There’s an article in today’s New York Times about “Deal or No Deal.” (See previous posts here, here and here.) From the headline — “A Game Show for the Probabilities Theorist in All of Us” — it sounds like it might be heading into a nifty theoretical realm but, alas, it is really a TV review at heart.
So, first of all, Happy ChanuKwanzaMasNewYear to everyone. And thanks for making 2005 such a freakonomical year. A while back, we offered to send a signed bookplate to anyone who wanted one. The good news is that about 2,000 of you replied. The bad news is that about 2,000 of you replied. The demand severely outstripped not only our supply . . .
Levitt went home last weekend to visit his family in Minn./St. Paul, and look what happened: the local newspaper got hold of him for a Q&A. (Note: if Levitt were actually awarded the Clark Medal in 1994, as the paper states, he would have been only 27; the actual year was 2004.)
We’ve heard reports here and there of expectant parents plucking a name or two from the various lists of first names in Freakonomics, but these folks are taking it pretty seriously. Personally, I’d vote for “Lucienne Rachel,” even though I’d prefer “Lucienne Aviva.”
Here’s concrete proof: an article in the new issue of Newsweek is headlined “Economics: Sexiest Trade Alive,” and credits Freakonomics with leading the way.
According to the New York Times, the most blogged-about book of the year is Freakonomics. Here is the complete list; and here is a rather exhaustive list of Freakonomics blog citations. (Thanks to Connie Sartain for the links.)
Earlier I mentioned that my undergrad alma mater, Appalachian State University, was playing for the NCAA I-AA national championship. Well, they won, the first national title in any sport for the university. Congratulations to one and all. When I was there, they had a Top 10 soccer program, full of African and Irish and South American players. Thompson Usiyan, from . . .
The new issue of People lists the 10 best-selling movies, books, CDs, DVDs, etc. of the year. Freakonomics was the No. 7 book among those first published in 2005. (The new Harry Potter was No. 1 by a landslide.) Here, from the other categories, are the other No. 7’s. #7 movie: Madagascar #7 CD: Gwen Stefani: Love. Angel. Music. Baby. . . .
Now we learn that iTunes has named Freakonomics its Editors’ Pick for 2005. Very nice. That and $2.00 will get you a subway ride — unless, of course, NYC transit workers really do go on strike on Friday, as they are threatening, in which case $2.00 will get you one cup of strong Starbucks coffee to fortify you for a . . .
Here’s what New York Magazine‘s year-end roundup thinks of Freakonomics: “This book has no thesis, an annoying title, a phony humility, and sundry other grating tropes.” Pretty grim, huh? But in fact the magazine gave Freakonomics a 2005 Culture Award. Here’s the rest of the blurb: “Yet it makes such interesting arguments and compiles such counterintuitive data that you can’t . . .
I did my undergraduate work — which consisted mainly of playing in a punky/country/rock band called The Right Profile — at Appalachian State University, which is located in the mountain town of Boone, N.C. (Levitt probably would have gone there too, if he had gotten in, but he had to settle for Harvard.) A.S.U. is not well-known nationally but that . . .
A bunch of people have asked what the illustration that accompanied our latest N.Y. Times column is supposed to mean. Honestly, I have no idea. If you want to see a considerably less abstruse illustration concerning Freakonomics, take a look at this. It was done by a Portuguese artist, Goncalo Viana, to illustrate our Times column as it is carried . . .
The latest runaway best-seller in Brazil is the autobiography of a young prostitute, Raquel Pacheco, a.k.a. Bruna the Surfer Girl. The book is called The Sweet Venom of the Scorpion: The Diary of a Call Girl and here’s what Reuters has to say: “In just over a month, it has sold some 30,000 copies and is already in its third . . .
I’ve just returned from a quick trip to British Columbia (specifically to the ski town of Whistler, to which one can only properly say “wow”), and a couple of things from western Canada caught my eye. The first is this blog post about the use of urinalysis for construction job applicants in Alberta, where the long-standing oil rush is headier . . .
On a few occasions in the past, we’ve asked you to vote for awards for which Freakonomics was nominated, and you did, and we were and remain grateful. Now, if you’re not too exhausted to vote again, there’s another award (albeit a very small one, given the posted vote tally), and it’s actually a little closer to home because it’s . . .
