That’s the (tenuous) claim of this Guardian article:
According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), there was a 10% increase in the number of students accepted to read physics by the university admissons services between 2008-09, when The Big Bang Theory was first broadcast in the UK, and 2010-11. Numbers currently stand at 3,672. Applications for physics courses at university are also up more than 17% on last year. Philip Walker, an HEFCE spokesman, said the recent spate of popular televisions services had been influential but was hard to quantify.
Hard to quantify, indeed.
FWIW, we’ve been told by a lot of youngish readers that Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics led them to major in economics. John J. Siegfried addressed this possibility in a Journal of Economic Education paper called “Trends in Undergraduate Economics Degrees, 1991-2010”:
The Times today published a compelling report of first-hand observations of election fraud in Russia’s recent parliamentary elections. There are mounting protests; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced “serious concerns” about the election and called for a “full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation.”
But what if those first-hand observations were anomalous? What if the outcome for Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia Party, as disappointing as it was for him, truly represents the will of the Russian people?
I recently switched banks, to Chase. So far, it’s been a pretty good experience. Indeed, the bank does a lot of very good things from a customer-service perspective.
But:
While using an ATM, I wasn’t able to pull up a list of recent transactions. I was sure I just wasn’t finding the right menu. I could print out the recent transactions but I didn’t want to print it out; I just wanted to look at it on the computer screen. Having failed to figure it out after a few ATM visits, I wrote to the very helpful and smart Chase employee who helped me set up my accounts. He confirmed that I couldn’t get recent-transaction data via the ATM screen. Furthermore, he wrote:
Your only other options at this point are:
1) Enroll your mobile phone for Chase Mobile which will allow you to receive a text message of recent history
2) Download the Chase iPhone application which will allow you to access real-time transactions
3) Stop in and sit with a banker who can show you recent transactions/pending or posted
At this time, there is no alternate way to view recent history at a Chase ATM.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Wha? “Sit with a banker” to see my recent transactions? Shall I bring my collection of buggy whips to pass the time while waiting?
Fact: in September, we put out an hour-long Freakonomics Radio podcast called “The Upside of Quitting.”
Fact: in September, more Americans quit their jobs than in any month since Nov., 2008.
Coincidence?
Actually, it’s not even a coincidence. The podcast was out on Sept. 30; the resignations (2 million of them) covered the month of September.
That said, more resignations would seem to indicate an improving economy. From Time:
According to a recent survey by job-search site Snagajob, 44% of respondents who quit in the past year did so believing they would find a better opportunity elsewhere, up from 31% the year before.
Why, you might wonder, is Time citing Snagajob rather than a government source? And should we believe those numbers?
We launched the Football Freakonomics series in the spring with an episode called “The Quarterback Quandary.” It examined the difficulty of drafting QB’s since they tend to be a) vital to a team’s success; and b) relatively expensive; but c) hard to assess coming out of college even if they have a substantial track record.
One thing we can all agree on, however: the NFL today is a quarterback’s league — isn’t it?
That’s the question we ask in our latest Football Freakonomics segment.
The numbers certainly line up in support of the quarterback’s dominance. As you can see in the accompanying graphic, there has been a sea change in the pass/run ratio over the past few decades. In the 1970’s, NFL offenses averaged roughly 26 passes and 35 runs per game. By the 2000’s, those numbers had essentially flip-flopped, with about 32 passes and 28 runs per game.
The “first minority to be a controlling owner of an NFL team” isn’t an African-American.
I find this story interesting and am surprised it has been so lightly commented upon.
The team is the Jacksonville Jaguars (that may be one reason why it’s so lightly commented upon), and the new owner is Shahid Khan.
That’s the claim of a new paper by D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees, put out by the IZA, titled “Medical Marijuana Laws, Traffic Fatalities, and Alcohol Consumption”:
To date, 16 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. Using state-level data, we examine the relationship between medical marijuana laws and a variety of outcomes. Legalization of medical marijuana is associated with increased use of marijuana among adults, but not among minors. In addition, legalization is associated with a nearly 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities, most likely to due to its impact on alcohol consumption. Our estimates provide strong evidence that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes.
If you were shopping on Amazon.com last night for a Fisher-Price “My First Dollhouse” with a Caucasian family, you would have been asked to pay $63.99. If, however, you wanted to buy what looks to be a nearly identical “My First Dollhouse” with an African-American family, the price was only $37.99.
