An important new working paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodríguez examines whether Hugo Chavez opposition voters in Venezuela paid a price for their opposition. Between late 2002 and August 2004, more than 4.7 million Venezuelans signed petitions in favor of a recall election for Chavez despite widespread threats that signers would be punished. After Chavez’s . . .
Nate Silver, a Freakonomics favorite, wonders if the American car culture is finally coming to an end. Silver points out that Americans drove much less this January than last January, even less than expected in a bad economy with high unemployment. Part of the decrease may be explained by a delayed response to last summer’s high gas prices, but Silver . . .
New Zealand native Phil Keoghan is best known as the host of CBS’s reality show The Amazing Race, each episode ending with Phil at some exotic international finish line, solemnly informing each team where it has placed in the day’s contest.
Despite a friendly Congress and a pending labor bill, unions are under fire these days in Detroit and elsewhere — perhaps with good reason. A working paper by David Lee and Alexandre Mas finds that a successful unionization vote significantly decreases the market value of the company even absent changes in organizational performance. Lee and Mas run a policy simulation . . .
We blogged a while back about some research suggesting Facebook use was correlated with low grades. Well, one Facebook-using professor named Eszter Hargittai thought the data looked fishy. So did Josh Pasek, a graduate student who got in touch with Hargittai — through Facebook, of course — and asked if she’d like to work on a paper with him challenging . . .
A German court recently upheld a ban on surnames that are hyphenated three or more times, claiming long names could cause “intolerable administrative difficulties” for German officials. As Time reports, local German authorities must also approve first names, which have to match the child’s gender and “must not expose the child to ridicule or discrimination.” (Germany is hardly the first . . .
Bram Stoker‘s Dracula is the story of a vampire’s reign of terror in Victorian England, told through letters and diary entries. This blog will post each entry on the day it appears in the book, so readers can experience the story “in real time.” Dracula started on May 3 and ends November 6. Think of it as a new series . . .
In what Wired calls a botnet “explosion,” botnets have taken control of about 12 million new IP addresses since the beginning of the year. (That’s according to a report by the anti-virus firm McAfee.) The number of zombie computers — those overtaken by a hacker, trojan horse, etc. — have increased 50 percent since last year. What spurred the increase? . . .
What made swine flu so worrisome was the high death toll it wrought in Mexico. Most of us assumed that the virus would be at least as lethal wherever it spread. It wasn’t. With the virus temporarily in retreat, current estimates show all but one of the swine flu deaths were confined to Mexico, and all but a few of . . .
As if you needed another reason to avoid the bookstore, you can now buy your book from an Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds (albeit without flashy cover imagery, photos, etc.) your book of choice in just a few minutes. There are about five of them in the U.S., reports Publishers Weekly, and they were recently launched in the . . .
In much of America, conspicuous conservation is the new conspicuous consumption. Those of you itching for a fix of boom-time nostalgia can visit the Most Expensive Journal, your guide to the priciest items available. A $50,000 Go-Kart? Sure. A jewel-encrusted, $2.4 million iPhone? Why not? It’s SkyMall for plutocrats. [%comments]
Freedom House has released its 2009 Freedom of the Press Survey. For the seventh consecutive year, it notes, global press freedom has declined, with declines occurring across all regions for the first time. Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong were downgraded from “Free” to “Partly Free.” (Is it time for someone to study the correlation between economic meltdowns and press freedom?) . . .
Is your pâté consumption wreaking havoc on your pocketbook? A food processor and some Newman’s Own dog food may solve your problem. Economists at The American Association of Wine Economists conducted double-blind taste tests of five unlabeled blended meat products, including dog food. Subjects were unable to identify the dog food. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center describes some surprising demographic trends. Contrary to popular belief, birth rates have risen in northern Europe and the United States in recent years and fallen across much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In fact, the fertility rate in the United States is at its highest level since 1971. In contrast, . . .
Last month, Levitt blogged about how Google Flu Trends, which measures flu queries in real-time, can serve as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks. The catch: it only works if Google’s data analysts are paying attention to the data — which they weren’t last week, when Flu Trends showed a bump in flu-related search terms right before the swine flu . . .
