Both of them would be better off if the default option were switched to opt-out as opposed to opt-in. This is hardly surprising but, sadly, it is still news. Let me explain. One of the reasons that some people don’t contribute to their 401(k) plans is because they usually have to “opt in” to the plan — i.e., actively choose . . .
One of the many reasons I love Amazon.com is the regularity with which it experiments with new features on its book pages. It is literally a dynamic website, much more so than many other sites that actually offer more fresh content. For instance, Amazon has just introduced a nifty new treatment of its customer reviews: providing a little graph that . . .
I am probably like the other 98% of Americans who know almost nothing about the libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul, perhaps besides the fact that he’s running for President and that he seems to have a growing fringe following. So this e-mail, from a reader named Casey Hopkins, caught my eye: Why don’t you guys write about Ron Paul? 1. . . .
On his CNBC blog, sports-business wizard Darren Rovell calculates how much the first overall N.B.A. draft pick is actually worth, at least in terms of his first year, measured by increased wins and increased attendance. The answer? Quite a bit. Rovell shows that in the past 11 years, the team with the No. 1 pick had an average attendance increase . . .
There is a large body of literature on cultural bias in standardized testing. It generally has two components: 1. In some questions, white people are made to look superior to minorities. 2. In some questions, there is a presumption of knowledge that is more likely to be held by whites than minorities, providing white students with a hidden advantage. But . . .
We’ve written repeatedly on the shortage of human organs for transplantation, and the different incentives that are being offered to produce more donated organs. Among the incentives: a commemorative medal and a shorter prison term. Now a reader named Ronald Wielink writes to tell us that in the Netherlands, a funeral insurance company is offering to cut funeral costs by . . .
Back when I worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine, it was a pretty regular occurrence to send an article up to the legal department for vetting. One of the lawyers that I dealt with there was named Adam Liptak. I liked him a great deal for two reasons: as with the other lawyers there, he always . . .
Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen has posted a few suggestions, and is soliciting more. One of Cowen’s ideas: Allow all candidates to watch a short debate of experts — with a fraud or two thrown in — and ask them to evaluate what they just heard and why they reached the conclusion they did. He also suggests they should conduct . . .
A few days ago, I blogged about Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s new book, The Black Swan, and solicited questions for a Q&A that NNT had agreed to answer. Here now is our inaugural user-generated Q&A. Many thanks to all of you for the good questions and observations, and thanks especially for NNT’s thoughtful replies. It seems fitting that we post this . . .
Not long ago, I wondered aloud on this blog why so many doctors write so well. The two doctors I mentioned in detail were Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, both of whom have new books out. For those of you interested in this subject, take note that Abigail Zuger, who is an M.D. herself, has written an article in the . . .
Now that it’s looking a bit more likely that Michael Bloomberg could maybe, perhaps, possibly run for President on a third-party ticket, you’ve got to at least entertain this bizarre ballot possibility in 2008: For U.S. President: Hillary Clinton (D-NY) Rudolph Giuliani (R-NY) Michael Bloomberg (I-NY) How nice it would be, speaking as a NYC resident, to know that regardless . . .
This is the kind of story you don’t read every day. The plot points: 1. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City sued two gun shops in Virginia, as part of his effort to stop guns being illegally imported to New York. 2. A gun-rights group called the Virginia Citizens Defense League mounted a fundraiser for the two gun shops, planning . . .
From a recent N.Y. Times article by Michael Barbaro, headlined “Less Risk Seen in Purchasing Clothes Online”: For the first time since online retailing was born a decade ago, the sales of clothing have overtaken those of computer hardware and software, suggesting that consumers have reached a new level of comfort buying merchandise on the Web. One of the merchants . . .
With global warming having become Topic No. 1 of so many discussions, to me the big question is the degree to which behavioral changes are produced on three separate levels: 1. The individual level — where change seems well underway, but probably won’t amount to all that much without major institutional/structural changes. 2. The governmental level — where change will . . .
I was in Canada much of last week, and happened to run into an off-duty Air Canada pilot. I had flown Air Canada a few times in the previous days, and told him that the experience was significantly better than on any U.S. airline. He grimaced. “Oh, it’s terrible for us, too,” he said. Then he talked about all the . . .
