Tim Davis, an artist who teaches at Bard College in upstate New York, wanted to sculpt a life-size self-portrait out of album covers of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. But he’s been having trouble getting enough copies, as explained in an e-mail note he sent along to friends: “I’ve been buying them on eBay, but have artificially driven up the price . . .
The Yale economist Robert Shiller has indexed American housing prices going back to 1890. You know how people like to say that such-and-such experience “was a real roller-coaster ride”? Well, the blogger Richard Hodge at SpeculativeBubble.com wanted to see if housing prices really were a roller-coaster ride. So he plotted Shiller’s inflation-adjusted index onto a roller-coaster video ride. It is . . .
I have never been a huge video gamer but, having run into the Nintendo Wii a few times in the past couple of months, I can see why it is beloved. But here’s the question: why is the Wii, which was famously scarce before Christmas this year, still so hard to buy? Paul Kimmelman, a technical architect who has guest-blogged . . .
A recent post on Consumerist.com asked readers to comment on a plan to install rear-facing seats on airplanes. The options for commenting were basically: a) I don’t like it b) I like it fine; and c) Whatever, no comment, who cares, people should just be happy airlines provide the miracle of flight, so let them do whatever they want. For . . .
Nielsen BuzzMetrics wanted to know what people really think when they think about Sanjaya, the onetime faux-hawked American Idol contestant. So here, according to Max Kalehoff, is what they did: “We took a sample of all the blog posts about American Idol over a week, then focused on keyword sanjaya, then mapped out all the most closely associated words and . . .
Hunter Walk, a brand manager at Google and a friend of ours since he invited us to give a talk at the Googleplex, has an interesting post on his personal blog. Here’s the brief background: Hunter was helping run Google Video and, since the Google acquisition of YouTube, he has been working with the YouTube folks. The point he makes . . .
Do you regularly read the Marginal Revolution blog? If you care much about actual economics, and especially if you are a student of the same (either literally or figuratively), you would be wise to do so. This typically excellent post offers a brief review of a book called Money-Driven Medicine, by Maggie Mahar, whose argument Tyler Cowen summarizes thusly: I . . .
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois is apparently not much of a Freakonomics fan, or maybe he thinks it’s something that it’s not. He trashed our good (ha!) name the other day during a Senate Appropriation Committee hearing that was probing the budget of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Here’s the story, as covered by OMB . . .
Have you ever heard of Chef Jeff Henderson? Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either. That’s when our publicist mentioned him and his new book. (We have the same publisher.) Jeff grew up in L.A. and San Diego, became a big-time crack dealer, and was sentenced to a long term in prison, where he learned to cook and became . . .
Levitt and I are off to give a lecture this afternoon at Colgate University. I know that Colgate is a very fine school but I have to admit that I always think of it as the alma mater of the athlete/ humanitarian/ democracy-lover Adonal Foyle, whom I’ve been reading about in the New York Times for years. He has always . . .
On April 12, 2005, Freakonomics was published. We had high hopes and low expectations. From what I recall, nothing magical happened on that day. But at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of April 13, this Wall Street Journal review appeared. It was the kind of review that, in the theater, is known as a “money review”: it doesn’t just say . . .
Remember this discussion about the likelihood of a three-way tie on Jeopardy? Everyone agreed that the estimate of 1-in-25 million was absurdly high. So too does Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Numbers Guy.” Men outnumber women on the Internet, by a long shot … right? Wrong. Stockpickr.com takes a brief look at the stocks of companies working on treatment . . .
We have written before about advertising in strange places — on fresh eggs, on airplane barf bags, on time itself. There is now an effort to advertise in [the place we used to think of as] the final frontier: space. The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Pasztor has this to report: California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science . . .
The National Football League’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has just made it a lot more expensive to be a thug. Goodell suspended the Titans’ Pacman Jones without pay for the upcoming season (a loss of $1.29 million in base salary) and the Bengals’ Chris Henry for the first half of the season (surrendering as much as $230,000 in base pay). Jones . . .
Under what circumstances would you be willing to pay $731 for a pizza? If your answer has something to do with raising money for charity, then you are halfway right. But that’s not the interesting half. Here are a few clues: + The pizza was sold at auction. + The bidding began at $0, and climbed fairly steadily to the . . .
