Here’s another hilarious xtranormal send-up – this time lampooning the Becker/Murphy theory of rational addiction.
Hans Rosling, a guru of data animation, is at it again.
In a previous post, I asked why the writers of the TV show House chose for last week’s episode (“A Pox on our House”) to have a sick family composed of a recently married husband and wife who each bring to the marriage a child from a previous relationship.
Here’s a puzzler for people who have seen the latest episode of the TV show House.
Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story (more here), paints a compelling but amazingly bleak picture of a future ravaged by the twin evils of predictive analytics and texting. Following the truly prescient Snow Crash, his characters are obsessively plugged into their “äppäräts,” souped-up versions of today’s app phones. (One of the funnier lines occurs when one character makes a disparaging reference to another character’s outmoded hand device, saying: “What is this, an iPhone?” (Kindle 1244).) Here is a world where credit scores, eHarmony-compatibility predictions and rankings are ubiquitously at hand. Characters routinely choose the reality of the shadows on their screen over the real world.
On page 9 of Lifecycle Investing, Barry Nalebuff and I write:
“[B]efore you invest in stocks, first pay off all your student loans and credit card debts.”
On reflection, we were only half right. You should pay off your high-interest-rate credit card loans before investing in stock. But in this post from our Forbes blog, Barry and I show why young investors need not pay off their student loans before investing in stock.
The music entrepreneur Derek Sivers gave a TED Talk with the provocative claim that you’re more likely to reach your goals if you keep them secret.
“The honeymoon is over.” These are the words of Alberto Iturra, the leader of a team of psychologists who have instituted a series of prizes and punishments to change the behavior of the 33 miners trapped in Chile. When the miners do what the psychologists want, they are given treats like T.V. and music. But if miners refuse, say, to submit to daily interviews with psychologists, the psychologists will restrict the supply of cigarettes or wine.
The results are in. I’m happy to report that my eBay auction ended with a winning bid of $282.85. Twenty-three bidders put in a total of 45 bids. The bidders were a mixture of seasoned eBay users (some with more than 150 eBay purchases) and newbie eBay users.
I was a little scared to get on the scale this morning. I had eaten copious amounts this weekend – including a quarter pounder at McDonalds. But my fear was heightened because I knew that my weight would be automatically tweeted at twitter.com/ianweight.
Harry Truman once quipped, “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, ‘On the one hand, on the other'” Often even a lone economist has difficulty making a recommendation. While true on certain matters, there are many issues where economists do agree about the right and wrong course of action. A case in point is competitive bidding for Medicare supplies.
An unusual auction began late yesterday on eBay. I’m selling my “right to regain weight.” Why would anyone in their right mind be willing to pay me cash to buy this right? What does this even mean?
My eleventh book, Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done, has just been published. It is centrally about how to craft incentives and commitments to help you and others accomplish your goals.
Another pleasurable summer read for me was Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality. Put simply, the book is an impressive achievement. It interweaves Ariely’s compelling personal narrative with what seems like dozens of his own super-interesting academic experiments. Ariely explains how his own struggle with being severely burned as a youth put him on the path to being one of the world’s premier behavioral economists.
A few years ago, a contracts student of mine left me almost speechless when he admitted in class that he had purchased a tie from J. Press with the intent of returning it after he wore it to deliver a mock oral argument to me (as a mock Connecticut Supreme Court Justice).
Why can buying a prom dress be legally similar to buying a textbook?
One of my summertime reading pleasures has been reading C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters for the first time. As a new generation of property student begins the school year, I thought it would be useful to pass on this commentary on the most property-laden adjective, the possessive “my.”
University students are returning to campuses throughout the country. It is a migration that raises my spirits – seeing the energetic, eager faces tackling another course in contracts or intellectual property. But this year something is different. For the first time, a federal law has taken effect which requires “institution of higher education receiving Federal financial assistance” to provide students with information on textbook pricing.
I received the following email from Kyle Tower, one of the lead members of the Ticketfree team, responding to my earlier post on speeding insurance.
A couple weeks ago, Ian Ayres became briefly fascinated and somewhat appalled by the appearance of a new Internet business that offered a sort of insurance against speeding tickets. In return for an annual fee of $169, ticketfree.org promised to reimburse you for the costs of up to $500 in moving violations. Then, the site suddenly disappeared. Why?
Wolfram Alpha has just launched a free Widget Builder that lets you easily create widgets to calculate all kinds of things – seamlessly integrating data from the Alpha server.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources on July 28th ran what may be the first-ever online reverse auction for energy efficiency grants. The state allocated $3 million of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding in a series of three one-hour auctions by having 23 pre-qualified businesses bid on a $/kWh saved basis for projects that were expected to enhance energy efficiency. Grants with fixed dollar amounts were awarded to the bidders who promised the best (conservation) bang for the (grant) buck.
The Research 2000 case.
Here is a post coauthored with Yale School of Management professor, Barry Nalebuff, regarding Paul Samuelson’s criticisms of our Lifecycle Investing strategy.
There is a brief vignette in the uninspired movie Killers in which an inebriated guest is about to drive away after a wild party at the home of the film’s two leads. One of the film’s leads advises the departing guest to walk home. Readers of SuperFreakonomics will realize this is bad advice.
Will he choose salary or a championship?
Ayres and Nalebuff coauthor a poem.
A strategy for the Lakers.
Game theory lessons on YouTube.
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