Today is the first day of the rest of our blogging lives. For 3.5 years, this blog has lived at NYTimes.com, very happily for the most part. But as time passed, we became eager to take the blog indie again, and unite it with the other stuff we’ve been working on.
A reader named Sarah Johnson, who is passionate about crocheting, noticed something curious about the demographics of a user-rated knitting-and-crocheting website called Ravelry. Sarah is graduating from high school in June, and plans to major in psychology and pre-med. She writes: “I joined a free site for knitters and crocheters called Ravelry. As far as a little Internet research goes, it’s one of the biggest knitting and crochet sites out there, with over 1 million members. CrochetMe, another big site with comparable features, has 224,000 users. Crochetville, a large crochet forum, has only 46,000 members as of today. 414,974 people like ‘knitting’ on Facebook. By comparison, only 5,560 people like ‘crochet.'”
Five things you don’t know about the NFL labor standoff.
The Salina Journal, a daily newspaper in Salina, Kansas, has published a final exam that was given to local eighth-graders in 1895 (via this friendly website). (“It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS.”)
Could it be that cities are “our greatest invention” – that, despite their reputation as soot-spewing engines of doom, they in fact make us richer, smarter, happier and (gulp) greener?
A while back, we did a Freakonomics Radio program asking why the NFL hasn’t (yet) put advertising on its players’ jerseys. One person we spoke with was Michael Neuman, then of Amplify Sports and Entertainment and now of Horizon Media. Neuman and Horizon have just released a report that tries to put a firm dollar figure on jersey sponsorship.
One session at the recent AEA meetings addressed “popular economics,” with a panel including Diane Coyle, Robert Frank, Steve Levitt, and Robert Shiller. (Shiller wrote a bit about it on Slate.) Many interesting things were said. To me, the most interesting was that Frank is writing a book arguing that Charles Darwin, more so than Adam Smith, is the true forefather of modern economics. (He has already written a Times column on the topic.)
How to respond to a reader request?
Last week, we solicited your questions for Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, co-authors of the new book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes.
Here are their answers, covering everything from sex to divorce to … gulp … apology. Thanks to all who participated, especially Paula and Jenny.
Economic trouble continues. In the U.S., where the Federal government has moved gradually at best to cut spending, the pain — especially at state and local levels — is still rolling in. (The U.K., meanwhile, went directly to austerity mode.) But there are green shoots to be seen, especially at the high end. Plastic surgery, for instance, is on the rise. (Depending on your worldview, you might consider this the end of the world rather than the start of a recovery, but still …)
Ed Glaeser is an economist’s economist — as smart as they come, driven by empiricism, with something interesting to say about nearly anything. He has just published a new book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. Glaeser argues that cities often get a bad rap even though they are “actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America’s income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites.”
We’re pleased to offer the following guest post from Glaeser on the glory of cities. I hope you find it as enthralling as I did.
Last week, we solicited your questions for George Atallah, the assistant executive director of external affairs for the N.F.L. Players Association. You responded with typical vigor, and Atallah took the bait, answering the vast majority of your questions. Thanks to him and all of you.
In Romania, life has gotten even harder for practicing witches, as spelled out in a recent A.P. article: “A month after Romanian authorities began taxing them for their trade, the country’s soothsayers and fortune tellers are cursing a new bill that threatens fines or even prison if their predictions don’t come true.”
Bring on the Pain! It’s not about how much something hurts — it’s how you remember the pain. This week, lessons on pain from the New York City subway, the professional hockey rink, and a landmark study of colonoscopy patients. So have a listen. We promise, it won’t hurt a bit.
A wealth manager I know sends out a quarterly letter to clients that summarizes his view of the economy and his resultant investing plans. Here’s a nice paragraph from his most recent letter…
Sometime in the late spring, our second book, SuperFreakonomics, will be published in paperback. As with Freakonomics, we’re going to add some bonus matter to the back of this edition. And, as with Freakonomics, one thing we’ll include is a Q&A in which we answer questions from readers. And where do these questions come from? You! So ask away in the comments section; here’s your chance to be a published (albeit unpaid) author. Posted below is the Table of Contents from SuperFreak, but feel free to ask questions unrelated to the content as well. Thanks in advance.
