In a New York Times Op-Ed on Saturday, Sonja Lyubomirsky wrote that subjective well-being has remained high during the recession. But she’s dead wrong. Here’s the gist of her piece, titled “Why We’re Still Happy” : Research in psychology and economics suggests that when only your salary is cut, or when only you make a foolish investment, or when only . . .
Last week I did something that felt very 1990’s: I purchased a compact disc. The CD wasn’t for me; it was a Christmas present.
As I wrapped the CD, I pondered the silliness of the whole enterprise. After all, the recipient — like most of us these days — listens almost exclusively to MP3 files. In fact, I’m not even sure if he has a CD player beyond his laptop, which he will use to convert his disc-shaped gift into a more useful set of MP3 files.
Color me confused, but I’ve never really understood the difference between a bet and “financial trade.” And if there ever really was a line, it’s definitely becoming blurrier. In recent months, there have been millions of dollars bet in options markets, as traders seek a big payday in the event that the economy heads south — and this hasn’t raised . . .
If those riding intellectual fads are sometimes guilty of sloppy reasoning, imagine what happens when two fads collide. That’s what happened when the British Medical Journal elected to publish a study analyzing 1) happiness in 2) social networks. The study, by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, concludes that happiness is contagious within social networks. According to the authors, your happiness . . .
I’m a bit late getting to this, but I just saw that my friend Roland Fryer appeared on The Colbert Report on Monday. He was — officially — talking about his current experiments with providing incentives for kids to get better grades. While it is pretty hard to look good next to Colbert, Roland pulled it off. And it takes . . .
Ronald Reagan famously described the distinction between a recession and a depression as follows: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.” Right now, a few more economists might be willing to use the D-word. The “help wanted” publication for Ph.D. economists is sporting a brand new section: suspended or canceled listings. . . .
What are the odds of your marriage ending in divorce? This is a risk with some pretty important consequences, but chances are, you don’t have the foggiest idea on how to quantify it. Until now. My favorite economist (and my significant other), Betsey Stevenson, has put together a neat online widget for the folks at Divorce360.com. The widget crunches recent . . .
Yesterday, I asked Tyler Cowen if he’s willing to bet his Marginal Revolution readers against Freakonomics readers in the caption-that-photo contest we announced earlier this week. I’m pleased to report that Cowen is a betting man after all. Yes Tyler, your bet is accepted — and it’s dinner on the loser. I remain confident that the winning caption will be . . .
Freakonomics versus Marginal Revolution in a caption-that-photo contest.
Yesterday, President Bush invited the most recent round of Nobel laureates to the White House to accept his congratulations. And yes, this included his trenchant critic and economics prize-winner, Paul Krugman. Photo from Economist.com This photo posted on Economist.com (from Agence France-Presse) makes me wish I were better at reading body language. I’m going to shamelessly rip off The New . . .
Photo: Darwin Bell Beets are the new broccoli. Or at least they will be after Obama takes office on January 20, as the president-elect recently revealed his distaste for this vitamin-laden root vegetable. And Obama is not alone: Even as beet salads have become popular in trendy eateries, most American kids I know also reject the mighty beet. It’s a . . .
Photo: sporkist My former Ph.D. student and frequent co-author Erik Snowberg sends along an interesting question: Why do discount clothing stores (like Nordstrom Rack — and clothing sales in general) have an excess of really small and really large sizes? I have to admit, I’ve always wondered. Erik continues: The typical answer seems to be that there are more medium . . .
The 8th installment in Bob Dylan‘s “bootleg” series is a two-disc set called Tell Tale Signs, and it is set to be released next Tuesday (October 7). But until then, you can listen to it for free on National Public Radio, here. Yep, free. But as I understand it, this only lasts until the official release next week. I just . . .
A revised bailout plan has been announced, and President Bush has thrown his weight behind it. To my eye, the rewriting of Paulson‘s plan this past week has been worthwhile; and the final plan, while imperfect, is a useful step forward, and a clear improvement on the original plan in terms of likely effectiveness, cost to the taxpayers, accountability, fairness, . . .
Usain Bolt‘s wonderful run in the Olympic 200-meter sprint reminds us that the normal distribution — the familiar bell curve beloved by economists and statisticians — can be wildly inappropriate when analyzing extremely selected samples. This morning’s New York Times shows Usain Bolt’s new world record, relative to the 250 greatest 200-meter sprints ever. Not only does this not look . . .
