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 . . .
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 . . .
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