The following is a guest post by Linda Jines — yarn merchant, book titler, and sister of Steve Levitt. Enjoy. The Office-onomics? A Guest Post By Linda Jines The most recent episode of NBC’s hit comedy The Office offered viewers something extra along with its usual half hour of wry observations about life in Dilbertian corporate America. The episode, entitled . . .
A website called African Signals, the brainchild of Eric Hersman, launched this week. Its goal is to aggregate information about mobile phone and internet connections across Africa. Hersman is also affiliated with Ushahidi, “a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.” You can see Hersman’s TED talk on Ushahidi . . .
One of Huan Hsu‘s Chinese coworkers called him “Steve” for months, wondering why Hsu, unlike most other young professionals in mainland China, had yet to pick an English name for himself. Another of Hsu’s friends, who goes by dozens of names depending on the situation, tells him “a name is just a dai hao.” In other words, a code name, . . .
Barkevious Mingo! The L.S.U. linebacker fended off a late challenge from Iris Macadangdang to be crowned winner of the 2009 Name of the Year competition. Hopefully in 2010 they’ll finally find LemonJello and OrangeJello. [%comments]
Since we first asked you to send us your Freakonomics-related photos, you’ve responded from all over the world, and with an impressive variety of images, ranging from innovative ways to stop overzealous newspaper deliveries … To signs of hyperinflation: So keep sending your photos here, and, as usual, tell us why they’re Freak-worthy.
A new study analyzes reciprocal attention in blogging. The authors conclude that “the activity of bloggers is found to be related to the size and level of reciprocity within a blogger’s network.” The study also finds that bloggers who don’t participate in reciprocity are punished with a lower number of readers. In other words, the Internet hasn’t remotely damaged the . . .
Tent cities have been cropping up across the country and around the world. The Times‘ Jim Wilson recently put together this series of photos of tent city life outside Fresno, California. (NOTE: This post originally linked to a different set of photos which the photographer has since requested be removed.) [%comments]
Dan Hamermesh wrote recently that he doesn’t feel sorry for would-be retirees who lost their savings by bad asset allocation. Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff thinks people aren’t capable of predicting how much they’ll need to save in the first place. So he has developed a “consumption smoothing” program that helps users maintain stable spending patterns up to and . . .
We’ve been watching the wandering meaning of the word “piracy” over the last few weeks, as it stretches and shrinks to accommodate the modern world. The re-emergence of honest-to-goodness sea piracy shares headline space with the high-profile trial of Swedish internet pirates and the debate over just what to call “digital piracy.” The Wall Street Journal reports that another group . . .
If going to the library is a hassle and you don’t want to pay $20 for a children’s book, plop your kids in front of this website, which offers children’s stories for free. The stories are all original and written by the site’s proprietors, so you won’t find certain books there — but they may be the perfect therapy for . . .
We’ve told you about recession music, recession comfort, and depression cooking. Now: recession gadgetry? Last Year’s Model is a site encouraging users to reject disposable culture by hanging on to their good old gadgets as long as possible. It’s good for the pocketbook and good for the environment. We’ve got a 2004 model-year iPod whirring around the Freakonomics office. Is . . .
Some on Wall Street think of themselves as the fighter jocks of American capitalism. Justin Fox thinks they’re more like bumper car drivers, “spending more time tangling with each other than doing anything useful.” Either way, now that the market has tanked and the public has turned on bankers, many on the Street find themselves switching to Plan B. [%comments]
If deliberately practicing your way to success seems like a lot of work, there’s always the prescription drug route. In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the increasing use of cognitive-enhancement drugs. Tests have indicated that the drugs improve concentration but their effect on abstract thought and creativity is unclear. As one scientist put it, “I’m a little concerned that . . .
The paparazzi are like 18th-century pirates in that it’s hard to understand and control them until you realize that they’re rational, economic actors. The Obama administration seems to understand this. The White House has been strategically releasing photos of the Obamas in an attempt to drive down the value of paparazzi shots. The avalanche of Obama photos recently released to . . .
You’ve probably already forgotten about Conficker, the computer worm, since it declined to wreak havoc as feared on April 1. Rest assured, Conficker has not forgotten about you. It’s currently operating on millions of computers around the world, and it’s still spreading and changing. Nobody knows what it will do next. As Bruce Schneier points out, the worm isn’t any . . .
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