Actually, yes, at least if you live in the United Kingdom.
We’ve blogged about proposals to save ailing print newspapers. Despite shrinking circulation and falling ad revenue, Daniel Gross doesn’t think print news is doing so badly.
We know polling results are sensitive to the wording of questions. The delivery of those questions could be a factor, too. We’ll know for sure when we see the first health care push-poll featuring sniffling, sneezing pollsters.
As noted earlier, Congress today is holding its first-ever hearings on geoengineering as a potential means to fight global warming.
We’ve blogged before about the growing role of mobile phones in economic development; now the phones will be used to deliver food aid as well.
Among these monkeys, grooming is a hot commodity and is viewed by scientists as a form of “payment” for services.
There were many good guesses (Ashcroft, Bork, Corzine, etc.). There were also some really awful guesses, like my colleagues Robert Lucas and Gary Becker, who fit many of the criteria, but obviously I was not meeting for the first time last week.
I watched the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night. It got me wondering what would happen to various economic outcomes if, like Brad Pitt‘s character, henceforth half of all men, but no women, were born and lived their lives backward from old age to infancy.
Welcome to the first installment of the SuperFreakonomics Book Club. We know you’re all busy, and scattered around the globe too. So it wouldn’t be convenient for all of us to regularly gather in someone’s living room and talk about the book while sharing bean dip. So let’s harness this Internet thingy and try something different.
The idea is simple. We’ll start at the beginning of the book and work our way to the end, each week giving you a chance to ask questions or leave comments for some of the researchers and other people we write about in SuperFreakonomics.
Edmunds.com reports that its statistical analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program finds that the program generated only 125,000 extra new vehicle sales, meaning that the cost to the U.S. government was $24,000 for each of those new cars.
The random coin toss must be one of society’s most frequently used decision-making mechanisms. We use the coin toss to choose which movie to see, to determine team positions in major sporting events, to divvy up household chores.
Paul Saffo, an American futurologist, recently told the Telegraph that the ultra-rich may slowly evolve into a separate species thanks to medical advances. Saffo imagines a world of replacement organs, sophisticated robots, self-driving cars, and artificial limbs that are superior to the real thing — all available to only the very wealthy.
Every newly purchased mobile phone comes with a new charger. Even if you’ve already got a working charger from your last phone, chances are it won’t work with the new one. It’s redundant.
The Freakonomics book website has been redesigned and updated to include SuperFreakonomics. We love the new look. (Thanks, Being Wicked, and you too, Sean!) It’s the best place to stay up-to-date on appearances, reviews, and so on. It’s also a great place to sign up for the Freakonomics email list or request an autographed bookplate.
Most readers of this blog are probably aware of the tit-for-tat between us and some critics of our global-warming chapter in SuperFreakonomics. In the larger scheme of things the dispute is practically meaningless, at best a very distant second to the actual climate issues on the table.
To that end, the best news I’ve heard recently is that Congress will next week hold its first-ever hearing on geoengineering solutions to global warming. I’m grateful to Ken Caldeira for alerting us to this hearing; he will be among the climate scientists to testify.
He wondered if he was in for a Jim Cramer-type beatdown. But it turns out that Jon Stewart doesn’t appreciate the global-warming fanatics either, and gave SuperFreakonomics a thumping endorsement.
GOOD produced this sharp info-graphic on murder rates worldwide. One interesting trend it doesn’t show: countries with lower murder rates tend to have higher rates of suicide. Take Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates in the world — just 0.5 per 100,000 people. It also has a very high rate of suicide, 23.7 per 100,000. Jamaica, on the other hand, has an unusually high murder rate — 49 per 100,000 — and the unusually low suicide rate of 0.35 per 100,000.
Here’s a behavioral puzzler: Why might it be more efficient for Connecticut to change its sales tax rate from 6 percent to e^2 percent ?
Or more generally, why might using irrational numbers as tax rates be less distortionary than rational tax rates?
A hint comes from a great article of Amy Finkelstein, “E-ZTax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates.” Her simple and powerful idea is that as the salience of tax rates declines, taxes will produce fewer distortions because taxpayers will not pay as much attention to the taxes.
Roughly 15 years ago, before there was such a thing as Baby Einstein, I had a business idea that emerged from a dinner conversation with a linguist. We got to talking about how hard it was for adults learning foreign languages to ever sound like native speakers.
One reason for this is, apparently, is that there are sounds that occur in some languages and not others. If you are raised hearing only English in your first year or two of life, your brain loses some of its ability to discern the sounds that don’t arise in spoken English.
Gizmodo lists eight “Regrettable Tech Inventions” and their inventors’ apologies for them, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s apology for the double-slash in web addresses — “Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //”
The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason to give the publisher as to why I couldn’t do it. I had no choice.
Here’s a sampling of the latest coverage:
Reviews
* Wall Street Journal: “Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down.”
Organ donation is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. And yet, Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics spells out, relying on altruism for organ donations has proved to be largely unsuccessful. There are a lot of reasons people give for not signing up as organ donors.
Faced with a plague of rabbits, some wild and some abandoned pets, the city of Stockholm is pursuing a unique pest-control strategy. The city is hunting, deep-freezing, and shipping the rabbits to a heating plant in central Sweden where they’re processed for fuel. Three thousand rabbits have been culled this year.
Tonight, ABC’s 20/20 devotes a full hour to SuperFreakonomics. The show’s five segments can be previewed online:
Not if the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov has his way. According to Simon Shuster at TIME magazine,
For just a few million dollars, the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March.
You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your conventional wisdom about what makes you tick–what makes you happy, healthy and whole–turned out to be wrong? How would you find out? You’d probably start by…
The makers of World of Goo, a “physics-based puzzle game,” let customers pay what they wanted for the game — which normally sells at $20 — and a week after the offer, 57,000 people bought the game, bringing in over $100,000 in sales.
Ten percent of Arkansans have been married three or more times, double the national average. That’s according to new data from the Pew Center. Arkansas also has one of the lowest median ages for first marriage: 26. If you’re looking for marital stability, look no further than New York State, where the “serial marriage” share is among the lowest in the country, at 2 percent (tied for last place with New Jersey and Massachusetts).
Each year in my 500-student principles class I gather a group of eight students and tell them that I will auction a $20 bill to the highest bidder. If two or more students bid the same thing, the difference between $20 and their joint bid will be divided among the winning bidders. They can collude to fix the price just like oligopolists who violate antitrust laws, but they must mark down their bids in secret.
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