Of all the stories we told in Freakonomics, the most popular was the section on the economics of crack cocaine. While it related a lot of particular facts about the crack trade, I believe that readers responded most vigorously to the daring and smarts of the researcher we wrote about, Sudhir Venkatesh, who went and hung out with the crack . . .
Although I’ve been writing journalism in one form or another for a long time, I would like to think that I am not the kind of journalist who makes friends or family uncomfortable about saying something casually that that they don’t want known publicly. That said, it does happen that someone will mention something over dinner, e.g., and then quickly . . .
We’ve written often — most recently here — about the fact that just because two things are correlated, it does not necessarily follow that one causes the other. For instance: campaign spending and electoral success; “culture cramming” and childhood test scores; the use of child car seats and the decline in auto fatalities. So it was interesting to see, on . . .
Greg Mankiw, an energetic blogger (you may have heard of him? he teaches econ at Harvard? and used to advise President Bush?) wrote a super-compelling piece in Sunday’s New York Times, whose headline says it all: “Fair Taxes? Depends on What You Mean By Fair.” It is about taxing the rich, and begins by explaining why Warren Buffett can afford . . .
I blogged a while back about parking spaces in New York City, wondering why there aren’t more spaces for sale rather than for lease. An article in yesterday’s New York Times reveals that more new buildings are indeed selling a few parking spaces, including one building in Chelsea whose five spots are selling for $225,000 apiece. This isn’t quite the . . .
In testimony before the Senate health committee, James Holsinger, President Bush‘s nominee for Surgeon General, listed his three top priorities if approved. According to the New York Times, these priorities would be: “tackling childhood obesity, ‘making America a tobacco-free nation’ and improving the ability of the Public Health Service to respond to emergencies.” While these priorities are certainly in sync . . .
We recently posted a series of excerpts from The Economic Naturalist, a new book by the Cornell economist Robert Frank (who has another new book out this week, Falling Behind, a brief treatise on income inequality). Because the Economic Naturalist excerpts were well received and vigorously debated, we asked Frank if he would reply to some of the feedback. Kindly, . . .
In response to yesterday’s post about how our site was overwhelmed by Reddit traffic, which was a response to a post two days earlier about the economics of libraries, Reddit co-founder Alexis (knOthing) Ohanian has weighed in on the matter, going so far as to make our Freakonomics apple/orange the Reddit logo of the day. I don’t know whether to . . .
As far as I know, American Indians did not invent casino gambling. They did, however, invent lacrosse, a sport more typically associated these days with the likes of young men at Johns Hopkins and Duke. But in a fitting and culturally resonant reallocation of resources, Indian tribes in upstate New York are now pouring profits from their specially licensed casinos . . .
Tim Harford, the affable British economist who is a star of book writing, journalism, and even TV (his BBC program was called Trust Me, I’m an Economist), is now taking to the radio waves as well, at least in the U.K. His first radio documentary, Analysis: Repugnant Markets, airs today on BBC radio (3:30 p.m. EDT), and will be archived . . .
It is hard to predict, in nearly every pursuit, what will be popular and what will not. Blog posts are no exception. Sometimes a blogger posts something that would seem to generate a lot of interest and it fades without a trace; sometimes you post something that seems like no big deal and, for whatever reason, people care a lot. . . .
New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, unhappy with an official probe into the e-mails he sent to a former girlfriend who was also the state union president, has decided to swear off e-mail entirely. (In related news, stocks in smoke-signaling firms surged in overnight trading.) Meanwhile, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has also found that old online exchanges can come back . . .
My spam filter is so good that I barely ever get to see all the Nigerian oil-scam spams any more. But this one poked its way through today. It is always nice to see people thinking creatively. My name is Sgt Kenny Baker, Jr. I am in the Engineering military unit here in Ba’qubah in Iraq, we have about $10, . . .
I’m reading a pretty interesting book called Blue Blood. It’s a memoir written a few years back by a Harvard-educated New York City cop Edward Conlon (who also wrote the New Yorker’s “Cop’s Diary” column under the name Marcus Laffey). I have the paperback edition, which means that the first three or four pages are devoted to positive reviews and . . .
Raise your hand if you hate libraries. Even though this blog doesn’t enable me to peer through the screen into your living room (yet), I am guessing there aren’t a lot of raised hands out there. Who could possibly hate libraries? Here’s one guess: book publishers. I am probably wrong on this, but if you care about books, hear me . . .