Amazon reviewers have taken note, and aren’t pleased. When my son Solomon (11 years old) wandered past my computer last night as I was looking this over, he didn’t need any prompting: “That’s so racist!” he said.
Is it? What is it that we’re seeing here on Amazon — racial discrimination? Price discrimination? Neither?
Tyler Cowen writes books more often than some people brush their teeth. He also blogs many times each day, including weekends, and does a variety of other productive, interesting things.
His latest book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, is probably my favorite thing he’s written. (It’s not out ’til spring; I am lucky enough to have scored an advance copy.) It does such a good job exploring the economics, culture, esthetics, and realities of the food network that I don’t even mind the short shrift he gives Japanese cuisine (while being more thorough with Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Thai, Filipino, and especially Chinese food).
There are a number of mind-blowing ideas and facts in the book, the most interesting of them in a chapter called “How American Food Got Bad.”
From a reader named Paul Kilmartin, in response to Steve Sexton’s post “The Inefficiency of Local Food”:
Well, if we’re going to think like economists, then lets talk about how we got here. The food distribution network cannot thrive as it does now without the massive public works program called the Interstate Highway system, which subsidizes distant food movement. Large, “efficient” agribusiness is as much a result of farm subsidies leading to consolidation, and the percentage of crop land dedicated to corn is a function of ethanol policy. Furthermore, FDA policies prohibit or discourage the farming and production of items people want, such as hemp and unpasteurized milk.
On top of that, misinformation of the USDA has driven the public to choose grains over protein and fat, driving the obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates higher, which shifts resources to those with government-granted monopoly rights to market pharmaceuticals to treat those diseases.
So, in the absence of all these price distortions, would local food be at such a disadvantage? I contend not. So those liberals who want more local food should dismantle the nanny state and public works programs that made pseudo food so much more profitable.
Who cares to argue with Paul?
The U.N. is holding its big annual conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa. For those of you still paying attention to global-warming news, you may want to add a couple of links to your reading:
+ There’s been a second round of “ClimateGate” e-mails, (the first preceded the U.N.’s climate-change Copenhagen conference in 2009); the Times‘s Andy Revkin becomes a more prominent character this time around, for which he is attacked, and which attack he promptly defends.
+ A new study in Science argues with the accepted wisdom on climate sensitivity. From the website of Oregon State University, home to lead researcher Andreas Schmittner:
My old band was called The Right Profile. (I talked about quitting in this radio show.) It wasn’t a great name probably but we stuck with it. I did love its provenance. It came from a song on The Clash’s London Calling, which is still one of my favorite records ever. “The Right Profile” was about the strange, sad life of the actor Montgomery Clift, who after a terrible car crash was shot from the right side. It was hardly the best song on London Calling — I wouldn’t even put it in the top five — but you come to love the names of people and things you loved, so I always loved The Right Profile.
So I was very jazzed to learn, via Variety, that a biopic of Clash leader Joe Strummer is in the works, to be directed by Julie Delpy, and it’s got a great title:
Details from The Right Profile are being kept under wraps, but the idea is to focus on Strummer’s life and his planned disappearance from the public spotlight in 1982. Pic is titled after the song “The Right Profile,” which appeared on the Clash’s seminal 1979 album “London Calling.”
An iconic figure of the British punk movement, Strummer died in December 2002, just a month before he and the Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Can’t wait.
(HT: Mark Ehrenkranz)
Its content notwithstanding, what’s interesting to me about this picture is how jarring it is to see a black-and-white photograph these days. It instantly looks like an antique. There was a time, not so long ago, when 99 percent of serious photographers sneered at color photography. I worked at the N.Y. Times when it began printing color photographs in the news sections, and from some of the shrieking commentary you would have thought they were producing the color ink by pulverizing baby seals and kittens. The full-on proliferation of color photography is a good example of how quickly we get used to new things that we predicted we’d never get used to.
(HT: J.L.)
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
In the decade since the stadium opened, the personal seat licenses or PSLs fans bought for the right to purchase season tickets have soared in value, offering a far better return on investment than the slumping stock market or even the price of a barrel of oil.
Take, for instance, a fan who bought a license for a seat in an upper level of Heinz Field for $250 in 2001. It now is selling for an average of $4,306, an increase of 1,622.4 percent, based on 2011 sales at STR Marketplace, a website authorized by the Steelers to allow fans to buy and sell seat licenses.