At this moment, a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would seem pretty unlikely. It took a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. (The Soviets repaid the favor in 1984, staying home from the Los Angeles games.) On the other hand, a lot of people around the world harbor feelings of . . .
The job of I.R.S. commissioner has been filled — Mark Everson, who left to take over the American Red Cross, has been replaced by deputy Kevin Brown — but there’s still room for more at the I.R.S. Now you can nominate yourself (or a loved one) for a three-year volunteer membership on the agency’s Information Reporting Program Advisory Committee, which . . .
The economics of book publishing are usually not sensible, predictable, or even explicable. This New York Times article by Shira Boss is a good beginner’s guide to the subject. Not all real-estate agents are fond of the National Association of Realtors. This one calls the organization “routinely, habitually, congenitally anti-free market” as well as “a protection racket — vicious, awful, . . .
Taking off on Levitt’s recent blog post about pesticides in the water in Indiana, James Altucher at Stockpickr has assembled a Freakonomics portfolio of clean water stocks. He has also blogged about it in more detail at TheStreet.com.
“Ferreting out antilogics is an exhilarating activity.” Do you agree with the above sentence? If so, you will probably enjoy the writing of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a polymathic gentleman whose new book is called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Here’s how its dust jacket succinctly describes the thesis: “A black swan is a highly improbable event . . .
Because we had a chapter in our book about the socioeconomic impact of baby names, we’ve blogged many times about baby names in the past, including just the other day. One question that rarely arises, however, is this: How possible is it to predict which names will become more popular in time, and which ones will fall? We did make . . .
Here’s heartening news for all those who believe that economists not only can’t predict the economic future, but can’t even describe the economic past. Daniel Altman, for his Economic View column for the New York Times, e-mailed the 177 members of the National Bureau of Economic Research who concentrate on economic fluctuations and growth. He asked them a seemingly simple . . .
We got an e-mail the other day from John Yinger, a professor of economics and public administration at Syracuse University. It went, in part, like this: By coincidence, I read a chapter of “Tom Sawyer” to my 10-year-old son the day your column on leisure time came out. It’s the famous chapter on whitewashing the fence. Here’s how it ends: . . .
Several months ago, we blogged about a controversy over a high-caffeine drink called Cocaine. Now it has been pulled from shelves nationwide. Its producer, Redux Beverages of Las Vegas, was disappointed — and, based on this quote Redux partner Clegg Ivey gave to the Associated Press, a bit confused: “[W]e intended for Cocaine energy drink to be a legal alternative . . .
I am in Vancouver for about 36 hours. Vancouver anytime is pretty great; in springtime, it is even greater. Snowcaps glimpsed between modern skyscrapers; people from everywhere; lots of green. And, of course, that spectacular meeting of mountain and water. A few random observations: 1. There seem to be more coffee shops per square block, including Starbucks, Blenz, and others, . . .
There was a very nice piece in the New York Times the other day about Mike Nolan, the manager of Metro-North Railroad’s lost-and-found department. Via the article: Since joining Metro-North in 1994, Mr. Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in . . .
In addition to its Freakonomics Poker Portfolio, James Altucher at Stockpickr.com has also posted a Freakonomics Horse Racing Portfolio, thus creating indices in honor of two of Steve Levitt‘s greatest passions. FWIW, Levitt’s picks the other day on the Kentucky Derby weren’t terrible. One of the two long shots he liked, Hard Spun, placed and paid $9.80. On the other . . .
From an Associated Press report out of Rome: Giro d’Italia champion Ivan Basso admitted involvement in the Spanish doping scandal and is cooperating with sports authorities. It is hard to overestimate the value of a cooperating witness. Think of the damage, e.g., that Sammy Gravano did to John Gotti and the rest of the Gambino crime family. If someone of . . .
A few days ago, I blogged about how pre-election polls have historically overstated a minority candidate’s standing, but how that gap seems to be shrinking. In other words, according to the Pew Research Center article I cited, people used to lie to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a minority candidate, but now they do so less often. This . . .
We’ve blogged before about a pay-what-you-wish coffee shop and pay-what-you-wish downloadable music. Now Luciana Silvestri, a reader from Argentina, writes with news of something different: An all-you-can-eat restaurant with a prix fixe twist. As she explains: A friend has just returned to Argentina from a six-month internship in Chicago and told me about a Japanese restaurant with quite an original . . .
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