I ran into an old friend the other day whose actor husband is a regular on the TV show House. We caught up on friends and family, etc., including a few mutual acquaintances who have died since we last spoke. As we parted, I couldn’t help but laugh: at least these unfortunate deaths, I thought, were nowhere near as numerous as those on the kind of TV show her husband appears on.
They should! It’s a cardinal rule: more expensive items are supposed to be qualitatively better than their cheaper versions. But is that true for wine?
We recently published a post about the dramatic decline in U.S. fire deaths over the past century. A reader named Tricia Hurlbutt writes in with a related challenge.
Levitt and I just recorded a Q&A session for the Freakonomics Radio podcast, using the questions that all of you recently submitted. You’ll hear the results soon, probably in January. Thanks for the good questions.
One question we didn’t get to, from Tg3:
I have heard Dubner casually mention that he is a backgammon player. Are there ever Levitt vs. Dubner battles? More importantly, why is such a great game not more popular in North America?
… Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, by Viviana A. Zelizer, an economic sociologist at Princeton: Suppose for a moment that this is the year 2096. Let’s take a look at American families: although by now money often takes postelectronic forms unfamiliar to the twentieth century, in the “traditional” home, “housewives” and “househusbands” receive monthly stipulated sums of money as salaries from their wage-earning spouses.
Not long ago, we made a Freakonomics Radio podcast asking whether the NFL might someday sell ad space on its jersey fronts, as soccer teams around the world already do. In European soccer in particular, the revenue can be substantial.
U.S. auto sales are looking a bit better this year. Trucks in particular are doing well. But one category is moving in the opposite direction. Why? Some blame has to go to the fall in gas prices from a peak of more than $4 a gallon. That’s right: it’s the tiny, gas-stingy cars that aren’t moving off the lot.
A reader named Gerald Andriole writes in with a small but interesting puzzle.
On the football field, as in nearly every arena in life, the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime.
James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers has become the poster child for the NFL’s crackdown on dangerous tackling. And he has paid the price in fines. His teammate Troy Polamalu has defended him, but Harrison’s reputation as a dirty player is growing. (As a Steelers fan, I do not subscribe to this view.)
A lot of meat and poultry gets eaten during the holiday season. Did you ever find yourself wondering: Hmm, what’s the trend line over the past 100 years for U.S. per-capita consumption of beef vs. chicken vs. pork vs. turkey?
We recently released a two-part podcast about Prize-Linked Savings, which are typically bank accounts or government bonds that shave a bit of interest off the top and pool together that interest to award regular big cash prizes to random account holders. The idea is to offer the thrill of the lottery with the principal-retaining properties of a savings or bond account.
Meantime, over the past two quarters, the number of U.S. households that subscribe to cable and other paid TV services fell for the first time since the dawn of cable – by about 335,000 households out of about 100 million, according to data provider SNL Kagan.
Diehard baseball fans know that the season doesn’t really end with the World Series. It just downshifts a bit, as J.C. Bradbury explains in his new book Hot Stove Economics: “The final out of the World Series marks the beginning of baseball’s second season, when teams court free agents and orchestrate trades with the hope of building a championship contender. The real and anticipated transactions generate excitement among fans who discuss the merit of moves in the arena informally known as the ‘hot stove league.'”
At least in his hometown, where Chicago magazine has named him one of the town’s top 40 pioneers from the past 40 years.
The Freakonomics Radio beast never sleeps: if you write in your questions in the comments section below, we will answer them — in our podcast!
New York City is on track this year to break its record for the fewest number of deaths by fire. To me, the decline of death by fire is one of the most underappreciated success stories of the past 100 years.
Russia and Qatar landed the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup. Congratulations to them. But has anyone in those countries’ bid committees ever heard of the winner’s curse?
It’s the banking tool that got millions of people around the world to stop wasting money on the lottery. So why won’t state and federal officials in the U.S. give it a chance?
Deaths can be costly — especially to the government if you’re a billionaire.
Vitamin D: should we take less or triple that intake? Whatever you do, don’t just read this headline and run with it.
Christmas is prime time to think about deadweight loss. Scroogenomics aside, tell the world what you really want this year using the Freakonomics Personal Gift Registry.
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.
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