Nifty article in today’s Journal about a nifty study by Bret Myers of Villanova: “The pace and flow of soccer generally make it difficult for managers to affect the outcome of a match once it begins. Since soccer has almost no stoppages for coaches to draw on clipboards or strategize with their players, a manager’s most critical in-game decision may be choosing when to utilize their three substitutions.”
Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, a pair of journalists, are co-authors of the new book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes. It sorts out optimal strategies for household chores (it’s all about comparative advantage), paying the bills on time (find the right incentive!), and the “too-big-to-fail marriage.”
Two good questions from a reader named Harold Laski, who is the medical director of Southside Medical Center in Jacksonville, Fla.: “As a physician treating injured sportsmen, I understand (or at least I think that I do), the reasons that people get into sports. But two things have bothered me…”
Ruh-Roh. John Tierney in today’s Times: “… Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology … polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center [during the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology], starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.”
George Atallah is the assistant executive director of external affairs for the N.F.L. Players Association, which means that he and his boss, DeMaurice Smith, are the top representatives for perhaps the most prominent labor union in history: NFL players.
Last week, we solicited your questions for Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, the authors of Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won.
You shot them a lot of good questions — heavy on the NFL, to be sure.
What do a computer hacker, an Indiana farm boy, and Napoleon Bonaparte have in common? The past, present, and future of food science.
I cannot believe we posted a photo puzzler the other day about the pricing strategies at a banana stand and failed to acknowledge the most delicious fact about the situation: There’s always money in the banana stand!
There’s a great little scene in Mike Leigh’s new-ish film Another Year, which like most Mike Leigh films, is wonderful and also rather depressing (or at least sobering). In this exchange, there’s a wife and husband named Gerri and Tom; they are late middle age, mid-middle class, extremely compatible with each another and have their heads screwed on as right as can be. Their friend Mary works with Gerri and is a sad sack, a deluded and downward-spiraling woman who’s desperate for approval and love and, well anything she can get her hands on. The excerpt from the screenplay, below, can hardly do justice to the excellent acting and direction, but it gives you a sense of what makes Leigh’s films so quietly electric. According to his Wikipedia page, Leigh has been in theater and film his whole life, but when it comes to incentives, he sure thinks like an economist.
We ran a contest yesterday with a simple question: what do the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers have in common? There are many correct answers, but there was one in particular I was looking for. I was worried it might be hard, and I was ready to step in and give a clue. But I was wrong to be worried. The post went up at 10:30 a.m.; the first correct answer came in at 10:31 a.m., in the very first comment.
Teach for America (TFA) recently announced it is receiving $100 million from four philanthropists to start its first endowment. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, one of the “Big Three” Education philanthropists, pledged the first $25 million, which encouraged matching donations from three others. “A few years ago we embraced the priority of making Teach For America an enduring American institution that can thrive as long as the problem we’re working to address persists,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. “I think it’s only appropriate in our country – which aspires to be a place of equal opportunity – that we have an institution which is about our future leaders making good on that promise.”
I mean beside the fact they’re both playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday, or that they’ve both won a bunch of NFL championships, or that they’ve both reached the Super Bowl in recent years as a No. 6 seed. There may be lots of other commonalities I’m not thinking of, but whoever is first to give the answer I am thinking of will get his/her choice of Freakonomics swag, which now includes the just-released Freakonomics movie DVD and a movie poster.
Our recent podcast about the economics of trash featured a story about an American grad student living in Taipei. He discovered that that city had an unusual trash-collection style: instead of putting your trash out at a curb or in a dumpster, you’d have to bring your trash out at a certain hour to deposit it directly in a municipal trash truck, which might be playing Beethoven to announce its arrival.
In our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, we look at the economics of charity — specifically, what works (and what doesn’t) when trying to incentivize people to give. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
In Australia, Dick Smith’s electronics empire has afforded him enough success to be able to donate about 20 percent of his annual income to charity. But, he says, this kind of generosity is no longer the norm:
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