A reader named D.J. writes in with a problem that requires some sensitive game theory, trickier than the roommate dilemma. Note that he is wise enough to flatter you as “intelligent and thoughtful,” so do your best to live up to his bias.
As searchers recover more wreckage from the Air France jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic last week, Miles O’Brien reports on the perils the jet faced as it flew headlong to its doom in a gauntlet of equatorial thunderstorms. In an interview with BoingBoing TV, O’Brien wonders why jets don’t transmit telemetry data all the time, moving the black box from the back of an aircraft, where it could be lost, crushed or incinerated, to computers safely on the ground. Any ideas, readers?
This ad demonstrates that T-Mobile has a deep understanding of human nature.
Either that or they have been reading the economics literature.
My demand is quite inelastic, and the near monopolist at this smaller airport is taking advantage of that. I know that the price in the main part of the airport is lower for the same quality food, and the average quality is better too. I wonder: is this generally true?
NASA research suggests that there may be life on Mars after all — but that, up ’til now, we’ve been destroying it when we visit. (Does this hurt the case for space exploration?) As New Scientist tells the tale, The Phoenix Mars lander, which NASA uses to search for organic compounds on the red planet, may have been mistakenly burning up those very compounds.
I learned of this article via Market Design, the blog of the always-interesting Al Roth. His headline was striking: “Anesthesia Was Once Repugnant.” There’s no way, I thought, that he could be right on this one (even though he has always been right in the past). But after reading Jay’s article, I was thoroughly convinced. Like most good arguments, it is not only convincing but humbling: how could we not have seen this earlier?
We’ve blogged before about how people fear strangers more than they should, whereas it’s the people you know who often cause trouble. According to this new study, urban mockingbirds may be better at risk assessment than people. It found that the birds apparently learn to recognize the faces of people they’ve seen before and, based on past encounters with an individual, assess how threatening they are; but they aren’t as fearful of complete strangers. (HT: VSL) [%comments]
We know Freakonomics readers love brain teasers. We hope you’ll test your brain on these five puzzlers. The results, completely anonymous, will be compiled and analyzed by the Vision Lab and the Social Neuroscience and Psychopathology Lab at Harvard University. Have fun, for science!
The jury’s still out on whether WolframAlpha.com will turn into a tool that is useful to solve real world computational problems, but it certainly is fun to play with.
There’s interesting research waiting to be done explaining just why some countries have been hit harder by the global financial crisis than others. For now, here’s an interesting observation from my former boss at the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glenn Stevens
Say the mounting rate of escalator injuries spooks you into taking an elevator instead. Even if a glitch doesn’t leave you trapped alone in that metal box for forty hours, you’re still captive, for a short while, in a unique laboratory for human psychology. Throw another passenger or two into the mix, and things get really interesting. …
Washington, D.C., is underlaced by miles of fiber optic cables that carry information for the nation’s intelligence agencies. The exact locations of these cables are kept secret so that terrorists and other enemy agents can’t snip the lines. The secrecy has indeed kept the cables safe from terrorists. Instead, the danger comes from well-meaning construction crews, who occasionally sever these sensitive conduits during the course of an innocuous building project. That’s when the men in the black SUV’s show up.
YouTube may become the digital generation’s replacement for MTV, reports NPR’s All Things Considered, as musical artists use it as a cheaper way to be discovered, promote their albums, and post music videos that would never have made the cut at MTV. Getting a video noticed on YouTube, meanwhile, requires a different set of “tricks” than MTV, which may produce a new generation of videos that forgo bling and fancy production for dance crazes and badly shot paparazzi videos.
For those who are still too scared to invest in the stock market, you can buy some imaginary stock at UpDown, a “practice investing” site that simulates the stock market and lists real-life companies without meting out real-life consequences.
I’ve been eating a lot of kiwis lately. At the corner deli near my home, I can buy three for $1. They are delicious. Unless the stickers are lying, they come from New Zealand. At 33 cents apiece, a New Zealand kiwi costs less than the price of mailing a letter to the East Side. (And believe me, I consider a first-class stamp one of the greatest bargains ever.) How on earth can it cost so little to grow, pick, pack, and ship a piece of fruit across the world?
