Last week, I posted here about how a member of the school board in suburban Chicago’s District 214 wanted to have several books removed from the schools’ reading list. Among them was Freakonomics. The board member, Leslie Pinney, objected to the various books for various reasons, including pornography, vulgarity, and in the case of Freakonomics, the argument that legalized abortion . . .
Have them play the National Economics Challenge, which sounds like Quiz Bowl with yield curves. Whatever you do, don’t send them to Times Square, where only 4 of 10 people on the street know who Steve Levitt is, but 8 of 10 know Jessica Simpson. (Honestly, I’d be shocked if as many as 4 of 10 random Americans could i.d. . . .
That’s the question sent our way by a reader (who happens to work for the Federal Trade Commission). To be exact, here’s what he wrote: Why don’t media companies act more like sports teams in trading assets? Why don’t we ever something like this: FOX trades Arrested Development to ABC for Alias and a pilot to be named in the . . .
There aren’t enough people like John Stossel on television: smart, curious, cantankerous, and very willing to shoot at sacred cows. I say this not because Stossel hosted the recent hour-long 20/20 program on Freakonomics, but because I’ve always admired his reporting and especially his attitude. His recent 20/20 special on education, “Stupid in America,” is a particularly good example. A . . .
That’s the question I’m asking myself today. I’ve spent the past couple of days in Washington D.C. for Book Expo America. My five-year-old son is a football fanatic, so whenever I’m in a town with an N.F.L. team, I try to bring home a souvenir for him. Today, I went to a huge souvenir store in D.C., with thousands of . . .
It has been said many times that awards are meaningless — unless you happen to win one. I guess that’s true. When we heard not long ago that the Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing on a website was not awarded to Freakonomics.com (yeah yeah yeah, we were happy just to be nominated) but to some hack outfit called TheNewYorker.com, I . . .
There’s a fascinating article by Nicholas Wade in today’s New York Times about a new understanding of human evolution — i.e., that “the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages … may have occurred millions of years later than fossil bones suggest.” Furthermore, “A new comparison of the human and chimp genomes suggests that after the two lineages separated, they . . .
What child hasn’t played around with the spelling of his or her name — wondering, e.g., how it would sound if it were spelled backward? (I admit that I signed some school papers “Evets Renbud” when I was a kid.) Well, now it seems that at least 4,457 parents last year did the work for their children, giving them the . . .
A board member at a suburban Chicago high school is trying to wipe Freakonomics off a required-reading list, along with The Things They Carried, Beloved, and The Awakening. “One part of Freakonomics that raised her ire,” reports the Daily Herald, “hypothesizes that legalized abortion could lower the homicide rate.”
That’s a question that gets sent our way at least two or three times a day, and we haven’t put together any sort of meaningful response. But a bunch of other economists have, and here is their brief bipartisan statement, courtesy of the ever-vigilant gentlemen at MarginalRevolution.com
Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here’s a recent one: I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I’d like to pay you something. This is also an experiment in how accessible famous people are. . . .
Football as in soccer, that is. Here is proof that Europeans take their football very seriously. A little too seriously, perhaps. In other football news, Patric Andersson of the Center for Economic Psychology at the Stockholm School of Economics (and a collaborator with Anders Ericsson in the Expert Performance Movement) has written to let us know about an upcoming conference . . .
As many readers of this blog may recall, we have written about child car seats and how they seemingly provide no safety advantage over seat belts for children 2 and older. This aroused the ire of many safety officials and researchers, who felt we were giving car seats an unduly bad name. Well, it seems like Britney Spears has just . . .
A really interesting link on MarginalRevolution.com about a really interesting proposal by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff (authors of Why Not?, a book I liked an awful lot) to send a portion of every lottery ticket purchase to an individual retirement account. This means that all the people who make the poor choice of spending too much money on lottery . . .
Probably not. But, in what is either a very odd coincidence or some kind of concerted effort to get out the organ-market message, there are OpEds in both the N.Y. Times and Wall Street Journal today arguing the case. The first one, headlined “Death’s Waiting List,” is by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and American Enterprise Institute scholar. Satel herself received . . .