There was an interesting article in the New York Times sports section the other day about how the All England Club has kept the Wimbledon tournament free of pigeons since 1999 by employing a man named Wayne Davis to bring in his small flock of peregrine falcons. Until Davis came along, the pigeons were a real nuisance. “In the old, . . .
This kid better have a great life, or he’s got a lot to answer for: a boy named Jack Falkner was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisc., on Saturday, 7/7/07, and he weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces. That, at least, is what the hospital says. But think about it: if you were the person looking at Baby Jack’s scale, mightn’t you . . .
I blogged nearly a year ago about a study by the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa which argued that beautiful women sometimes marry unattractive men because of the following supply/demand gap: there are simply more good-looking women than there are good-looking men. One reason, Kanazawa said, is that beauty is a more valuable trait for a female, and is therefore accentuated . . .
Tomorrow’s date is 7/7/07. If you believe in lucky 7’s (the influence of which we’ve written about before), it’s a good day. During a recent trip to Las Vegas, I was told by one casino executive that never in the history of Vegas have the hotels been booked so far in advance as they are for tomorrow. I predict that . . .
The wheels seem to have come off the Tour de France. This year’s race, with a ceremonial start in London, is of course absent the retired Lance Armstrong, whom Americans learned to love and the French grew to hate in seemingly direct proportion. But the race this year is also missing Floyd Landis, last year’s disgraced winner, as well as . . .
It sounds as if Barack Obama has been listening to some economists (maybe even Austan Goolsbee): he has come out in favor of merit pay for schoolteachers. From an A.P. article: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told the largest teachers union Thursday that performance-based merit pay ought to be considered in public schools. Teachers at the National Education Association’s annual . . .
We’ve written in the past about the life-like struggles for resources and justice in online roleplaying games and universes. Now comes word that EVE Online, a sci-fi MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), has hired a full-time economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, to help manage the game’s virtual economy. Insert your own joke. (Hat tip: Derek Guder)
Prediction markets. Are there any other two words that couple as nicely as those, at least to readers of this blog? The promise of a prediction market is simple and profound: if you ask a lot of people a question about politics or sports or Hollywood movies, and those people are motivated to answer it correctly, their collective judgment turns . . .
They were both widely reported this week, although not at ABC News. Gary Langer, who runs polling at ABC and also acts as its data cop, kept both stories off the air after kicking their tires and determining that they weren’t worth reporting. Langer was obviously not sufficiently consulted in the Paris–Hilton– gets-out-of-jail story.
Mike Bloomberg regularly calls himself a “short, Jewish billionaire from New York” … but how Jewish is he? Here’s an interesting article from the Forward on Bloomberg’s brand of Jewishness in which an acquaintance calls Bloomberg something I’d never heard, but which is a pretty useful acronym: W.A.S.H., or a White Anglo-Saxon Hebrew. If widely adopted, this would give headline . . .
I have a new book on sale today, although it’s not really a new book. HarperPerennial has just republished my second book, Confessions of a Hero- Worshiper, which originally came out in 2003. Here’s the Amazon link. It is currently ranked #3,984,523, so there’s nowhere to go but up. The book is a memoir of hero-worship, as the title implies, . . .
A reader named John Grund wrote in to lament the relative unpopularity of Paul McCartney — relative, that is, to John Lennon. Grund bases his assumption on a Google Trends search of the two men’s names. Indeed, aside from the occasional spike, McCartney lags behind his long-deceased mate (Lennon is in red): “You might think that if McCartney ever had . . .
Newspapers have historically been vocal advocates for good environmental policy. So when millions of people start to consume them electronically, on computer screens, instead of on paper that comes from trees and must be thrown away, wouldn’t you think that newspapers would stand up and cheer? Well, not necessarily, since newspapers still make a lot more money selling ads on . . .
I am currently in the process of hiring a new assistant. (Yes, Nicole has been here for more than a year, and I vow at the outset to hold no assistant captive for much longer than that.) I posted an ad on Craig’s List and received roughly 200 resumes. Many of them are impressive. From an anthropological standpoint, nearly every . . .
Our British publisher, Penguin U.K., continues to delight and astound us with their marketing cojones. How would you like to come across this new poster in the Tube? It is perhaps not surprising that Penguin won a big marketing award this year for their work on Freakonomics. It should be noted that the “3 million copies sold” refers to worldwide . . .
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