I’ve been enjoying Arthur Brooks‘s musings on the relationship between personal politics and personal happiness. And so I was interested to read an interesting piece in The Times (of London), assessing how my own recent research with Betsey Stevenson on income and happiness fits into the broader political debate. And I’m a sucker for an article that can relate economic . . .
A couple of months ago, Dubner and Levitt wrote about how poorly constructed laws can lead to some unintended consequences. Let me add one more example to their list, albeit one that I’m enjoying. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board was set up in the wake of the 21st Amendment, and the end of Prohibition. A direct (and presumably intended) result . . .
One of the real barriers to widespread adoption of prediction markets by U.S. corporations has been a murky legal environment. Are prediction markets legitimate business tools, an alternative set of securities markets requiring SEC regulation, illegal betting markets, allowable games of skill, or something else altogether? Fortunately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is stepping up to the plate, and I’m . . .
Yesterday, Democrats voted in Indiana and North Carolina. My latest W.S.J. column parses the results. A few highlights: With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton trading victories in North Carolina and Indiana, it’s tempting to call Tuesday’s primary vote a split decision. Instead, political prediction markets have declared Senator Obama a clear winner. Senator Obama began Election Day rated a 76 . . .
Last week I posed a simple challenge: Try to find any coherent economist willing to support the gas tax holiday proposed by candidates McCain and Clinton. The challenge remains unanswered, but here’s some interesting commentary collected during the week: 1. George Stephanopoulos posed my challenge directly to Senator Clinton (video here), asking: “Can you name one economist — a credible . . .
Following my recent musings about the tax rebate checks, several people asked about the likely economic consequences of this sort of policy. My friend and colleague, Nick Souleles, is one of the leading experts on these matters, so I asked him for a short primer on what we learned from when rebate checks were sent out in 2001. Here is . . .
This week many of you will receive tax rebate checks from the I.R.S. Yes, that $600 you are receiving is meant to help kick start the economy. The government tried the same thing in 2001, sending out $300 checks. But this time, there’s a difference — not all of us are getting a check. In fact, those earning six figures . . .
Election season is probably the best time for bad economic policies to garner support — and one of the roles of academic economists is to call the candidates out on terrible policy. From yesterday’s New York Times, we learn that: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan . . .
What good is G.D.P., anyway? While my postings this week have shown that it is correlated with happiness, I have not spent much time asking just precisely what it is about our subjective experiences that is correlated with higher G.D.P. In fact, the analysis in my previous posts, focused almost exclusively on simple responses to surveys asking people how happy . . .
How do you score a bruising fight like the Pennsylvania primary? In politics, it seems, expectations are everything. And regular readers will not be surprised to hear that I would argue that political prediction markets can help us understand which candidates actually exceeded pre-poll expectations. Some simple observations: Clinton‘s 9.5 point victory margin was roughly what one might expect from . . .
In a famous 1995 paper, Richard Easterlin asked: “Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?” His analysis involved studying the evolution of happiness through time in Japan, the U.S. and Europe. His answer? “No.” Betsey Stevenson and I recently returned to examining the evolution of happiness in these three important regions, and we conclude that the . . .
One of the fun things about living in Philadelphia is that elections here are always hard-fought, and often have a national impact. And today’s Democratic primary is no exception. What can I tell you from being on the ground here in Philly? First, there is no shortage of Penn students for Obama. They are everywhere. And second, in an unscientific . . .
Continuing on the theme of the relationship between income and happiness (previous posts: 1, 2 , and 3), let me show you what Betsey Stevenson and I learned when comparing the happiness of rich and poor people. Let’s begin with the most recent data from the 2006 General Social Survey, which asked: “Taken all together, how would you say things . . .
Yesterday I noted that there is powerful evidence from the recent Gallup World Poll that rich countries are happier than poor countries. Today, I want to show you how this fact remained hidden in the data for several decades. (And I don’t mean to suggest that we are the first to discover this, but rather that those who noted this . . .
