Little dairy farms disappeared from the map, but now they’re making a comeback. Do “locavores” have anything to do with it?
One of my favorite images from the new Illustrated SuperFreakonomics (beautifully designed by No. 17) is a decision tree showing how Gary Becker, a young man who was better at handball than math, nevertheless chose math and became the Nobel-winning economist whose research made possible books like ours.
For the most part, Americans don’t like the simple, boring act of putting money in a savings account. We do, however, love to play the lottery. So what if you combined the two, creating a new kind of savings account with a lottery payout?
That’s the question asked by U.C.-San Diego economist Gordon H. Hanson in a new working paper.
Given the massive uncertainty about the near (and long-term) future of the U.S. tax code, we recently invited Michael Mundaca, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy, to field questions from Freakonomics readers. You asked about everything from offshore tax shelters to the messy estate/death tax situation; here are his answers. A big thanks to all.
I keep thinking the headlines are from The Onion but they are not. First we read that San Francisco has effectively banned the Happy Meal. Then we learn of a new law that bans people from sitting or lying on city sidewalks from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. (known, naturally, as the “sit/lie law”). Some months ago, the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare proposed banning the sale of any pets other than fish, but that measure has apparently been tabled.
A few days ago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began selling futures contracts on rain. As this Marketplace report points out, the Merc – best known for selling agricultural commodities and futures – “already sells futures for temperature, frost, snow – even hurricanes.”
The U.S. president is often called the “leader of the free world.” But if you ask an economist or a Constitutional scholar how much the occupant of the Oval Office matters, they won’t say much. We look at what the data have to say about measuring leadership, and its impact on the economy and the country.
It’s shaping up to be a most interesting year on the tax front. A recent Freakonomics quorum focused on potential tax-policy mistakes that might be made this year, with so many issues up in the air. It brought up concerns about everything from expiring tax cuts to the federal deficit to the lack of clarity surrounding even this year’s tax code.
Happy Election Day, everyone! Please don’t read this before you vote.
And then don’t read this either. It’s a paper by Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy, both of Harvard Business School, and it’s called “Friends in High Places.”
A recent interview with the Rolling Stones reveals some of their business and wealth-protection strategies. “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” said Keith Richards. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. [This may sound like an exaggeration, but likely isn’t.] We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30% in holding until we sort it out.”
The N.F.L. is very good at making money. So why on earth doesn’t it sell ad space on the one piece of real estate that football fans can’t help but see: the players themselves? The explanation is trickier than you might think. It has to do with Peyton Manning, with Eli Manning, and with…wait for it…Tevye.
We recently solicited your questions for John Brenkus, author of The Perfection Point, a book about the limits of athletic achievements. Read on for Brenkus’s thoughts on those special swimsuits at the Beijing Olympics and the most surprising perfection point he encountered in his research. Thanks to everyone, especially John, for participating.
This is not the first time we’ve seen such call-and-response advertising from India. I am guessing this practice exists in the U.S., especially on the local-advertising front, but it is probably rarer.
I have heard a lot of reasons for planes being delayed, but this was a new one. My Delta flight out of JFK was just about to push back from the gate when the captain made an announcement. He explained that there is a wheelchair on board every flight, and the one on this plane had had a malfunction – the handle broke, he said – which made it unusable. It didn’t seem to matter that no passengers on the flight had needed a wheelchair to board: the plane couldn’t take off, he said, until a replacement was brought on board.
This year’s midterm elections promise to be a bit more eventful than usual, with predictions of seismic change in Congress and in many statehouses, most of it in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next?
While the New York Yankees’ 2010 season came to a disappointing close, it would still appear inevitable that the team will want to re-sign Derek Jeter, their franchise shortstop. But it appears just as inevitable that his on-field performance isn’t worth nearly as much as he will likely want to be paid.
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book: SuperFreakonomics: The Illustrated Edition. It’s a large-format book built around the original text of SuperFreakonomics, with hundreds of new visual elements and quite a bit of new text as well.
Government and the private sector often feel far apart. One is filled with compliance-driven bureaucracy. The other, with market-fueled innovation. But something is changing in a multi-billion-dollar corner of the Department of Education. It’s an experiment, which takes cues from the likes of Google and millionaires who hope to go to the moon.
Last week, we solicited your questions for Matthew Kahn, the author of Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. His answers, covering everything from water scarcity to Moscow’s recent heat wave, are below. A big thanks to Matt – and to everyone who participated.
Consider the ingredients: a frail economy, a toxic political environment, looming hard deadlines and massive uncertainty in the business community – the perfect circumstances under which to write some great federal tax policy!
But tax-code writing will be done – on the expiring Bush-era tax cuts, the estate tax, the Alternative Minimum Tax, capital-gains taxes and more.
Every year, athletes break records and accomplish physical feats previously thought impossible. But is there a way to know the upper bound of such accomplishments?
The recent financial crisis clearly had many contributing villains. But if you’re looking to sue someone to recover losses, Nassim Nicholas Taleb maintains, the choice is clear: the Swedish Central Bank, which awards the Nobel Prize in Economics,
There are plenty of dire predictions about what will happen to our cities if the worst predictions about global warming were to come true: flooding, droughts, famine, chaos and massive death. But Matthew Kahn, an economist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, sees a different future. He tells that story in his new book Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future.
It was a pretty good baseball season — especially if you’re a fan of the Yankees, Rays, Twins, Rangers, Reds, Braves, Phillies, or Giants, all of whom made the playoffs. But the post-season just opened with a telling event, a no-hitter pitched by the Phillies’ Roy Halladay, which shows what’s been missing all season: runs.
Last week, we solicited your questions for Steven Johnson, the author of Where Do Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Your questions were very good, as are his answers, which you’ll find below. (My favorite excerpt: “Governments are teeming with information that’s useful to our lives: information about services they offer, and information that they collect about society at large. But these public institutions are generally terrible at coming up with innovative ways of sharing that information and making it more relevant to people.”)
Reusable grocery bags may be unsanitary but at least they’re quiet. The same cannot be said for Frito Lay’s new environmentally friendly SunChips bag. The bag is so noisy that the company, after lots of consumer backlash (including Facebook campaigns), is ditching the effort.
Back in February, we started a podcast. It was generally well-received, but there were a lot of complaints, mainly about its frequency. Now, what began as a lark has become a real thing, thanks to New York Public Radio, American Public Media, and The New York Times.
Very interesting essay by James Collins in the New York Times Book Review about forgetting what you read.
What kinds of environments and societies give rise to good ideas? Author Steven Johnson takes your questions.
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