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Archive for December, 2007

First the Bagel, Now the Mohel

The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own religious tradition. An excerpt: Nearly . . .



Lost: $720 Billion. If Found, Please Return to Owner, Preferably in Cash

According to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of housing prices, home prices have fallen by about 6 percent in the United States on average over the last twelve months. By my rough calculations, that means that home owners have lost about $720 billion in wealth as a consequence. That is about $2,400 for every person in America, and $18,000 for the average . . .



Economics and New Year’s Resolutions

In recent days, we’ve introduced a pair of regular guest bloggers, Ian Ayres and Sudhir Venkatesh. We are happy and proud to now introduce a third, a terrific addition and no stranger to readers of this blog: Justin Wolfers, an economist at Wharton and a great explorer of everything from racial bias in N.B.A. refereeing to the decline in women’s . . .



Seeing With Tongues

We use our eyes to see, so it seems logical to conjecture that if you didn’t have eyes, you couldn’t see. What I love about science is that these sorts of limiting beliefs routinely get blasted out of the water. A fascinating series of experiments points out that we see with our brains, not our eyes. Consequently, you can substitute . . .



Crime Falls and It Actually Makes the Newspaper

I have blogged repeatedly about the propensity of the media to distort official crime reports to make it appear as if things are getting inexorably worse. (You can see past examples here, here, and here.) Crime has more or less been treading water in the United States over the last few years, although you would never know it from the . . .



The FREAK-est Links

A financial markets outlook for 2008. The newest trend in Romanian business: eBay scams. (Earlier) What would Earth look like to aliens? Want to keep your Web surfing, e-mail and IMs private? Here’s how.



Is the U.S. High School Graduation Rate Worse Than We Thought?

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, . . .



The Truth About Salvadoran Gangs: A Guest Post

Please say hello to a new guest blogger, Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia. You may remember him as the grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago crack gang, which we wrote about in “Freakonomics,” and you may also remember this blog Q&A. On Jan. 10, Venkatesh will publish a memoir about his research, . . .



Eat By the Numbers

A friend of mine went through Naval Officer Candidate School a while back, and I recently stumbled upon an old e-mail he’d sent me that included the following: It has been eight weeks, and my training class is about to become the “senior class on deck,” which means that we are responsible for running the junior classes. It also means . . .



The FREAK-est Links

The art and practice of political data mining. (Hat tip: Chris Masse) CalTech scientist works to develop more efficient, less costly fuel cell. (Earlier) Spam made up 90% of e-mails delivered to big companies in November. (Earlier) LeverageCard.com offers increased options for gift card recipients. (Earlier)



What Would an Independent I.R.S. Look Like?

The Harvard economist (and blogger) Greg Mankiw has written an excellent primer on the Federal Reserve’s power to influence the economy, making much of the the fact that the Fed is politically independent and can therefore afford to ignore public sentiment more than politicians can. His piece got me thinking about what a lot of people have been thinking for . . .



Does This Analysis of Test Scores Make Any Sense? A Guest Post

Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. Here are Ayres’s past posts and here is a recent discussion of standardized tests. A recent article in the Times trumpeted the results of a report that had just been released by the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.). The E.T.S. researchers used four variables that are beyond the . . .



Where Do You Give Charity, and Why?

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 . . .



Mozilla Gets Freaky

For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in other words, businesses don’t run . . .



The FREAK-est Links

E.P.A. denies states’ requests to set their own emissions standards. (Earlier) Study indicates that insured cancer patients have better chance of survival. The one place where the Patriots lose: the point spread. Sellers offered extra incentives to buy in stagnating home market.



What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Quorum

What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools? We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play — including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, . . .



The Reports of Her Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Yesterday, I posted a quiz asking what my wife Jeannette’s grandma has in common with Mark Twain. The answer is that she, like Twain, had her obituary published while she was still alive. Jeannette’s grandma is named Anne Hathaway. At age 92, she is still going strong. Just a few years ago, she traveled from Orono, Maine to Slovenia for . . .



