In New York City, at least, it sometimes seems that way. Not long ago, we wrote a column about how a real-estate boom actually lowers median Realtor income because of all the new agents who rush in to join the boom. Homethinking.com, a new website that allows customers to rate Realtors, has posted an interesting item on Realtor density. It . . .
A 30-year-old Belgian municipal worker named Reno has a website called Shoot My Blog, a sort of meta-site on which he posts user-submitted photos of computer monitors showing his blog page. I am particularly fond of the family of computers in bed together. Reno says he is running this submission contest merely to engender creativity (and promote his own website), . . .
If there is a more insightful, interesting, appealing, or prolific writer on pro football than Peter King, someone please point me to him.
My son Solomon turned six the other day. This morning, he watched me on Good Morning America. My wife Ellen and four-year-old daughter Anya were also watching at home. Ellen later reported Solomon’s reaction: When Diane Sawyer said the word “economics” during the segment, Solomon turned to his mom and said, “Hey, why’d that lady say economics? Didn’t she mean . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
Here’s a quasi-serious letter, putatively written by a Marylander named Paul McGlaughlin, asking his senator (Paul Sarbanes) to revoke his status from legal citizen to illegal immigrant. He’s after the tax break, of course. You have to admit, it’s a pretty clever ploy. (HT: Chris Albon)
David Cay Johnston, who does an incredible job covering U.S. tax policy and other business issues for the N.Y. Times, today has an interesting article about how the I.R.S. is outsourcing the collection of back taxes to third parties — i.e., collection agencies. “The private debt collection program,” Johnston writes, “is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, . . .
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is starting a massive campaign against drunk driving. “We’re taking the gloves off on drunk driving,” Nicole R. Nason, the NHTSA administrator, told the New York Times. “This country has made tremendous strides against drunk driving through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. But the numbers have been flat for the last decade.” . . .
I am not a big fan of animal feces left lying about, whether on sidewalks or parks or at the beach. We even devoted one of our N.Y. Times columns to addressing the problem of dog poop in NYC. But dogs at least have owners, who sometimes pick up after their pets. Wild Canadian geese have no such overseers — . . .
I realize I am a little late on this, but a small company in Minnesota has decided to place ads in college textbooks, which means that instead of paying $500 or $1,000 for a semester’s worth of textbooks, a student might someday pay … $0. (HT: Alon Nir.)
I am in the middle of a Cape Cod vacation with my family, so I haven’t been to a Starbucks lately. But I’ve been told that Starbucks is now featuring a coffee cup with a Freakonomics quote on it, which goes something like this: “Morality describes the way that any of us would like the world to work. Economics describes . . .
This guy is offering to be your best friend, for a price, via eBay. He lives in New York City and calls himself Rent-a-Pal: “The lucky Winning Bidder and RENTAPAL will exchange unlimited emails for a period of 30 DAYS on any subject that you like. RENTAPAL will provide you with a compassionate ear, good conversation, feedback and advice – . . .
There is a new study claiming that music with sexually explicit lyrics causes teenagers to have sex earlier. The lead author is Steven Martino, a Rand researcher, and the study will be published in the August issue of Pediatrics; the data come from telephone interviews with 1,461 participants, aged 12 to 17. I haven’t read the study itself, but here’s . . .
That’s what I learned these past few days, when I took my 5-year-old son Solomon to visit the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training camp in Latrobe, Pa. Watching a pro football team in camp is awesome in a very different way than watching a game live, even if you watch a game from the sidelines, as I’ve done a few times. A . . .
Wikipedia is generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining. What it isn’t is very dependable, for the very reason that makes it fun: it is an encyclopedia whose content is generated by random contributors. We’ve touched on this subject a few times on this blog, here and here and here. But Stephen Colbert has done a better job of ridiculing Wikipedia . . .
It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other compelling attribute. But a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking . . .
The answer is, apparently, not very. Several months ago, Newsweek magazine proclaimed economics the “sexiest trade alive,” arguing that “There’s no doubt that Freakonomics did its part in glamorizing the trade.” But in Turkey, where our book has recently been published, the book alone clearly did not have enough sex appeal. So the publisher had to sex it up with . . .
The main event of the World Series of Poker gets underway today at the Rio in Las Vegas. Why do I want Phil Gordon to win? It’s not just because he’s such a nice guy, or because he’s so smart, or because of his philanthropic endeavors, or even because he’s so tall. It has to do with the game of . . .
After Bode Miller told 60 Minutes that he often drank the night before ski races, and that he’d even raced while still drunk, he was raked over the coals and forced to grovel and apologize. Now we learn that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis (here’s a recent posting on the subject), who tested high for testosterone after his miraculous . . .
This may well be old news to many of you, but it’s the first I’ve seen of a plausible explanation for why Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi. According to this British TV interview (via YouTube) with Alex Hayes of the French newspaper L’Equipe, Materazzi happened to call Zidane’s mother a whore on the very day she’d been taken to the . . .
According to the Associated Press, “a survey of 49 American metropolitan areas found that monthly parking rates in midtown Manhattan were the country’s most expensive, averaging $574.” What’s particularly amazing about that figure is that most people who park in midtown only park during the day near their offices, then drive home at night. I live on the Upper West . . .
As we’ve noted before (here and here, e.g.) some interesting e-mail makes its way to the Freakonomics in-box. The latest was from one Stephanie Downs of MarKomm Consulting, which I thought was worth posting here: I am involved with Spay/Neuter programs with various organizations, she began, and the mentality is to fix the problem and not the symptom. In the . . .
That’s because we just keep on posting. The typical blogger, like most people who go on diets and budgets, quits after a few months, weeks, or in many cases, days. For some reason, we haven’t. In fact, if you look at the “Archives” chart to the right, you’ll see that by the time July is over, we will have blogged . . .
The U.S. national soccer team recently embarassed itself in the World Cup. During the Olympics, U.S. athletes regularly get beat in certain sports that, like soccer, are taken much more seriously in other countries than in ours. So why have Americans done so well in the Tour de France? American cyclists have won 10 of the past 20 TdF’s — . . .
Got this message from someone I know who works at a Barnes & Noble whose location shall remain unnamed: “I’ll be glad when [Ann] Coulter drops off the [best-seller] list, for obvious reasons of taste, but also because customers keep turning her book around or taking it off the shelf and hiding quantities in the back of the store.” This . . .
Last week, it was ads on eggs. This week — well, the headline of
When I saw an ad in today’s Wall Street Journal for a mountain resort in North Carolina, the name of the place struck me as — well, terrible. It’s called Bear Wallow Springs (that part’s okay) at Lake Toxaway. It looks like a perfectly lovely place but … Lake Toxaway? Maybe it’s just me, but the only image conjured by . . .
Last week, Levitt declared his intention to run some experiments with poker players in Las Vegas. Well, there’s one more player he may want to consider: Mikey the Chimp. He’ll be in Vegas since he’s competing in the 2006 World Series of Poker. Mikey’s gambit is a publicity stunt for a poker website, PokerShare.com. Here’s the press release that tells . . .
A few months ago, we posted about an effort in Sydney, Australia to drive late-night hooligans from a public park — by blasting Barry Manilow songs. So far, it seems to be working. But the people who live near the park are being driven crazy by the Manilow music. The hooligans have probably moved off to some nice quiet spot, . . .
CBS has found a new place to advertise its TV shows: the eggs in your refrigerator. I can’t imagine Michael Pollan will have anything good to say about this.
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