Australian mothers pay up to $1,000 for it on the Internet due to the country’s shortage of breast-milk banks, the Courier Mail reports.
The great Paul Samuelson passed away last weekend at the age of 94, and several economists have now written about his life and work…
For the 20-year period ending in 2007, the Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA championship record did a surprisingly good job of reflecting the stock market.
What was Stanford statistics student Ryan Tibshirani to do when his buddies kept beating him at darts?
If you’re in Times Square on Saturday, Dec. 19, keep an eye out for SuperFreakonomics on the Dow Jones news zipper. A piece of Freakonomics schwag will go to the first person who sends us a photo of the book’s name up in lights.
As the L.A. Times reports,
two new studies, from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco and the National Cancer Institute, suggest that hospitals may want to cut down on the volume of CT scans.
The always-enlightening Atul Gawande evaluates the new health-care bill’s efforts (or lack thereof) to control runaway health-care costs. The bill, which has been widely criticized for its lack of significant cost reductions, proposes a few small pilot programs aimed at cost containment.
University of Scranton psychology professor Carole Slotterback analyzed about five years’ worth of children’s letters to Santa that were sent to her city’s central post office.
It’s one Los Angeles boutique owner’s answer to the pay-what-you-wish pricing scheme: only open your store to customers you want to let in — and set prices on the spot by sizing customers up. The strategy, she says, has helped her store stay open when other shops around hers are struggling.
Finally, a scientific approach to the eternal cats vs. dogs debate. NewScientist evaluated dogs and cats in 11 different categories: brains, shared history, bonding, popularity, understanding, problem solving, vocalization, tractability, supersenses, eco-friendliness, and utility. It was a close contest but Fido ultimately won six to five.
Does giving a man a job stop him from becoming a political insurgent? The generally accepted wisdom is that it does. In fact, the U.S. and other western powers have distributed millions of dollars of foreign aid in the hopes of reducing political violence and instability.
Tim Donaghy’s 2007 arrest for betting on N.B.A. games, including games that he refereed, shocked basketball fans. Despite his astounding betting success rate (70 to 80 percent), Donaghy claimed that he never fixed N.B.A. games but rather used insider information, a claim that the N.B.A., the F.B.I., and the U.S. Attorney’s office were unable to disprove.
More than 4,000 teams of people recently raced to determine the location of ten red balloons released across the U.S., as part of an experiment designed to “explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.”
Planet Money recently interviewed Elinor Ostrom, this year’s Nobel prize winner and an expert in the tragedy of the commons about global warming. Ostrom believes the solution to climate change will come not from government initiatives but from people in communities around the world. “I think we are stupid to sit around and wait and wait and wait,” she says.
A group of civic activists in Los Angeles plans to start giving “Gang Tours” — taking busloads of tourists through some of the most dangerous parts of the city — in hopes of “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.”
Scientists in the U.K. and Slovenia have developed a new, new technique for dating old books that’s far less damaging than the typical methods which require destroying part of the book.
As the SuperFreakonomics chapter on global warming suggests, solutions that are initially viewed as repugnant sometimes gain acceptance over time. Consider, for example, that environmental groups have supported a “last-ditch effort” by Illinois environmental officials to dump a toxic chemical into a canal. The purpose?
A site called Oobject features juxtaposed shots of cities before and after major events like war, natural disasters, and “property speculation.”
When I’m upset about the minor annoyances of life, I sometimes find it helpful to think of the price I’d charge for enduring the annoyance. For example, when my wallet was stolen, I wondered how many dollars would someone have had to pay me to consent to the taking.
After jump-starting the economies of Somali fishing towns, local pirates are taking their local business further by setting up “stock exchanges” that host 72 pirate gangs or “maritime companies,” a Reuters article reports.
Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made — including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days before being removed.
National borders may sometimes seem like arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but a new study from the University of Haifa reveals that those borders mean something to the resident animal populations.
A Boston Globe article explains how “positive deviance” — a way to change behavior by using “nudges” that already exist in a community, rather than imposing them from the outside — substantially decreased malnutrition in a Vienamese village: researchers observed children who looked more nourished than others, found that their families were feeding them crabs — considered a low-class food — and encouraged neighbors to follow the family’s good example.
It seems to make all the sense in the world. You are WPMI-TV, the NBC affiliate that covers southern Alabama and some of the Florida Panhandle, and you rent a big electronic billboard to promote your nightly news and weather team.
Foreign Policy released its list of 2009’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. The No. 1 spot goes to Ben Bernanke for “staving off a new Great Depression,” while Obama takes No. 2 for “reimagining America’s role in the world.” A few of our old favorites also made the list.
Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home last year, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn’t include bagels eaten at work, where a not-completely-insignificant number are delivered by bagel economist Paul Feldman). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, 1,979 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.
At Big Think, Dan Ariely discusses ways to think about money so you splurge less — like equating expensive wine with gallons of milk and making paying hurt a little more.
The island of Kiribati began to subsidize coconut harvesting in the hopes of encouraging fishermen to switch to the coconut trade and thereby help preserve Kiribati’s reefs from the ravages of overfishing.
Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics, called “Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism,” takes a look at the research of John List (the Univ. of Chicago economist, not the notorious murderer of the same same — although the same chapter does cast a new light on a famous murder as well). List’s research challenges the prevailing wisdom on a few decades’ worth of lab experiments which seemed to prove that human beings are innately fair or even altruistic.
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