A seat license that went for $500 in an end zone now is selling for an average of $7,486, an increase of 1,397.2 percent. And one that sold in a lower midfield section for $2,700 when the stadium opened now is going for an average of $17,131, a jump of nearly 534.5 percent.
Taken together, the 49,278 seat licenses sold by the Steelers for an average of $1,172 since Heinz Field opened now are selling for $9,802, on average, or an increase of 736.3 percent, based on the sales data.
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
What do Dan Marino, Jerry Rice, and MarTay Jenkins have in common?
Yes, wise guy, they all played in the NFL. But beyond that? They all hold all-time single-season records.
+ Marino (among his other records) passed for 5,084 yards in 1984.
+ Rice (among his many other records) gained 1,848 receiving yards in 1995.
+ Jenkins had 2,186 kickoff-return yards in 2000 for the Arizona Cardinals.
But Jenkins, unlike the other two, won’t be getting a call from Canton any time soon, even though he set a second record that season – for the number of kickoff returns, with 82. Eighty-two kickoff returns! That’s an average of more than 5 a game.
Care to guess the Cardinals’ record in 2000? They were 3-13. Yes, it’s great to be a kickoff returner when your team is getting kicked off to over and over and over again.
And so it is that MarTay Jenkins is the poster boy for our latest Freakonomics Football video, “When Good Stats Go Bad.”
In a Time magazine Q&A, the actor gives a fascinating reply to the question “Are you disappointed in Obama”:
I get angry at people who don’t stand for him, actually. If this were a Republican president, Republicans would say, “We were losing 400,000 jobs a month. We stopped it. We saved the car industry.” You could go down the list. Democrats should talk to Hollywood about how to posture some of these things. Say you’re about to get into tax loopholes. Instead of “loopholes,” say “cheating.” And then on the floor of the Senate, get up and say, “We’re not going to raise your taxes, but we’re not for cheating. Are you?” I just think Democrats are bad at that.
A few points: I assume the “people” he gets angry at for not standing for Obama are Democrats? If not … well … hard to imagine someone like Clooney getting angry at Democrats who didn’t “stand for” Bush.
Great point re the job loss and car industry! Perhaps not nearly 100 percent accurate, but still, a great point re how those accomplishments haven’t been framed as successes.
If you are in the least bit an airplane junkie, you should follow the advice of Jason Kottke (no relation to Daniel, or Leo, fwiw) and search for “planes overhead” on the Wolfram Alpha search engine. It returns a list of airplanes above your geographical location, including carrier, origin/destination, altitude, angle, type, slant distance, as well as a sky map so you can find the actual planes in the sky:
There’s a nasty secret about hot-button topics like global warming: knowledge is not always power.
Productivity, that is. One factor was the trimming of deadwood; the other seems to be old-fashioned harder work. From a new working paper by Casey Mulligan (emphasis added):
During the recession of 2008-9, labor hours fell sharply, while wages and output per hour rose. Some, but not all, of the productivity and wage increase can be attributed to changing quality of the workforce. The rest of the increase appears to be due to increases in production inputs other than labor hours. All of these findings, plus the drop in consumer expenditure, are consistent with the hypothesis that labor market “distortions” were increasing during the recession and have remained in place during the slow “recovery.” Producers appear to be trying to continue production with less labor, rather than cutting labor hours as a means of cutting output.
Once in a while, we do an FAQ podcast (that’s FREAK-quently Asked Questions) whereby you send us questions via the comments section and we answer them in a radio program. We’re gearing up to do another FAQ, likely to be released on Jan. 4, so fire away. Given the release date, you might consider asking about New Year’s resolutions (and the commitment devices we sometimes employ); the dangers of drunk walking; maybe even the reproductive provenance of your holiday meal. Feel free to ask followup questions on radio stuff we’ve done in the past too, like the “Prius Effect” (conspicuous conservation), the decline of hitchhiking, and whether expensive wines actually taste better. Thanks in advance.
Way to scapegoat, Chronicle of Higher Education!
An article about a Dutch psychologist accused of faking his research data wonders if academic fraudsters are responding to the wrong incentives:
Is a desire to get picked up by the Freakonomics blog, or the dozens of similar outlets for funky findings, really driving work in psychology labs? Alternatively—though not really mutually exclusively—are there broader statistical problems with the field that let snazzy but questionable findings slip through?
