Women in the legal profession with more masculine-sounding names, like Cameron or Kelly, have better odds of becoming judges than women with feminine names, according to a new study by Bentley Coffey and Patrick McLaughlin (gated; abstract here).
If the financial crisis has proven anything, it’s that you should ignore the advice of most economists.
Most economists, that is.
Over at The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s awesome photo blog, there’s a series of pictures showing the aftermath of a catastrophe (probably an explosion) at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in south-central Russia on August 17.
You’re older than you’ve ever been, as the song goes, and now you’re even older. And for each eight years you age, you double your chances of dying. That’s the Gompertz Law of human mortality, which is actually sunnier than you think.
Is the Invisible Hand … one of Adam Smith’s key theories, a “mildly ironic joke,” or “a popular literary 17th- to 18th-century metaphor with no significance”?
The Internets Celebrities (Dallas Penn and Rafi Kammade) appeared on our blog a while back with their video about check-cashing establishments vs. commercial banks. They’re back with another (NSFW) video, “Vend Diagram,” in which they question how the recession has affected New York’s street vendors.
The World Bank’s annual Doing Business report indicates that capitalism has fared better than feared in the recession. For the year ending in May 2009, 131 countries introduced 287 reforms, more than in any year since the survey began in 2004.
The first public passenger railroad opened in England in 1825. By the 1860’s, railway accidents had killed, maimed, and otherwise traumatized so many that doctors had to coin a term to describe the shock suffered by rail crash survivors; they called it “railway spine,” and the debate that surrounded it planted the seeds for the study of what we know today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
In a follow-up to its earlier article about things that science can’t explain, New Scientist lists 13 More Things That Don’t Make Sense. We wonder: if you were writing a similar list for the field of economics, what would you include?
If you’re wondering how the recession is affecting today’s young adults, a new paper (abstract only) by Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo may have the answer.
Henry Farrell at the Crooked Timber blog argues that smoking bans succeed in large part because prevailing societal norms about smoking – e.g. “That Irish people can smoke in pubs to their hearts’ content, and that others will just have to put up with it” – were much weaker than we thought.
The million-plus surveillance cameras that monitor London’s citizens haven’t stopped much crime, the BBC reports. According to a police report, just one crime was solved by every 1,000 cameras, creating “a huge intrusion on privacy, yet … little or no improvement in security.”
The TED blog recently posted Cary Fowler’s fascinating TED talk as well as a Q&A with Fowler, director of the world’s largest seed bank. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, otherwise known as the doomsday vault, is located in a remote area of Norway and was built to protect the world’s crops from disease, climate change, and famine.
The article profiles Quest to Learn, a new school in New York that will teach exclusively with video games. At Quest to Learn, “children learn by doing — and do so in a way that tears up the usual subject-based curriculum altogether.” This fall, for example, students will spend time as ancient Spartans and learn about history, geography, and public policy.
In Bangladesh, a country whose power shortages are particularly severe during its hot summers, it doesn’t make much economic sense to dress up in a stuffy suit and then crank up your office’s AC to stay cool. That’s why, to cut down on air-conditioning use, the prime minister ordered a new dress code for the country’s civil servants: no more ties and suits – just simple, short-sleeved shirts. Casual Fridays every day shouldn’t be too difficult to enforce.
According to Google Books, it’s the year Raymond Chandler’s Killer in the Rain was published, along with Stephen King’s Christine and a landmark biography of Bob Dylan — not to mention the Italian editions of Freakonomics and Super Crunchers.
In Detroit, the average price of home sales is less than what you’d pay for a good used car. UCLA economics professor Matthew Kahn points out that you can buy 100 Detroit homes for the price of one house in Westwood in L.A.
A new article in The American Prospect looks at the progress of New York City’s ambitious anti-poverty initiative, Opportunity NYC. The program is based on Mexico’s successful conditional cash-transfer program, Oportunidades.
It seems the recession may be good for your health. A new paper by Stephen Bezruchka in the Canadian Medical Association Journal confirms that economic recessions in the 20th century actually led to declines in mortality.
For all the anxiety surrounding the spread of swine flu, some of the most effective flu countermeasures are also the cheapest and simplest: social distancing (keeping about three feet away from potentially infected people) and washing your hands.
Joining a growing number of people who are selling their burial plots for some extra income, Elsie Poncher is auctioning her late husband’s crypt on eBay, hoping to use the proceeds to pay off the $1.6 million mortgage on her house in Beverly Hills.
Sales of antidepressants remain brisk in spite (or perhaps because) of the recession. Slate reminds us of a decade-old study suggesting that widespread use of mood-lightening drugs could fuel irrational exuberance on Wall Street.
Jim Lynch, who owns a Hummer dealership in Chesterfield, Missouri, has begun selling guns and ammo alongside the vehicles.
Jeff Ruby, a food writer for Chicago Magazine, claims that eating only burgers for 65 days made him stupid. He says he experienced difficulty concentrating, confusion, and forgetfulness, and that “saturated fats had eroded the connections between neurons in my brain.”
If Adam Smith were alive today, he might rely on InvisibleHand for his online shopping. The service, a Firefox add-on, notifies users if a product is available for less elsewhere, eliminating the need for price-comparison websites. The invisible hand never worked so quickly.
The library on board the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is well-stocked with Freakonomics as part of its Navy Reading Program. According to Flickr user Roxanne Darling, it’s the most-read book on the ship.
The average American spends about one hour at meals, and about the same time grazing– eating as a secondary activity to something else (very often leisure). But how does this differ across the population? Those whose time is valuable — who have a high wage — have an incentive to multi-task, to graze rather than devote their full time to meals.
As people who hate meetings, we were particularly taken with one paragraph from this wonderful piece on the unlikely success of Craigslist.
More than 52,000 bicyclists have been killed in bicycle traffic accidents in the U.S. over the 80 years the federal government has been keeping records. When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault, a result of reckless or aggressive riding. But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes.
It’s got the pharmaceutical industry worried enough to fund a major study to identify the factors in rising placebo potency. Drug companies could be victims of their own success in this instance: we’ve become so convinced of the power of modern medicine, it works even when we’re off the pill.
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
