Last week, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim wrote a guest post about black coaches in the NFL and the introduction of the Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority applicant when filling head-coaching spots. Moskowitz and Wertheim concluded that the policy change was successful: “The league achieved its aim. By 2005, there were six African-American coaches in the NFL…”
The Economist reports that the city of Shanghai has been auctioning car license plates. The average auction price has recently been $6,900, truly remarkable considering average family income in China, and even in Shanghai. The number of plates given out in 2011 will be reduced further in an attempt to reduce gridlock and pollution (both of which my experience several years ago in Shanghai suggests are world-class).
Our recent podcast about the economics of trash featured a story about an American grad student living in Taipei. He discovered that that city had an unusual trash-collection style: instead of putting your trash out at a curb or in a dumpster, you’d have to bring your trash out at a certain hour to deposit it directly in a municipal trash truck, which might be playing Beethoven to announce its arrival.
What happens to men when women cry? A new study finds that, as in mice, human tears may serve a “chemosignaling function.” Specifically, female tears seem to reduce male sexual arousal.
When we run a contest or quiz on this blog, we generally offer the winner/s some kind of prize. We’ve recently updated the old offerings. So here’s the current assortment. And remember: you can always get a free signed bookplate for either book any time you want. If you’re really feeling the spirit, you can even get some SuperFreakonomics pants, but you have to buy them yourself. (Sadly, they do nothing to stop you from walking home drunk.)
In our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, we look at the economics of charity — specifically, what works (and what doesn’t) when trying to incentivize people to give. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
In Australia, Dick Smith’s electronics empire has afforded him enough success to be able to donate about 20 percent of his annual income to charity. But, he says, this kind of generosity is no longer the norm:
Both men and women lie to their partners about their spending, but the money similarities between the genders seem to end there. Viviana A. Zelizer explores the differences in a Wall Street Journal article, writing that women in many different cultures are more likely than men to direct money toward their children’s well-being.
Several years ago, Matthew Funk and I proposed a mechanism for moving beyond the all-or-nothing choice of the do-not-call list to a system where you also could choose how much you would like to be paid for telemarketing calls.
Earlier this week, Tobias J. Moskowitz (a University of Chicago finance professor) and L. Jon Wertheim (a Sports Illustrated writer) contributed a guest post on black NFL coaches, which was an adaptation of their new book Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won. You may recall this as the book Levitt described as “[t]he closest thing to Freakonomics I’ve seen since the original,” much to his wife’s chagrin.
Joanne Barkan, writing in Dissent, argues that three big nonprofit foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), working together, exert a “decisive influence” on public-school education.
Here’s how Darin McCloud, a 45-year-old man in Portsmouth, England, has been eating lately: “He has been scoffing three-quarters of a loaf of bread, several packets of crisps and bacon rolls every day, and tucking into chips, takeaways and junk food for his tea.”
Over at Economic Principals, David Warsh reveals little-known facts about Paul Samuelson’s acuity as an investor and his involvement in an early hedge fund called Commodities Corp.: “Long famous for the fortune that his pioneering textbook earned him after 1948, it turns out that Samuelson may have made more money as an investor than as an author. He was both smarter and richer than is generally understood: as an investor, a bigger winner, perhaps, than the more volatile John Maynard Keynes.”
I’m back in Germany, the land of serious recycling. We separate much of our excess into bio, packing, paper and everything else (“all the rest, and only that,” as the instructions in our apartment state). Of course, this doesn’t include the three types of glass – white, green and brown – that are to be carried to a set of common receptacles two blocks from our apartment.
The Economist complements this week’s print issue on rising income inequality with an online forum on the subject. Daron Acemoglu explains why we care about income inequality: “First, people’s well-being may directly depend on inequality, for example, because they view a highly unequal society as unfair or because the utility loss due to low status of the have-nots may be greater than the utility gain due to the higher status of the haves. Second and more importantly, equality of opportunity may be harder to achieve in an unequal society … Third and most importantly, inequality impacts politics. Economic power tends to beget political power even in democratic and pluralistic societies.”
We’re working on a Freakonomics Radio episode about pain. One component is the very interesting research by Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier about how colonoscopy patients remember the pain of the procedure, and how that memory can be manipulated (to dim the memory of the pain) so that patients aren’t reluctant to return for their next colonoscopy.
Robert Shiller points to an interesting conflict in economics today: “We are in the midst of a boom in popular economics: books, articles, blogs, public lectures, all followed closely by the general public. Yet this boom in popular economics comes at a time when the general public seems to have lost faith in professional economists – because almost all of us failed to predict, or even warn of, the current economic crisis, the biggest since the Great Depression.”
Here’s an interesting method of combating the hand-hygiene problem discussed at length in SuperFreakonomics: “A doctor enters a hospital room to examine a patient, but neglects to wash her hands. A special badge on her lab coat turns a deep shade of red as wireless computer components in the door, the soap dispenser and near the bed immediately relay information about the unwashed hands. The doctor is busted.”
When my wife saw the cover of the new book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, which was sitting on my bedside table, all she could do was shake her head.
As did its recent acquisition, Northwest Airlines, Delta is doing on-line auctions of seats that must be vacated if the plane is overbooked.
A new Foreign Policy photoessay takes a look at the secretive, Bangkok-based Dhammakaya movement.
Last time, I showed you evidence (courtesy of Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution and Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper of Stanford University) that driving per person seems to have peaked in the 2000s and now may even be dropping. This bucks every travel trend we’ve seen since Henry Ford got to work. What might be slowing down the acceleration in driving?
A new research paper shows that North American economists have lost a lot of market share in research publication to the rest of the world — but mainly to European economists.
In the SuperFreakonomics section about various “birth effects,” we cited some research about the downside of having a surname that begins with a letter late in the alphabet: It is common practice, especially among economists, to co-write academic papers and list the authors alphabetically by last name. What does this mean for an economist who happened to be born Albert Zyzmor instead of, say, Albert Aab? Two (real) economists addressed this question and found that, all else being equal, Dr. Aab would be more likely to gain tenure at a top university, become a fellow in the Econometric Society (hooray!), and even win the Nobel Prize.
When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.
A collaboration between Kraft and Intel has produced a machine that scans your face to predict what you might want to eat (or, more precisely, what it can sell you to eat).
A while back, we did a podcast about whether the NFL might someday sell corporate sponsorship on its jerseys, the way soccer clubs around the world do, and even Major League Soccer clubs in the U.S.
Marginal decisions to increase the net of revenue minus costs arise in non-profit organizations as much as in companies. The designers of a recent book, Peter Leeson’s The Invisible Hook (Princeton University Press, 2009), recognized this in picking a cover.
New research from OkCupid, the research-focused dating site, finds that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. OkTrends assessed male perceptions of female attractiveness and found that “when some men think you’re ugly, other men are more likely to message you. And when some men think you’re cute, other men become less interested.”