Daron Acemoglu describes what makes a nation rich in a new article for Esquire. According to Acemoglu, experts who believe geography or the weather or technology are to blame for persistent poverty are missing a much simpler economic explanation: people respond to incentives.
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good?
“What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?” These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University’s Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in the world, no one really understands why one person hates another.
It’s well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive contract between family members.
If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC’s piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron book club. Some U.S. tour appearances are available online as well, from the Commonwealth Club, the Motley Fool, and the Philadelphia Free Library.
We’ve blogged extensively about the serious organ-doner shortage in the U.S. and the debate over establishing a market for organs. Now it seems the recession has uncovered some unexpected potential participants in the organ market: unemployed white collar Americans.
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s mind-blowing book — and totally engrossing website — Bird.
In recent years, replacing your car with a Schwinn has become a popular idea for reducing your carbon footprint. However, not everyone has rushed to their local bike store: fewer than 2 percent of the population relies on bikes for transportation.
The folks at Appfrica have put together some interesting infographs on infrastructure investment and Internet connectivity in Africa. The graphs provide information on internet penetration and network readiness by country, and the various infrastructure development projects that are rapidly transforming Internet connectivity in Africa.
SuperFreakonomics briefly considers the possibility of a rogue leader like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deciding to unilaterally try geoengineering the planet. Who’d have thought Chavez would actually try some geoengineering with his own hands? According to this Reuters report, Chavez recently asked a team of Cuban scientists to seed clouds over his drought-stricken country.
Can you decipher this first grader’s math assignment? BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder wants a second opinion.
We all know that information is valuable, and that more information is generally better than less.
But in the realm of pharmaceutical research (as in others, to be sure), there’s a troubling paradox: while successes are widely publicized, and while the results of clinical trials are usually published, the research from projects that fail before that stage is usually kept hidden.
Dubner will be appearing on the public-radio show The Takeaway every morning this week to talk about SuperFreakonomics. His past appearances can be found here, including this one about kidney donation and this one about climate change.
Over the last decade, the number of syphilis cases in China increased tenfold, according to this Associated Press report, because more migrant workers have been able to afford to hire prostitutes.
Malcolm Gladwell explains Christmas, as imagined by Craig Brown for Vanity Fair: “In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger. Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right?”
So while environmentalists may find the very notion of geoengineering repugnant, the fact is that geoengineering is already with us, and will likely be put to use whether we like it or not.
Unhappy with the clutter in your life? You don’t need to get organizized; you just need to ditch your extraneous stuff. The Happiness Project’s Gretchen Rubin punctures eleven myths of would-be clutter slayers.
If you’ve never really gotten a good look at Mars, here’s your chance: The Big Picture has collected 35 striking photographs from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and photographing the planet since 2006.
Could half of Americans be carrying genes that predispose them to going into debt? At least one team of researchers thinks so.
Levitt and Dubner are scheduled to appear on the Charlie Rose show tonight, talking about the importance of applying economics to “trivial” subjects; how Levitt learned to stop fearing death; and about SuperFreakonomics in general. The show airs on PBS at 11 p.m. in most cities, but check your local listings.
There’s at least one unexpected benefit of rising unemployment. More people are staying home during working hours, and going out less often at night. That means there’s less chance they’ll be burglarized.
We’ve blogged several times about Roland Fryer’s research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone (which was chronicled in Paul Tough’s excellent book Whatever It Takes), with hopeful results.
Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in and photographing the slums of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Bendiksen’s photos of family homes portray a reality that clashes with popular perception.
A while back, we blogged about a site called Strange Maps, which features all sorts of strange, fascinating, and even influential maps. (Maps in general have since come up on this blog quite a few times.)
Frank Jacobs, the London-based journalist and creator of Strange Maps, has now published a book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities.
He has agreed to answer a few of our questions about maps and why he finds them so compelling.
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to motorists.
People worry that disasters have become more frequent and more damaging since the close of the 20th century. But the 19th century’s natural disasters were plenty devastating; but there weren’t nearly as many of us around to suffer the consequences (nor as much media to record it).
Who gets bumped to the front of UCLA medical center’s liver-transplant line? The godfather of the Japanese mafia, according to this 60 Minutes video…
Making fun of earmarked Congressional spending is easy, feel-good entertainment. But is it a distraction from the bigger problem?
Just announced: Levitt and Dubner’s sold-out lecture at London’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) will be webcast live on Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at 13:00 GMT (that’s 8 a.m. Eastern — or use this handy calculator to find the time where you live). One day earlier, they are also speaking at the London School of Economics; negotiations are still underway to temporarily rename it LSF.
What can polygamy on the outskirts of Russia tell us about the effects of the financial crisis in less remote locales?
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