publishing in the Republic of Slovenia may win the prize: While we’re sharing pictures, here’s . . .
The Sports Illustrated jinx is famous: all too often, as soon as an athlete appears on the cover of SI, said athlete loses the big game or hits a streak of very bad luck. The Jinx got so famous, in fact, that SI itself once ran a cover story on the Jinx. The piece was written by Alexander Wolff, who . . .
What’s that, you say? A strong nose of utility, a nice sharp yield curve, and a racy finish with just a touch of … is it, is it — yes: understated liquidity. The newly founded American Association of Wine Economists has a 5-member board of directors (I’m disappointed and surprised to not find Richard Thaler among them) and an academic . . .
We’ve posted before on the subjects of randomness and luck. Along those lines, there’s a fascinating article by Jim Yardley in today’s N.Y. Times about the Chinese appetite for lucky numbers — well, for 8’s, the luckiest of all numbers — and how the government now auctions off lucky license plates for thousands of dollars. It used to be that . . .
There is so much noise these days about obesity that it can be hard to figure out what’s important about the issue and what’s not. To try to keep track, I sometimes divide the obesity issue into three questions. 1. Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of . . .
I have long been a fan of the folks at www.tradesports.com and www.intrade.com. They brought a whole new approach to sports gambling. Instead of acting as a bookie and charging a vig, tradesports and intrade are clearinghouses. They provide a platform for bettors to come together and make deals amongst themselves. Since tradesports and intrade aren’t taking any position on . . .
Both Dubner and the folks at Party Poker think so. Although supposedly illegal for Americans, online poker and sports betting is a huge business. At any given time, as many as 100,000 people are playing poker at Party Poker. More than half of these are Americans. Party Poker is successful for much the same reason that eBay is. Most internet . . .