Columbia sociologist Shamus Khan went back to teach at his alma mater, the prestigious St. Paul’s School, nine years after graduating. He’s written a book about how society’s elite are brought up, and what behaviors they carry through life.
If you’re going to court, you better hope that judge had breakfast. Or just a break. A new study looked into psychological effects in the courtroom from the supply side: the judges. Researchers evaluated results from more than 1,000 rulings made by 8 Israeli judges and found that favorable rulings peaked at the beginning of the day, then again after lunch or a food break.
According to a new study by the London School of Economics, one in every three children in the U.K. between 9 and 12 has his/her own Facebook page, despite Facebook’s minimum age requirement of 13. Among 13-16 year-olds, that number shoots to 43 percent. Researchers noted that European children are taking undue risks online.
Photo: David Campbell 2 Kings VII discusses an incident in which the people of Israel are besieged and food prices are skyrocketing. A military officer scoffs when “a man of God” predicts that barley will soon sell for ½ shekel and fine flour for 1 shekel (very low prices). The officer is shortly trampled to death after the populace goes . . .
A new study surveying elderly Taiwanese men and women shows that senior citizens who engage in daily shopping are likely to live longer than their counterparts.
A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests a sensible, non-ideological take on why health care costs rise faster than their efficacy. This echoes a recurring theme here, that it’s often the cheap and simple solutions that work the best.
The next battle in the Google Books dispute comes in a week, when lawyers on both sides meet to consider their next move after a federal judge rejected a settlement proposal. Should Congress step in?
In June, the first of our Freakonomics Radio programs will hit the public-radio airwaves. In conjunction with the launch, we’ll be doing a few live Freakonomics Radio events — in St. Paul, Minn, Los Angeles, and New York.
Last week, a severe outbreak of tornadoes tore across much of the southeast U.S., killing at least 43 people. Despite the destruction, meteorologists are working on a handful of advancements that should greatly improve our ability to predict tornadoes.
It’s been almost a year since the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and more data is available on the magnitude of the spill. In a recent article, The New York Times describes the spill’s size as “some 4.9 million barrels of oil.” That led me to two numerical musings.
First, I wanted to make the number meaningful by comparing it to another large, famous spill: the Exxon Valdez. Its size is imprinted in my memory as 11 million gallons, which is about 250,000 barrels. So the Deepwater spill was about 20 times larger than the Valdez. In retrospect, that makes sense. The Deepwater well reached into a geologic formation. Whereas the Valdez was merely what one could take from another formation and stuff even into a big ship.
Water is a topic that’s come up repeatedly on this blog. We’ve written about attempts to do away with bottled water; why it’s a bad idea to ban bottled water; whether festivals should hand out free water; and the need for safe supplies of water around the world.
P&G recently sold Pringles for $1.5 billion to Diamond Foods. But do you know why the chip is so easy to eat? University of Chicago mathematics professor Benson Farb explains why the Pringle is a relativistic chip.
What do actual drug dealers think about economists’ research on drug dealers? NPR’s Planet Money asks the question of drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross, and gets some illuminating answers.
t’s time for the annual Name of the Year contest. The 2008 winner, Destiny Frankenstein, is still our favorite, but there are some strong contestants this year. Among them: Sanmorteeno Battle, Yolanda Supersad, and Dr. Loveday Conquest. Cast your vote here.
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research.
Sometime around 1991, the standard coup d’etat morphed into something else entirely, according to a new paper by Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans: “[W]hereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1991 installed the leader durably in power, after that the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections.”
The woman right next to me was alive one second, then a taxi came up on the sidewalk of 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, hit her and veered off, and now the woman was dead. This happened on the first or second day of my job at HBO. I tried to call 911 on the payphone (there were still payphones in August, 1994), and then I had to go. The woman was dead.
We took our visiting 12-year-old granddaughter out to dinner last night, and she insisted on ordering edamame, which I too love. I discovered it at age 60 and would never have seen it in the U.S. at age 12 in 1955. Earlier in the day, I had bought a cherimoya at the local grocery store.
The experts generally fall into two camps when it comes to alleviating global poverty: those who believe we simply need to spend more money in more places; and those who think that too many billions have already been spent too inefficiently and ineffectively, requiring a new and smarter approach to aid.
New York City Dept. of Education has been savaged over reports that it stows bad teachers in ‘rubber rooms’ rather than simply firing them. A new report says that many of those teachers are being returned to the classroom after having paid a fine.
A new working paper attempts to assign a dollar amount to the cost of combat-induced PTSD as a result of the War on Terror. The answer? As much as $2.7 billion.
Turns out, toking the green isn’t all that green. A new report from the Dept. of Energy uncovers the massive carbon footprint of the indoor marijuana industry. Smoking one joint is equivalent to 2 pounds of CO2 emissions.
A marketing first? A Montana RadioShack is offering customers who sign up for a Dish Network package a coupon for a either a pistol or a shotgun from a local sporting goods store.
More than any other economist, Nobel laureate Gary Becker has inspired and shaped the work of Steven Levitt. Here’s your chance to submit a question for Stephen Dubner to ask Becker when they sit down for an upcoming video chat. Fire away in the comments section.
Our most recent podcast is about a pair of economists giving out free eye glasses to kids in China. Between 10 and 15 percent of kids needed glasses; but of those, only two percent had them. Turns out, this is a problem in New York City too.
Economists usually assume that doubling output more than doubles costs; or as textbooks say, there are increasing marginal costs. So economists naturally expect twins to be more than double the effort, stress, and out-of-pocket cost of a singleton.
Fans of the New York Times Sunday crossword might have come across a Freak-y clue this weekend. Check out clue 102 “Across”: 102. Steven who co-wrote “Freakonomics” The letters of Levitt’s name were used to spell the following “Down” words: 93. Sword lilies, for short : GLADS 94. Send, as a check : REMIT 95. Trump who wrote “The Best . . .
There’s a crime wave at London Zoo. We’ve blogged in the past about monkeys that can do amazing things: use money, be rational actors, even learn grammar. Add to that list baby Bolivian monkeys who have taken to stealing sunglasses from visitors. But, say their keepers, the monkeys’ motives have nothing to do profit-maximizing.
You can buy almost anything online these days — hotel reservations, books, movies, etc. — but how much does reviewer quality matter to online shoppers? A lot, according to research from Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. In a previous paper, the pair noticed that “demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.” In a more recent paper, Ghose and Ipeirotis find similar trends for products on Amazon.com.