The next chapter in the adventures of Dubner and Levitt has begun. Listen to a preview of what’s to come for the fall season of Freakonomics Radio.
Last week, we solicited your questions for the actor and director Adrian Grenier, whose new documentary film, Teenage Paparazzo, just made its HBO debut. His answers touch on everything from paparazzi methods to the role of the consumer in media culture. Thanks to all, especially Adrian, for playing along.
One example was real-estate transactions. The more a customer can learn via the Internet about, say, a property for sale and similar properties, the less likely she is to make bad decisions. That said, there is still a lot of room for improvement. A reader named Sam Bauch describes his encounter with one particular area of information asymmetry in real-estate, and what he’s doing to stop it.
A reader named Linda Cass asks an interesting question that pokes into the self-interest/fairness/altruism area we’ve been writing about lately: Why do 99% of people dim their headlights for oncoming vehicles?
As security guru Bruce Schneier writes, “the arms race continues.” I do wonder if, when, or how there will be a computer users’ revolt against tracking tools like this one.
Here are two interesting items.
In Washington, D.C., this morning, the New America Foundation (in partnership with Arizona State University and Slate) is holding a “Future Tense Event” called “Geoengineering: The Horrifying Idea Whose Time Has Come?”
Steve Levitt likes to preach that experimentation should not be limited to scientists and other researchers; firms and other institutions stand to benefit from it a great deal, and yet often don’t engage. But here, from the Canadian magazine Macleans, is one institution that’s giving it a shot: the National Hockey League.
We feature all kinds of people on this blog – drug dealers, prostitutes, even academic economists – but readers are always complaining that we don’t have any movie stars. Today that changes. Below we are soliciting your questions for Adrian Grenier, the actor who plays Vincent Chase on HBO’s Entourage and has appeared in The Devil Wears Prada and other films. Grenier also makes documentary films – Shot in the Dark (2002), which chronicled his search for his estranged father, and Teenage Paparazzo, which premieres on HBO on Sept. 27.
From the Wall Street Journal: “When British bank Barclays PLC agreed to shell out ?25 million ($39 million) to sponsor London’s new public bike-rental program, it envisioned the marketing benefits of seeing its sky-blue logo draped on thousands of cycles around the city.”
Steven Rattner, the financier, onetime journalist and recent “car czar,” has just published a book called Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt, and if this snippet is a good indication, there is a lot of sensible, factual material to be read.
From a new working paper by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi: “We examine the ability of the government to increase consumption by evaluating the impact of the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program on short and medium run auto purchases.”
Let’s say you live or work in an area where there are a lot of vulnerable pedestrians – kids, maybe – and a lot of cars as well, and that the cars habitually drive too fast for your taste.
What do you do?
I was working at my desk recently when I heard a loud electronic chirp. I’d never heard it before. I was willing to overlook it once, but then I heard the chirp again, and again, and again, about every 30 seconds.
Want to know a bit more about Austan Gooslbee, the newly appointed chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers? Straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s a Q&A we ran with him in July 2009. There are a lot of interesting answers, including several that are perhaps more interesting now than they were then.
To some people, the following conclusion should be filed under “Duh.” But even they might appreciate the empirical rigor undertaken by Scott E. Carrell, Mark Hoekstra, and James E. West in a new working paper called “Does Drinking Impair College Performance? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach.”
Correct me if I’m wrong — I couldn’t find mention of it anywhere — but as the NFL season opens, the Pittsburgh Steelers would seem to be the only team that’s ever had three black quarterbacks on its 53-man roster: Dennis Dixon, Byron Leftwich, and Charlie Batch.
I’ve already used up too much of your bandwidth complaining about the uselessness of pennies, but allow me to share with you a wonderful vlog rant by John Green on the many, many reasons why the penny (and the nickel, too) should be abolished.
A story told on pp. 8-11 of SuperFreakonomics – about the plague of horse manure, the introduction of the automobile (an “environmental savior”), and the resulting carbon emissions — has been turned into (of all things) a Mercedes-Benz commercial.
The conclusion couldn’t be any starker: “Indiana lawmakers say the state’s driver education program isn’t working, citing a fractured system administered by three separate agencies and statistics that put the program’s usefulness in doubt.”
According to a new working paper by Ron Kaniel, Cade Massey, and David T. Robinson (abstract here; PDF here), the answer is yes, at least if you’re an MBA student looking for a job.
We recently took note of the “unbranding” movement, in which Firm A might seem to damage Firm B by sending Firm B’s product to an undesirable endorser. The example of the day was Snooki and her Gucci purse. There would seem to be no limit to the unbranding opportunities in the modern world. How about, say, politics? The Times headline says it all – “Republican Runs Street People on Green Ticket” — but Marc Lacey’s article is well worth a read.
The Freakonomics movie that premiered this spring at the Tribeca Film Festival is released to the public today — but only on iTunes (and on some Video on Demand cable systems), nearly a month before it hits theaters.
In the SuperFreakonomics Virtual Book Club, we invite readers to ask questions of some of the researchers and other characters in our book. Last week, we opened up the questioning for “Ian Horsley,” a banker who’s been working with Steve Levitt to develop an algorithm to catch terrorists. His answers are below. Thanks to Ian and to all of you for the questions.
In the Wall Street Journal, Jean Guerrero writes an interesting article about how cities are fighting street crime by the simple act of leaving the lights on deeper into the night. (Other cities have tried Barry Manilow music, with some success.) But leaving the lights on all night doesn’t always jibe with a city’s budget plans — or its global-warming conscience.
From a new CDC report: “To monitor the extent to which tobacco use is shown in popular movies, Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! (TUTD), a project of Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails, counted the occurrences of tobacco use (termed “incidents”) shown in U.S. top-grossing movies during 1991-2009. This report summarizes the results of that study, which found that the number of tobacco incidents depicted in the movies during this period peaked in 2005 and then progressively declined.”
Vice President Joe Biden says he’s willing to place a bet that Democrats will retain their majorities in the House and Senate. But is that a smart idea?
We recently solicited your questions for Bill Barnwell, a Football Outsider and one of the many authors of the new Football Outsiders Almanac. Here are his replies, which cover everything from miracle turnarounds to the role of injuries to his own background.
Last month, roughly two years into a global financial maelstrom, the U.S. Congress passed a financial-reform bill. It was more than 2,300 pages long, addressing everything from derivatives to consumer financial products to oversized banks. We asked a few clever people a simple question.
This week we’re offering up “Ian Horsley.” By day, he is employed in the anti-fraud department of a large British bank; but in his every spare moment for the past few years he has been working hard in collaboration with Steve Levitt to build an algorithm that can identify potential terrorists by their retail banking data.
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