More on the Gmail/General Motors Mixup

We posted an item the other day from a reader who kept landing on General Motors’ Web site when he went to use his Gmail account; he wondered if many Gmail users did the same, and subsequently wound up buying cars. We don’t have an answer to that question, but the whole scenario is starting to look a bit less . . .



The FREAK-est Links

A New York guide to holiday tipping. Researchers discover the surefire way to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors. (Earlier) An economic case for predicting no recession. Monkeys exhibit the same addition skills as college students.



Is ‘Stop Liking Men Who Drive Hot Cars’ Sound Climate Advice?

Richard Gray at the U.K. Telegraph reports that Sir David King, a University of Cambridge chemist, staunch global warming activist, and one of Britain’s top government scientists, gave the following advice to a woman who asked him what she could do to curb global warming: “[S]top admiring young men in Ferraris.” King’s larger point — that we should act individually . . .



My Wife’s Grandma and Mark Twain: A Freakonomics Quiz

My last quiz on horse racing was hard: you needed to know some institutional details, and even if you did, it was still very tricky. This next quiz is quite easy. For a piece of Freakonomics schwag, just be the first one to correctly answer the following question: What do my wife Jeannette’s grandmother and Mark Twain have in common? . . .



What’s That Have to Do With the Price of Beer in Germany?

Dan Hamermesh, on his Economic Thought of the Day blog — it is excellent, and always fun — wrote this recently: A disaster has occurred in Germany: The staple drink – beer – is rising in price. The reason is that there is a worldwide shortage of barley, a major ingredient in the brew. This has pushed up the price . . .



The FREAK-est Links

Which M.L.B. players performed better after using steroids? (Earlier) Confusion over euro conversion good for Spanish waiters. Rare $90 video game sells for more than $9,000 online. Apple beefs up program security to thwart hackers. (Earlier)



Use Gmail, Buy a Car?

Remember our contest on the Coase Theorem? It asked for good examples of the Coase Theorem failing in regard to URLs — i.e., instances in which a company that is most motivated to own a URL for some reason doesn’t. The winner of the contest proposed Nissan.com, which belongs not to the car company, but to a far lesser-known computer . . .



The Social Science of Raising Happy Kids

We wrote in Freakonomics about our views on parenting. Mostly, we were skeptical of how much parents could do to improve their kids’ futures. One can clearly be a terrible parent through neglect or abuse. The tougher question is whether being an “obsessive” parent who drags children to a never-ending procession of soccer practices, museums, and acting classes is better . . .



Bring Your Questions for Broadway Producer Rocco Landesman

Rocco Landesman is a Broadway original, a producer with the heart of an artist, and a rogue businessman if ever there was one. (He is also, I am happy to say, an old friend of mine.) He is president of Jujamcyn Theatres, one of the big three Broadway theater companies, and is also one of the most prolific and award-winning . . .



The FREAK-est Links

Receiving a kidney: a personal account. (Earlier) A wonderful meditation on globalization and journalism. Online game’s in-world economist issues his first newsletter. (Earlier) “The Wallet Test” captures honesty on camera. (Earlier)



Shaping the World at Versailles: A Q&A With the Author of A Shattered Peace

Any history book will give you a chapter on the Treaty of Versailles, during which delegates from around the world gathered in France to hammer out peace terms following World War I. The men (and occasional woman) who negotiated the outcome may have had their own individual and national agendas, but their decisions arguably set the stage for decades of . . .



Are All Deaths Suicides?

What does it mean to use “the economic approach” to thinking about the world? In the old days, if you asked 100 people this question, I bet at least 80 of them would have given some kind of answer having to do with dollars and cents, supply and demand, etc. Over the past few decades, however, “the economic approach” has . . .



Interesting Article on Los Angeles Gangs

Peter Landesman has written a fascinating article for L.A. Weekly on street gangs. The events he details are chilling. I can’t say I agree with some of the broader claims of the piece, however. Landesman argues that the gang problem is worse than it has ever been, and that gang violence hasn’t dropped the way other crimes have. A quick . . .