The September 11, 2005, Freakonomics column concerns Seth Roberts, a Berkeley psychologist whose very long and frequently strange history of self-experimentation has led to, among other things, a revolutionary new diet. This blog post supplies additional research material.
I’m undertaking a project on poker. I’ve set up a website, www.pokernomics.com, for people to download their hand histories. Using these hands, I hope to study what differentiates good and bad poker players. The response has been overwhelming. I think we’ve got over 7 million poker hands already. (For those of you who sent hands, but don’t have your Freakonomics . . .
Peter Maass wrote the NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on “Peak Oil” that I have been blogging about recently. He was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the course of the interview, he defended Matthew Simmons, saying, “Matt Simmons, he is not some kind of wild environmentalist, or kind of rogue economist, or anything like that…” Phew, we already have . . .
Guess what’s the No. 1 non-fiction book in Brazil?
As surprised as we have been by the success of Freakonomics in the U.S., we are doubly surprised by its success in the U.K., where it has been at or near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as . . .
Levitt and I don’t have all that many disagreements, at least not in public. But this one’s a little close to home. It began with this post, in which I wondered aloud if the tour was worth the publisher’s money. Steve followed recently with this post, which detailed why, from his perspective, the tour was a waste of his time. . . .
The answer is, that just like real estate agents and their clients, our incentives as authors are not perfectly aligned with the incentives of our publisher, William Morrow. As a consequence, we take actions that benefit ourselves and screw the publisher, just like real estate agents screw their clients. Every extra copy of Freakonomics that is sold earns the publishers . . .
It’s true that we’ve discussed in this very space the futility of a single vote. But when that single vote is going toward you (or, more precisely, a book you’ve written) — well hell, there’s no such thing as a futile vote. As it turns out, Freakonomics has been nominated for the inaugural Quill Awards. Described as a “new book . . .
The last stop on our recent California tour was at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This appearance had come about kind of casually, so we hadn’t thought about it much beforehand. The Google folks asked us to blog about our impressions, to be posted on the Google blog, and we did. Here’s what we had to say. To: All . . .
It’s been a busy few weeks, a combination of deadlines and vacation and various Freakonomics duties. So there are a variety of things that should be said on this here blog that haven’t yet been said. With any luck I’ll soon get caught up. Topics in the very near future will include: — Freakonomics is a finalist in the first . . .
Our last Freakonomics column was about the indirect approach that Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Kevin Murphy, and I used to try to measure crack cocaine use across places and over time in U.S. cities and states. Read all about it here. Some researchers in Italy took a very different, very bizarre approach, as discussed in a British newspaper article reprinted . . .
In the August 7, 2005, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt ask a simple question: Whatever happened to crack cocaine? Crack was the scourge of the 1980’s, leading to endless misery and violence. Today, it is rarely mentioned in the news media. Does that mean that crack has vanished? This blog post supplies additional research material.
That’s the headline of our newest New York Times Magazine column, to be published on Sunday, Aug. 7. Click here for a preview.
If you were not fortunate enough to win a Freako t-shirt in the giveaway, they are now available for sale through our friends at yarnzilla.com. Click here for the link. On the way, we are told, are Freakonomics baseballs hats, mugs, and pocket protectors. (Just for the sake of full disclosure, Yarnzilla.com is run by Linda Jines. If you memorized . . .
Last week, we went to California. Our publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, had determined that Freakonomics wasn’t selling as well there as elsewhere. It may have been a simple case of late adoption — Levitt and I are based in Chicago and New York, respectively, two cities where the book started strong — but Harper was taking no chances. (For the record, . . .
A question for the baseball experts: has any team in history ever been as bad as the A’s were early in the season and done as well as they are doing now? It has been an amazing run. Interestingly, the market at tradesports is still giving the A’s no respect. The bid-ask spread on total wins this season for the . . .
Levitt and I both arrived in Los Angeles late last night after nearly identical flight plans: 90 min. on the ground at our originating airports (JFK for me, O’Hare for Levitt). But no security trouble this time. I had the good fortune to be reading an early copy of The Search, by John Battelle, which primarily tells the history of . . .
In the “Letters” section of today’s New York Times Sunday magazine, a letter by two doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia criticizes our piece on car seats vs seat belts: As pediatricians, scientists and leaders of the world’s largest study on children in crashes, we think that overinterpretation of findings from a single source of data led Stephen J. . . .
A number of readers, in light of our recent column on car seats vs. seat belts for kids, have asked my views on seat belts and air bags for adults. So let me ask you a question: if you could only have one or the other, would you go for the seat belt or the air bag. It turns out . . .
I’m starting a research project on poker, with the goal of understanding what makes a person a good or bad poker player. I couldn’t find the kind of data I needed, so I am assembling my own data set. What I’m looking for are online poker players who have been tracking their hands using Poker Tracker software. I’ve set up . . .
Anyone who has tried to visit my home page at the University of Chicago to download copies of my academic papers recently will have noticed that it hasn’t been updated since 2003. Until today.It still looks the same as the old one, but now you can download just about all of my papers if you click on the “Curriculum Vitae . . .
A commenter on this blog finally asked a question about Freakonomics that, while seemingly obvious, has never really been asked. (This hasn’t kept a lot of people from commenting on the subject, but most of the commentary has turned out to be wrong). Here’s the question, from one “RJ”: I am curious. Mr. Dubner is not an Economist, but he . . .
The July 10, 2005, Freakonomics column, “The Seat-Belt Solution: How Much Good Do Car Seats Do?” is about the efficacy of child car seats versus plain old seat belts. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Things move quickly in the modern world. Within two hours of posting my academic paper on car seats vs. seat belts on the Freakonomics web page (the first time this paper had seen light of day), another economist found the paper and tested its hypotheses on a very different data set and reported back the results. The economist is Paul . . .
Several weeks ago, in the interest of full transparency, we posted some negative reviews of our book. The time has come again. It’s not that we are masochists; in fact, positive reviews have regularly been posted on this site as well. Like this one and this one and this one and this one. (The last one goes a bit too . . .
I’m not the only one saying nice things about Pat Robertson these days. Sarah Vowell, frequent NPR contributor, the author of the recent book “Assassination Vacation,” and the voice of Violet in the movie “The Incredibles” wrote recently on the New York Times op-ed page: Until recently, about the nicest thing I would have said about this televangelist is that . . .
On Sunday, July 10, our second Freakonomics column appears in the New York Times Magazine. Questions and comments will follow here.
We thought we had somehow gotten away without doing a book tour for Freakonomics. (As most writers can tell you, the typical book tour inevitably lands you in Milwaukee on a Tuesday night, reading to four people, three of whom are your relatives.) But our vigilant publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, decided that Freakonomics has not yet bloomed in California as fully . . .
Since the publication of Freakonomics, a lot of readers have written to comment upon or ask about “the Roe Effect,” the theory put forth by James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal. The Roe Effect posits that among the many unintended consequences of Roe v. Wade was a significant change in voting patterns. Although Taranto himself acknowledges many nuances and . . .
July is shaping up to be Contemporary Christian Month in Freakonomics land. First, Levitt was interviewed by Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. Now, in a Village Voice article called “Music for the Megachurch,” Josh Langhoff writes the following: If you’ve skipped ahead to the abortion chapter in Steven Levitt’s ‘Freakonomics’, you know his controversial argument that Roe v. Wade . . .
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