So the First and Second Ladies (Michelle Obama and Jill Biden) were brought in as grand marshals for the NASCAR season finale at Homestead (won in spectacular fashion by the absurdly entertaining Tony Stewart), and there was enough booing from the crowd to turn the story into “Michelle Obama, Dr. Jill Biden Draw Boos at NASCAR Event.” Video is here.
In our podcast “Boo…Who?”, we poked into political booing and sports booing, and how the two occasionally intersect. Bottom line: it’s often not pretty.
A couple twists worth noting in this case: these weren’t politicians getting booed but the wives of politicians (which would make the booing seem particularly hardcore); and they were there as part of a charitable campaign to help military personnel and veterans (which would make the booing seem to be a complaint about trying to score political points).
Now imagine for a moment that you were the person who handled this event from the White House side.
If you like words even a little bit, you should take advantage of Anu Garg‘s wordsmith.org. It is an idiosyncratic exploration of how language works; his “word a day” e-mail is particularly fun.
The “word a day” theme this week is “words with unusual arrangements of letters.” The first word in this series was “verisimilitude,” which Garg notes has perfectly alternating consonants and vowels. (Not bad, Anu, but my son’s name is even better, as it has perfect consonant-vowel symmetry while using only a single vowel: Solomon. An even longer example is Tunku Varadarajan‘s last name.)
“Verisimilitude” was followed by “syzygy” (“one could hyperpolysyllabically contrive a longer word having four Ys, but syzygy nicely lines up three of them organically in just six letters,” Garg notes) and “yob” (the rare word created by spelling a different word backward).
But today’s word is my favorite. It’s “kine.” Before you click this link, or look the word up elsewhere, try to guess what is unique about it. A slight hint: the answer is related to the topic of this post and, marginally, this one one too. The answer is below.
Our appetite for breast meat renders our holiday birds unable to reproduce.
That is the possibility raised in a new paper published in BMJ Open and summarized in Science Daily. The presumptive culprit would be environmental estrogen exposure. Add this to the bulging files of Unintended Consequences of Birth Technology (the theme of a recent podcast called “Misadventures in Baby-Making.”) First, from the paper:
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common male malignancy in the Western world, and risk factors associated with this cancer remain ill defined.1 The only acknowledged risk factors thus far are: age, ethnicity and family history.1 Several studies have suggested that oestrogen exposure may increase the risk of prostate cancer,2–4 while other studies have not found an association.5 6
We’ve noted in the past that various countries routinely elect economists to be president or prime minister — a trend that has decidedly escaped the U.S.
We also released a podcast a while back called “What Would the World Look Like if Economists Were in Charge?” — which, despite the title, was about the U.S. more than “the world.” (Yes, I am as synecdochically myopic — or is that myopically synecdochal? — as any other American.)
Now, a British reader named Peter Bennett writes in with this challenge:
Looking forward to hearing your take on these new technocratic economists in charge in Italy and Greece.
Just how bad would things have to get in the U.S. before they’d call in the economists?
We will try to scare up a worthy contributor to answer both those questions in the near future.
We’re working on a Freakonomics Radio episode that will probably be called “Weird Recycling” (or, possibly, “What Do Chicken Paws and Tongue Depressors Have in Common?”). It’s about people who find or create value from things that are typically thought to be worthless (or worse!).
I’d love to gather a few more examples and I can think of no population in the world better suited for this task than the Freakonomics readership.
What say you?
Thanks in advance.
A small (?) bad-news item about electric cars:
Electric cars face new scrutiny after a fire in a Chevrolet Volt prompted a federal investigation into lithium ion batteries, even after U.S. regulators said their own crash test likely led to the blaze.
And a big bad-news item about electric cars:
Accounting for more than half of the about 216,000 new cars sold sales in Israel by leasing to corporations, rental agencies are balking [at buying electric vehicles] because of uncertainty regarding the cars’ resale value. Mr. Bar said that he fears vehicles with switchable batteries might lose as much as 70% of their original value in four years instead of the typical 40% loss by gasoline-powered vehicles over the same period.
“It’s going to be a nice niche, a gimmick, for people who are environmentalists, and corporations who want to show they are saving the environment, but I don’t see a savings in costs,” Mr. Bar said.
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