Following yesterday’s post, I promised to describe the new evidence that rich countries are happier than poor countries. The simplest way to make this point is with a chart, using data from the Gallup World Poll. This amazing new dataset contains detailed data on subjective well-being for 132 countries in 2006. (Amazingly, Gallup plans to continue to field this poll . . .
Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson discussed their happiness research on CNBC today. Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox. What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations: 1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people. 2) But, rich societies tend not to . . .
This morning’s inbox leads me to two observations: 1) There is some excellent research out there about marriage and divorce. 2) There is no shortage of ways for imaginative advocates to distort the findings of this research. Let me begin with the first point: an intriguing paper by Elizabeth Ananat and Guy Michaels, forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources. . . .
Justin Lahart at the Wall Street Journal suggests a new party game for economists (or at least something to keep you awake if a conference gets dull): Six Degrees of Joe Stiglitz. He’s suggesting the econ version of the Paul Erdos number in math: If you drew a diagram linking different mathematicians, many of the lines would cross at Erdos. . . .
On the bright side, that leaves a lot of running room for policy-oriented economists like me! On the dark side, that means that economists are often under the streetlight rather than closer to where their keys might be.
A reporter friend of mine recently asked me for a short list of academic economists he should call to better understand the current financial and economic mess. I found it a more difficult question than it should be. It really has been quite striking how silent most economists have been in this hour of need. There are, of course, a . . .
When Betsey got home from her morning run earlier this week, she beamed and told me she had covered eight kilometers. And this Sunday, after running the first two hours of my long weekend run, I gritted my teeth and told myself, “only five miles to go.” The strange thing about these observations is that I’m an Aussie, and so . . .
Today is apparently D-Day here at Freakonomics — the “D” stands for divorce. Along with Hamermesh’s earlier post and this post by Wolfers, there’s one more on the way. One of the most frustrating things about doing research on families is seeing how often even the simple facts are misreported in the press. And Sue Shellenbarger, writing in this morning’s . . .
My friend Joshua Gans is one of Australia’s best young economists, and he is also a parent. And as passionate as Joshua is about economics, he’s just as passionate about parenting. While it has always been fun to follow Joshua’s economic musings on his blog, Core Economics, I have been having more fun following his parenting blog, Game Theorist, devoted . . .
If we judge politicians by what they buy, then Eliot Spitzer has clearly violated the public’s trust: he purchased the services of a high-priced prostitute, and may well end his political career as a result. But what if we judge politicians by what they sell? On this score, Spitzer may be one of the few politicians who has not prostituted . . .
There has been a lot of hand-wringing about whether or not the U.S. economy is currently in a recession. This morning’s data will, I think, lead to a near-unanimous view that the U.S. economy is in a recession. Not only was employment growth in February negative, but the B.L.S. also tells us that the previous two months were worse than . . .
Yesterday, the Times reported the results of an intriguing new study, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (subscription required). The focus of the story: the placebo effect. The existence of a placebo effect is well known, and the best work on this topic comes from Anup Malani, another economist (and a good friend) who currently teaches . . .
The political aficionados in Freakonomics Nation are probably doing the same thing that I’m doing right now — continually reloading the major news pages, in the hopes of finding some useful information. There won’t be any hard data for a few hours yet, and even then, it looks like there may be a long night of vote-counting ahead of us. . . .
Yesterday, Ian Ayres blogged about his recent weight loss, and frankly, it’s a pretty impressive achievement. The secret, Ian tells us, is finding a clever way to solve the problem in which today’s best intentions are betrayed by our rather less determined selves tomorrow. Ian’s solution — committing to fine yourself if you fail — is pretty ingenious. So ingenious, . . .
Ian Ayres‘s recent book, Super Crunchers, contains an interesting description of the secret to the success of Netflix (a company that’s been discussed before on this blog). According to Ayres, Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithms are so good that they know my taste in movies better than I do. It is a source of wonderment to me just how well they . . .
Who says there’s no romance in macroeconomics? Betsey Stevenson and I are currently working on a paper for a forthcoming Brookings Panel, assessing the relationship between levels of economic development and various measures of subjective well-being. We are working with an absolutely fabulous data set: the Gallup World Poll. The good folks at Gallup are now surveying people in more . . .
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