Latvia has been particularly devastated by the economic crisis. The Latvian Blondes Association recently staged a “Blonde Weekend,” complete with a 500-woman parade, in the hopes of raising the nation’s spirits.
Levitt was floored by the documentary Smile Pinki, about two children in India who receive free surgery to repair their cleft lips. The documentary, which won an Oscar last year, gets its television premier tonight on HBO at 7 p.m. You can watch the trailer, here.
Good news: people who still have jobs are having a much easier time driving to work. Traffic congestion is down as much as 30 percent in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metro areas. In Washington, D.C., famous for gridlock of all kinds, traffic has fallen 24 percent during rush hour. San Francisco saw travel times fall 12 percent this . . .
Even in the days of Woodward and Bernstein, writes Mark Kemp in Paste magazine, print journalism “wasn’t ever entirely noble” — but today, it’s “crumbling faster than week-old bread.” With “fond memories” of what the newspaper industry once was, and hope that it has a future, Kemp put together a list of the top 10 songs about newspapers and journalism.
Vanity Fair and Bloomberg hosted an economic panel last week featuring Meredith Whitney, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Olivier Sarkozy, Austan Goolsbee, and Jack Welch. The heavyweight panelists debated unions, the Obama administration’s stimulus package, health care, and the banking system.
The problem of children used as soldiers has been gaining visibility since, among other things, former child soldier Ishmael Beah published his memoir. But the image of the child soldier as a young African boy with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder isn’t as descriptive of the problem as you might think.
The Cardsofchange website posts photos of revamped business cards sent in by the recently laid-off. The cards, most of which are marked up in pen or marker, reflect what each person has done since losing his or her job.
David Warsh reflects on the advances of auction technology and market design since the first high-tech auction was held by the Federal Communications Commission in 1994. Warsh points out that despite the recent growth of auctions in private markets and the well-established benefits of auctions, industry continues to vigorously oppose government auctions. Auctions of landing slots at New York airports, toxic bank assets, and carbon emission permits have all been opposed by industry groups precisely because of their price-discovering power. Warsh, however, is hopeful about the future. “As principles of market design become more thoroughly articulated and widely understood,” he writes, “the sphere of governmental discretion will shrink.”
Should we get rid of physical cash in favor of all-digital currency? David Wolman thinks so.
A site called Work and Wealth for All offers free access to an extensive library of podcasts on economics, Social Security, and public policy, delivered by some of the best-known economists on the planet. The site also features commentary and analysis from a number of economically inclined outlets like The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. All in all, a good place to bone up on actual economics (as opposed to, i.e., a site like ours).
A study finds that living abroad for long periods of time boosts creative thinking.
Continental Airlines is suing nine of its pilots, reports ABC News, claiming they faked divorces in order to draw down their pension funds before retirement. The airline became suspicious when some of the couples continued living together and all nine couples eventually reunited. Continental believes the pilots became worried about the safety of their pension funds, especially after seeing what’s happening at other airlines.
Bob Clapp is 72 years old. He’s six-foot-one, weighs 190 pounds, has a 32-inch waist, 11 percent body fat, and claims to maintain the biological age of a 36-year-old. Clapp has also been a regular user of anabolic steroids for 50 years with “no irreparable negative side effects.” Jordan Heller profiles Clapp and other users, questioning the criminalization of steroids. A similar inquiry has recently been pursued by Miguel Sancho, Andrew Kirell, and John Stossel.
Home prices continue to fall, dropping another 18.7 percent in March. The price plunge is being blamed in part on the glut of cheap, foreclosed homes on the market. How cheap are these homes? They’re selling for as much as 31 percent below market value. Of course, deteriorating home prices are a leading driver of mortgage defaults, so more foreclosed homes lead to lower home prices, which lead to more foreclosures.
In an excellent article for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande investigates health care in McAllen, Texas, “one of the most expensive health care markets in the country.” Gawande traces the high costs to overutilization and a culture of entrepreneurship among McAllen’s doctors. Lester Dyke, a cardiac surgeon in McAllen, told Gawande, “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen.” Gawande advocates collaborative, accountable-care organizations, like Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, and concludes that unless American health care moves away from the McAllen model and toward the Mayo model, “McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future.”
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