New York City, home to the United Nations and many foreign diplomats, has famously coped with the problem of diplomats racking up comically high numbers of parking tickets. Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have made a good lemonade from these lemons, writing a paper that explores the correlation between a given country’s level of corruption and its diplomats’ willingness to . . .
It’s true that we just published an article about the importance of “deliberate practice” when it comes to succeeding in life. But I’ve also been long intrigued by how large a role luck plays in any given person’s success. In the vast majority of the “success literature” I’ve read (including rags-to-riches autobiographies as well as the biographies of politicians, athletes, . . .
Our latest “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine, which is about how people get good at whatever they’re good at, is as of this moment No. 5 on the list of most e-mailed articles in the Times. Here’s our webpage with further information about the psychology professor Anders Ericsson and other researchers in the Expert Performance Movement. [P.S.: . . .
Our new “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine asks a fundamental — but very hard – question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? To find the answer to this question, we turned to Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and the ringleader of . . .
Apparently, Jane Siberry doesn’t appreciate people calling attention to her website, which allows people to pay as they wish to download Siberry’s music. I liked the idea, and blogged about it a few days ago. But here’s what Siberry wrote on her MySpace journal today: The ‘self-determined pricing’ policy of the store is in the spotlight again, freakonomics has an . . .
The National Association of Realtors has more than its fair share of adversaries, including the U.S. Department of Justice (which is suing the N.A.R. for anti-competitive practices) and the Consumer Federation of America (whose executive director recently told the N.Y. Times what he thinks of the N.A.R.: ”Because the industry functions as a cartel, it is able to overcharge consumers . . .
Much like Paul Feldman, the bagel guy we wrote about in Freakonomics, Jane Siberry has decided to offer her wares to the public via an honor-system payment scheme. She gives her fans four choices: 1. free (gift from Jane) 2. self-determined (pay now) 3. self-determined (pay later so you are truly educated in your decision) 4. standard (today’s going rate . . .
Time magazine thinks so. Malcolm Gladwell, a previous member of Time‘s 100-most-influential club, wrote a very good essay about Levitt’s rare talents. Here’s the kicker: In Freakonomics and in his astonishing, wide-ranging academic work at the University of Chicago, Levitt, 38, reminds us that we owe a bigger debt to those with the humility to go wherever logic and discovery . . .
I’ve spent a lot of time around economists the past few years, and a lot of time around journalists for longer than that. It strikes me that our work is often similar: have an idea; gather data; analyze, synthesize, and present your findings. There are significant differences, of course. To most journalists, especially those on deadline, the data that’s gatherable . . .
The conventional wisdom says it is. But research on the subject is considerably more murky. (Hat tip: Ben Elder Jr.)
Arthur Hertzberg was a prolific and polemical rabbi, scholar, and thorn in the side of Jewish institutionalism. (Although I rarely talked economics with him, I’m sure he would have embraced Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” as his own.) I was very fortunate to have known him, even more fortunate to have been married by him, and very saddened by his . . .
A while back, Levitt and I wrote an article about a former economist in Washington, D.C., who sells bagels and donuts on an honor-system payment scheme. We later adapted that article for inclusion in Freakonomics. Now Levitt has posted a National Bureau of Economics working paper that looks at the Bagel Man’s profit maximization, an important element that we didn’t . . .
Maybe if he checked out this picture, he’d consider it.
Steve O’Keefe, editor of smarteconomist.com writes: Would you mind posting an announcement on the Freakonomics Blog about the new Smart Interviews feature at SmartEconomist.com? Here’s the announcement: SmartEconomist.com Launches Smart Interviews Fiona M. Scott Morton, Professor of Economics at Yale University’s School of Management, is on the hot seat at SmartEconomist.com April 17-21. Morton has agreed to field questions for . . .
This past Friday night, the ABC News program 20/20 showed an hour-long John Stossel special based on Freakonomics. Because our involvement was quite limited — we helped brainstorm the segments and sat for interviews, etc. — I can say without bragging that it was really, really good. A large and very hard-working team of producers took a bunch of our . . .
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