The person who made this web page is plainly crazy, in a really good way. It is a visual rendering of the Freakonomics chapter titled “Why Do Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms?” The coincidence is that, inspired by the amazing work of Edward Tufte, I have been thinking about how our next book (SuperFreakonomics, natch) should include visuals to . . .
Amazon.com asked us to compile of list of good economics books (well, books that are at least loosely concerned with economics), and since we’re often asked that same question by our readers, I’ll go ahead and post the Amazon link here.
Jeffrey Lacasse, a PhD. candidate in social work at Florida State University, has co-authored a paper claiming that pharmaceutical companies allowed to market directly to consumers take maximum advantage, exaggerating the benefits of their products in large part because the F.D.A. doesn’t pay much attention to the ads. Here’s the paper. In related news, here’s an article from today’s New . . .
Although I’ve written a fair amount for magazines and newspapers, I always believed an inevitable drawback of such work was that today’s article became tomorrow’s bird-cage liner. That may be why this photograph is somewhat disheartening: by writing books, I thought I had escaped the whole write/read/poop cycle. The photograph may also represent some sort of cosmic payback for our . . .
If so, you might want to let them know that our monthly Freakonomics column in The New York Times Magazine is now being distributed for secondary publication through The New York Times Syndicate. The column has already been picked up by a number of U. S. papers including The Boston Globe and The Las Vegas Journal-Review, and a number of . . .
There’s a Top 100 Amazon.com reviewer named Loyd Eskildson — that’s what he calls himself anyway — who is not only prolific but, um, hyper-current as well. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that any time you see a review by Eskildson, it is near the very top of a given book’s page of reviews — even . . .
Po Bronson is, among other things, the author of five books. The first two were novels. The third, The Nudist on the Late Shift, was a rat-a-tat chronicle of Silicon Valley during its most chaotic and muscular era. His fourth book became a big best-seller; it’s called What Should I Do With My Life? and constitutes many different chapters on . . .
Well, we took our lumps in the U.K., losing out to “The World Is Flat” in the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. But here’s some consolation: it turns out we’re huge in Canada. Having grown up in upstate New York, I’ve got an “accent” that’s often mistaken for Canadian, and friends over the years have . . .
I’ve just returned to my hotel in London, from the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, for which Freakonomics was short-listed. Well, you can’t them all. The award was won by Tom Friedman for The World Is Flat. As it turns out, this was the one book for which no author was present — Friedman gave . . .
Once again, Levitt is sending me off to an awards ceremony. The last time it was the Quill Awards, which Levitt thought we’d win and I thought we wouldn’t. Happily, Levitt was right. This time, neither of us think we’ll win but since the ceremony is bing held in London, I thought it’d be fun to go. The award is . . .
It is late Monday night, and Levitt and I just completed an entire day’s worth of Freako-chat in Columbus, capital of Ohio and proud home of the Ohio State Buckeyes. A buckeye, we learned today, is a tree whose nut looks just like a chestnut but is poisonous. We also learned the OSU cheer, which even we were able master . . .
A couple days ago, Levitt and I were in Orlando for a lecture. Driving down the freeway, I spotted a flashing billboard for the Orlando Sentinel. The first screen was headlined “TODAY:” and trumpeted the current issue’s lead article. Then the next screen flashed. It said “TOMORROW: RIOTS IN PARIS.” Tricky business, I thought, trying to predict tomorrow’s news. The . . .
The official murder rate in New Orleans has dropped to zero. The last recorded murder in the city occurred on Aug. 27, two days before Hurricane Katrina. It seems that Katrina, along with ruining a few hundred thousand lives, also dispatched most of the criminals, particularly the drug dealers and their customers. As N.O. criminologist Peter Scharf told the New . . .
According to this article in Wired, a man named Dean Oliver is trying to do for basketball what Bill James and Billy Beane did for baseball: create and exploit new metrics in order to better distinguish players who win from those who simply generate gaudy traditional stats. The Wired article is written by Hugo Lindgren, who is in some measure . . .
Football coaches are known for being extraordinarily conservative when it comes to calling a risky play, since a single bad decision, or even a good decision that doesn’t work out, can get you fired. In the jargon of behavioral economics, coaches are “loss-averse”; this concept, pioneered by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, holds that we experience more pain with a . . .
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