Dubner puts his foot in his mouth by accidentally insulting a stand-up comedian he met at a New Orleans conference.
Freakonomics.com announces its move to the New York Times Online.
For the next several hours, while this blog undergoes some rehabilitation — no, not that kind of rehabilitation; we are fine, thanks — comments will be shut down. If all goes well, this condition won’t last past nightfall (in New York)..
We got an e-mail the other day from a certain Sara in Chicago. She had a question about the virtual world Second Life, but it could be asked of many pursuits, virtual and otherwise. (Even though I’ve never visited Second Life, I have been thinking about this issue lately since I have become a gold farmer for my own kids, . . .
If all goes as planned, I will be appearing on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., 8/8 — lucky in China!) at about 8:30 a.m. EDT to talk about this very blog, and to announce a fairly significant change. Hope to see you there. As one result of this change, comments on the blog will be temporarily suspended today, starting in . . .
We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008. Q: Do you think the HBO series . . .
A few months ago, I attended yet another boring Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. This time, at least something good came of it. I met a guy named Weber Hsu, one of two young Merrill Lynch employees who left finance to start a yo-yo company, Yo-Yo Nation. Weber asked if we wanted them to create a special promotional Freakonomics . . .
Who will give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run? The first person who correctly identifies the pitcher who winds up surrendering Bonds’s record-breaker will get a signed copy of Freakonomics. One guess per comment, please. And a related question: for all the talk about not wanting to be the pitcher who gives up Bonds’s 756th, would it really be such . . .
Not long ago, we took our kids to Hershey Park in Hershey, Pa. We stayed at the Hershey Lodge, which is an official Hershey Park hotel. My 5-year-old daughter, Anya, had heard from a schoolmate that Hershey Lodge gave away free Hershey bars — big ones — whenever you wanted and as many as you wanted. My wife and I . . .
A few days ago, we solicited your questions for hedge fund manager Neil Barsky. As always, your questions were terrific, and so are Barsky’s answers, below. One thing that surprised me, however, is that nobody asked Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch‘s purchase of the Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones). This . . .
Tyler Cowen is giving away 15 copies of his new book, with a clever twist: you have to write in to Tyler on his Marginal Revolution blog and explain why you want his book, and why you want it for free. Hurry! As I type this, Tyler already has 55 comments in one hour. While he is a generous man, . . .
There’s a new news aggregator in town, called Newser.com, and from the quick look I gave it this morning, it immediately looks like one of the best I’ve seen. It summarizes the major news stories in a good paragraph or two, then provides prominent links to the major newspapers and wire services that did the original reporting, which makes the . . .
The legendary Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died on Monday (which happened to be the same day that the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died). In its Antonioni obituary that ran yesterday, the New York Times noted that Antonioni “attended the University of Bologna, where he was a tennis champion and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935.” . . .
This morning, my six-year-old son Solomon was having breakfast and watching his favorite TV show, Really Wild Animals. (It’s a great show, National Geographic cinematography with quippy narration by — I kid you not — Dudley Moore.) Apparently the same commercials come on the show every morning, because I heard Solomon reciting along with one commercial as it played: “Whether . . .
While it may be true that we have no fans at the National Association of Realtors, at least there is someone in the real estate industry — a commercial leaser in Memphis — that likes us. Enough, at least, to rip us off. I have to say, I really like the subtle shadowing they did on the book title; it’s . . .
In today’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer writes about California farmers whose irrigation systems are being stripped of their copper wiring, presumably by methamphetamine addicts who sell the metal in the recycling market: Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper . . .
I have a friend named Neil Barsky who used to be a journalist and now runs a hedge fund. This is not a typical progression in the journalism field. But that’s the fact. He did most of his journalism for the Wall Street Journal, principally covering real estate, and then he worked as a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where . . .
Last week, we offered several different views on ideas to save the African rhino. Ray Fisman, one of the participants, has followed up with another take: Pretty much any policy prescription that an economist will propose will have incentives at its core. In rhino conservation, economists’ mania for incentives would translate most directly into policy through programs that reward communities . . .
Nick Kristoff‘s OpEd column in today’s New York Times (sub. req’d) will set to racing the hearts of many readers of this blog. His column is about voting, and he makes several points that would not get much of an argument from a roomful of economists. (Wait, scratch that: there is nothing that a roomful of economists will not argue . . .
From a Q&A with John McCain in today’s N.Y. Times Magazine: Q. Well, maybe you will strike it rich with your coming book, “Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them.” How did you have time to write a 450-page look at history? A. Mark Salter, my co-writer, did it. What we usually do is use a . . .
Yesterday, I posted a short piece called “Should We Just Let the Tour de France Dopers Dope Away?” It wasn’t an outright call for legalization of sports doping, but I wanted to put the idea on the table. Well, Joe Lindsey, a contributing writer for Bicycling magazine, wrote in to say that there are a lot of compelling reasons to . . .
The economist Justin Wolfers, who has turned up on this blog more than a few times, has an interesting OpEd in today’s New York Times about the N.B.A. referee-gambling scandal. Wolfers is a sensible choice since he wrote a widely discussed paper about point-shaving in NCAA basketball and an even more widely discussed paper about racial bias among NBA referees. . . .
Today is the birth date of Michael Philip Jagger, known to the world as Mick. As true fans know, Jagger isn’t just the long-tenured front man of the Rolling Stones; he was also a student of finance and accounting at the London School of Economics. He did not graduate from LSE, however; he attended for just a short time. I . . .
Do you ever wonder why the media covers election campaigns so vigorously? Is it really necessary to know what each of the dozen-plus major-party early presidential candidates are doing on a daily basis, and what’s going on among their campaign staffs, and what their spouses like to eat and what sports their kids like to play? It may just be . . .
Now that virtually every cyclist in the Tour de France has been booted for doping, is it time to consider a radical rethinking of the doping issue? Is it time, perhaps, to come up with a pre-approved list of performance-enhancing agents and procedures, require the riders to accept full responsibility for whatever long-term physical and emotional damage these agents and . . .
Last night, Levitt posted this discovery of what seemed like a phishing expedition (and revealed to the world his late-night poker habits). As of 9:10 a.m. today, the site in question (http://www.fulltilt-cnn.com) was down. (Back when we wrote a column about Steven Peisner and identity theft, a fake Bank of America site was also summarily disabled, showing that if nothing . . .
Regular readers of this blog know how much we admire Tyler Cowen, especially for the Marginal Revolution blog he keeps with fellow George Mason University economics professor Alex Tabarrok. You may also remember some fulsome words of praise on this blog for Cowen’s forthcoming book, Discover Your Inner Economist. There is a really good profile of Cowen in this week’s . . .
A reader named James Thompson recently sent in a request for help in solving a wildlife conservation problem. We decided to put the question to a set of diverse, smart people we know or tracked down, who might have particular insights to this particular problem. As such, we bring you the inaugural Freakonomics quorum, composed of the following group: the . . .
The first time I saw a TV commercial about Restless Legs Syndrome, I was pretty sure it was a spoof. I figured I had stumbled across a prime-time Saturday Night Live special and was seeing a well-done fake ad. It was pretty funny, I thought — Restless Legs Syndrome, ha! Who thinks of this stuff? Of course, it turned out . . .
I am scheduled to fly to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in September for a lecture and then to Rio de Janeiro for a book festival. I have never been to Brazil before and, until this horrible plane crash in Sao Paulo the other day, I was very much looking forward to the trip. Now I am not. As someone who flies . . .
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