Mary Black, a public-health physician in Serbia, offers her ideas in the current issue of the British Medical Journal (abstract only). [Yes, I know: two posts in two days from BMJ — but hey, it’s interesting stuff.] Black’s criteria: “[T]hese are jobs that seriously compromise ethical and moral standards, are difficult to justify to your children, and are likely to . . .
To everyone who responded to this help-wanted ad for a junior freakonomist: thanks, but also apologies — because I haven’t replied to anyone yet. Thanks to a small pile of deadlines and some computer trouble, I haven’t answered a single applicant, though I promise that over time I will answer all of you.
An editorial in the current British Medical Journal makes a very sharp point that many of us have probably been thinking about in the last few weeks while reading the latest medical news in the papers: It’s easy to feel contempt for deluded practitioners of the past who advocated bloodletting and tonsillectomies for all. Easy, that is, until one considers . . .
The average U.S. retail price for a dozen large eggs was $1.51 in the first quarter, up 33 cents, or 28%, from the fourth quarter and 43 cents higher than a year ago … Behind the higher prices: Feed. Rising corn and soybean prices have led to increased costs for feed. The increase is in large part because of rising . . .
Although it is in a fairly primordial stage, this new home-finding tool from Google may turn out to be as formidable a challenge to Realtors as the Department of Justice. It does little more than aggregate public information (as is Google’s wont), but when the public information in question is the listings of homes for sale in any given city, . . .
I was on an airplane yesterday, and when I landed I saw that there were about 4 million e-mails on my Treo. This meant, I figured, that Levitt had run some kind of quiz on the blog. And indeed he had — this one, asking what his wife and LeBron James had in common. The airport I landed at was . . .
Last April, we wrote a column about tax cheating. It included a passage about the I.R.S.’s National Research Program, “a three-year study during which 46,000 randomly selected 2001 tax returns were intensively reviewed.” The goal was to determine some of the specifics of tax cheating: what kind of incentives work and don’t work, what kind of people are more likely . . .
Wouldn’t you like access to a “database of human feelings,” a live harvesting of emotion from blogs around the world? Here it is: WeFeelFine.org. It isn’t only U.S. real-estate agents who have been accused of anti-competitive practices; it’s happening in Canada, too. Were you aware that there is an international competition for the best beards and mustaches? I wasn’t either. . . .
As reported by Scott McCartney in today’s Wall Street Journal, U.S. airlines will begin offering wireless Internet access within a year. VOIP calls will be prohibited for now; but airborne phone use may well become a reality one day. Here are the salient details: AirCell will install equipment on airliners that will act as a WiFi hotspot in the cabin . . .
In the letters section of the Wall Street Journal recently, a reader named John Tagliamonte wrote in to comment on a Journal piece exploring how much money parents should give a child when the kid loses a tooth. Tagliamonte’s son lost his first tooth when he was nearly seven; the parents didn’t know how much to pay, so they asked . . .
This blog has just turned two years old. We wouldn’t be writing if you weren’t reading, so thanks for reading. We are thinking about beefing up the blog with more content and features. So we need some hired help — an editor/producer, probably full-time or close to it, ideally located in NYC. This person should have good ideas, excellent copy-editing . . .
Here’s an interesting paper from the British Medical Journal which argues that children’s anti-social behavior can be significantly altered by training their parents to be better parents. (And here is the BMJ‘s editorial summary.) The paper’s authors conducted a randomized study with 153 socially disadvantaged Welsh parents with children aged 3 or 4. Some of the parents were given a . . .
Congress has taken note of the shortage of donated organs, and has proposed an incentive to increase donation: a commemorative medal to honor organ donors. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution sums it up thusly: “Millions for medals but not a cent for compensation.” I am sure the congressmen and senators mean well, and we here at Freakonomics are firm believers . . .
Remember the San Francisco Chronicle reader who railed against the paper’s use of the phrase “pilotless drone”? (If so, you may also recall that we wondered if the reader was Matt Groening pulling a stunt.) Well, the pilotless-drone guy is back with another assault on the Chronicle, this time over a headline containing the phrase “Four-Year Anniversary,” which he declares . . .
M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary, argues in a new working paper that the epic 19th-century slaughter of American bison — with 10 to 15 million buffalo killed on the Great Plains in barely a decade — was driven by a technological advance and a profit motive that both came from Europe. (Incidentally, this makes me . . .
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