Quotes Uncovered: Making Money
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.
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.
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, offers some reading suggestions for fans of statistics (no, they are not as numerous as fans of, say, Harry Potter, but still …).
Are NFL coaches starting to listen to economists?
My gut feeling is that the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “no.” There are at least three pieces of data that hint at the possibility that economists might be making some headway.
In stressful meetings, does coffee help or harm the situation? Lindsay St. Claire, Robert C. Hayward and Peter J. Rogers attempted to answer that question in a new study, which is summarized here by the BPS Research Digest: “For two men collaborating or negotiating under stressful circumstances, caffeine consumption was bad news, undermining their performance and confidence. By contrast, for pairs of women, drinking caffeine often had a beneficial effect on these same factors. The researchers can’t be sure, but they think the differential effect of caffeine on men and women may have to do with the fact that women tend to respond to stress in a collaborative, mutually protective style (known as ‘tend and befriend’) whereas men usually exhibit a fight or flight response.”
This year alone has seen teacher-cheating scandals in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere; in this week’s Times, Sharon Otterman reports how New York State is trying to curtail cheating and offers some specific instances of past cheating:
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was “tricky,” and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
This comes as little surprise to Steve Levitt, who several years ago recognized what most legislators and school administrators were unable (or unwilling?) to foresee: that the introduction of high-stakes testing would create incentives that might encourage some teachers (especially bad ones) to cheat on behalf of their students. So he developed an algorithm to catch cheaters, which was so successful that then-Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan brought Levitt in to help identify and fire cheating Chicago teachers.
We’re taking a bike tour through the Everglades, and the guide mentioned one of the airboat “captains,” who did something seemingly irrational.
A new study out of England finds that, for heart-failure patients, being admitted to the general ward instead of the cardiology ward can mean death: “Half the patients were admitted to cardiology wards. Compared with those managed on general wards, they tended to be younger and were more likely to be men. Those admitted to general medical wards were twice as likely to die as those admitted to cardiology wards, even after taking account of other risk factors.”
As reported in Forbes on Friday, the Freakonomics blog will be leaving NYTimes.com on or around March 1 and returning to its indie roots.
Technology is supposed to improve outcomes and efficiency especially when it comes to “health-information technology” (HIT). But it’s not always that simple.
To my mind, WeightWatchers is the industry leader in performing rigorous testing of their services. Under the leadership of Karen Miller-Kovach, its chief scientific officer, it has sponsored several randomized control trials comparing the effectiveness of the WeightWatchers point system to other diet approaches. For example, Miller-Kovach is a co-author of this 2003 JAMA study (which showed that after 2-years WeightWatchers helped overweight dieters lose about 3 percent of their body mass – reducing their average weight from 207 to 201 pounds).
But I’m troubled by the current advertising campaign that accompanies the rollout of the New PointsPlus system.
Might want to carry your Purell to the ATM from now on. A new study finds that the numeric keypads on London ATMs are as bacteria-contaminated as the seats of public restrooms.
In our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, Stephen Dubner and Kai Ryssdal talk about the unexpected reasons why American food got so bad. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
In his forthcoming book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, economist Tyler Cowen pinpoints specific moments in history that affected American food for decades to come. From Prohibition to stringent immigration quotas to World War II, Cowen argues that large societal forces threw us into a food rut that lasted for roughly 70 years:
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 researches.
In the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, there’s a “Crime and Punishment” section featuring Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig’s “Economist’s Guide to Crime-Busting” (gated), which considers the most “cost-effective way to control crime.” And Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution writes on one of his favorite topics: bounty hunting.
It really annoys me! I review papers for scholarly journals and, if I agree to undertake the task, have never taken more than six weeks to get the job done. But sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers.
The Economist is running a forum on an interesting topic: Do economists need a code of conduct? The economists surveyed disagree on the merits of a code of conduct.
In the SuperFreakonomics chapter on cheap and simple solutions, we wrote: And seat belts, at about $25 a pop, are one of the most cost-effective lifesaving devices ever invented. In a given year, it costs roughly $500 million to put them in every U.S. vehicle, which yields a rough estimate of $30,000 for every life saved. How does this compare with a far more complex safety feature like air bags? At an annual U.S. price of more than $4 billion, air bags cost about $1.8 million per life saved.
Call me a skeptic about the “peak oil” story. Human ingenuity has always found ways to produce more of, find substitutes for, or discover ways to do without a scarce resource when price signals tell us to. But if peak oil is true, doesn’t one good peak deserve another? Why not meet peak oil head on with its dreaded natural enemy: peak travel?
The economist Stephen T. Ziliak is also a haikuist. As he writes in Poetry magazine, using haiku helps add “feelings to economics.”
As you may have read on this blog, the economist Roland Fryer has done quite a bit of research on bribing kids — i.e., offering financial rewards for good grades. A new working paper from Josh Angrist, Philip Oreopoulos and Tyler Williams examines the effect of financial rewards on performance among an older cohort: college students.
An article on the BBC and elsewhere notes that witches and astrologers are now recognized occupations in Romania and no longer part of the underground economy. Practitioners’ incomes are now taxable-and practitioners are now covered by the country’s pension and health insurance schemes. Some witches have cast spells to overturn the new regulations, while others like the new benefits more than they dislike paying the new taxes.
It is always fun when, in the midst of reporting, multiple sources lead you down the same interesting path.
I recently spent the better part of a day interviewing food scientists for an upcoming Freakonomics Radio podcast that we have dubbed “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup.” (Yes, it’s a corny title and yes, it may change, but maybe it won’t.)
Coming into the day, I never would have guessed that Napoleon would figure so prominently in these interviews. Not one, not two, but three different interview subjects brought him up, twice in the same exact context.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine off-handedly mentioned that he “tried not to use” his spouse’s disability placard to park in handicapped spaces when she wasn’t in the car. Frankly, I was appalled. The implication was that he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to use the placard to park in a handicapped place.
Apparently, he isn’t alone.
I had hoped to live-blog the American Economics Association sessions I attended over the past few days in Denver — and thanks for your suggestions — but, alas, it was nearly impossible to get a good internet connection in the (mostly) underground meeting rooms.
The latest issue of The Economists’ Voice is a special issue on health care reform. David Cutler explains the economics of health reform, while Mark Duggan and Robert Kocher weigh in on health-insurance exchanges.
Last fall, I saw my recidivist coauthor, Barry Nalebuff, and was struck by how much weight he’d lost. He had a clearly different body shape. I told him he looked great. Barry turned to my spouse (and coauthor) Jennifer Brown and said, “I’m doing it on my own, so I don’t have to use that [expletive] stickK.com.”
I bet you cannot — although if you happen to know my rooting tendencies, you might have a clue.
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.
I can’t tell whether I’m writing this as a very proud significant-other, a jealous co-author, or a pleased colleague, but whatever it is, I can’t resist passing on some good news: Betsey Stevenson recently learned that the Labor and Employment Relations Association is awarding her the John Dunlop Scholar Award, typically awarded to a labor economist in the first decade of their careers. The award is “to recognize outstanding academic contributions to research by recent entrants to the field.” It’s a very flattering acknowledgment, and she’s following in the footsteps of Jon Guryan, Alex Mas, Nick Bloom, David Lee, Marianne Bertrand, Armin Falk and David Autor, among other labor luminaries.