I recently happened upon one of George Stigler‘s humorous asides in the 1977 Journal of Political Economy — “The Conference Handbook.” In order to make discussions of research papers more efficient, Stigler suggested that one should simply interrupt the speaker by shouting the numbered objection, rather than the usual, overly long interjection. And as a public service, he gave a . . .
Many teachers believe that a “few bad apples” can spoil a whole classroom, reducing the learning of everyone in the room. While this is part of the folk wisdom of teaching, it has been surprisingly difficult to find these effects in the data. But a very convincing new paper, by Scott Carrell of U.C. Davis and Mark Hoekstra of U.Pitt, . . .
Wow. We really do live in the midst of a tidal wave of more detailed and interesting data. The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States. . . .
Jacob Hacker‘s Great Risk Shift described rising income risk over recent decades as an important and quite general phenomenon. While there’s been plenty of controversy around that claim, the most careful analysis I have seen roughly supports Hacker’s contention. (The CBO, using different data and a different methodology disagrees.) What Hacker actually shows is that the average level of income . . .
One of the things that I have learned (the hard way) is that looking sensible on TV is harder than it looks. That’s why I was happy when Nightline decided to interview my co-author Betsey Stevenson rather than me for a segment that ran last week summarizing our research on the relationship between income and happiness. Freakonomics readers have already . . .
You probably recall Hillary Clinton turning anti-economist in the dying days of her campaign: “Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.” And more recently John McCain has jumped aboard: “I trust the people and not the so-called economists to give the American people a little relief.” Honestly, I don’t get it. So . . .
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen draws an intriguing parallel between accusations made by disgraced NBA ex-referee Tim Donaghy, and models of collusion. While David Stern has denied explicit collusion between the league and the refs to influence game outcomes, Tyler argues that there may instead be implicit collusion: refs may simply perceive that the league wants them to produce . . .
It may be surprising to learn that one of the leading scholars studying U.S. politics is in fact a Swedish economist. But the advantage of this unusual state of affairs is that during my recent trip to Stockholm, I had a chance to catch up with David Strömberg. David and I spent an interesting afternoon exploring data from both political . . .
It isn’t often that economics makes the pages of Science, but I finally got around to taking a look at E. Roy Weintraub‘s review of Steve Marglin‘s The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community. (Gated copy here.) The prophet Jeremiah is alive and well and teaching economics at Harvard. It is not often that a scholar with . . .
The Noel Coward song suggests that “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Following Saturday’s Stockholm Marathon, I’ll add marathon runners and thousands of cheering Swedes to that list, too. Every novice runner begins a marathon with three aims: to finish; to run the whole way; and to beat some special time (usually four hours). Following . . .
Over a long dinner (and more than a few glasses of wine) with some economist friends, conversation turned to trying to understand why happiness is declining in Belgium. Helena Svaleryd offered an audacious new theory: the Belgians have not enjoyed the rise of celebrity culture that provides so much amusement for the rest of us. Concurring, Anna Sjögren argued that . . .
Tomorrow is a big day for me — I’m running the Stockholm marathon. Here’s a simple wisdom of crowds experiment: A free piece of Freakonomics schwag to whoever comes closest to guessing my finishing time. Leave your guesses in the comments anytime before the race begins (2 p.m. Stockholm time = 8 a.m. EST). And now, the form guide: The . . .
Emek Basker is an incredibly creative (and under-appreciated) industrial organization economist. She is also surely the leading Wal-Mart-ologist, and has been studying big box stores for several years. Her most recent piece provides a very nice teaching example highlighting the importance of the income elasticity of demand; she also managed the perfectly accurate but cheeky turn of phrase that we . . .
I’m currently in Sweden, spending a couple of weeks at Stockholm University’s Institute for International Economic Studies. It is really a remarkable place. “The Institute” was founded under the directorship of Nobellist Gunnar Myrdal, it thrived under the great Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, and is now guided by Torsten Persson, a giant in political economy. By any measure, that’s quite . . .
In a short piece in the latest Science journal, about the Promise of Prediction Markets, we provide a short review of the literature on prediction markets — how and why they work, and the accumulated empirical evidence. But our key point is public policy: Unfortunately, however, current federal and state laws limiting gambling create significant barriers to the establishment of . . .
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.
