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 Allie, a high-end escort whose entrepreneurial skills and understanding of economics made her a financial success.
You may have read about the standoff between Amazon.com and the Macmillan publishing company. Macmillan had objected to Amazon’s pricing, particularly its loss-leader $9.99 e-book price for new books. In turn, Amazon.com temporarily halted the sale of all Macmillan books.
In the first episode (subscribe at iTunes; or listen now in the player at right), we ask the question “What Do NASCAR Drivers, Glenn Beck, and the Hitmen of the N.F.L. Have in Common?”
We blogged last fall about the Book of Odds, an interesting site that generates “odds statements” of all sorts. Now, David Gassko and Ian Stanczyk of the Book of Odds have written a guest post which answers just the kind of question we like to ask around here: What are the odds that a given cow will make it to the Super Bowl?
The SuperFreakonomics chapter on geoengineering solutions to global warming has generated plenty of heat, but scientific and political interest in the concept is on the rise.
In the SuperFreakonomics Virtual Book Club, we invite readers to ask questions of some of the researchers and other characters in our new book. Last week we opened up the questioning for Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, labor economists and experts on the male-female wage gap.
A reader offers an alternate explanation for the male-female pay gap among MBA’s.
Remember the story about the cheating schoolteachers in Chicago? The theory was that high-stakes testing, by putting more pressure on students to pass, creates a stronger incentive for teachers to not leave those students behind – and that a fraction of those teachers, generally the worse ones, went so far as to cheat on behalf of their students.
Looks like it may have been happening in Springfield, Mass., too.
In the previous installment of our virtual book club, Sudhir Venkatesh answered your questions about his research on street prostitution.
Now, moving on to another section of Chapter One, here’s your chance to ask a pair of researchers about a central and pressing fact of U.S. economic life: the enduring wage gap between men and women.
The economic downturn has obviously hurt newspapers a great deal, but it’s hard to say which areas of coverage have been depleted the most. I have talked to people in many realms – international reporting, business, sports, entertainment – who claim their domain has been particularly hard hit. (Here’s a map from Paper Cuts that shows 2009 newspaper layoffs.)
Bill Gates has started blogging. The homepage is here, and in the “What I’m Learning” section, he proves to be a a fantastic book critic: “I really liked Freakonomics and I think SuperFreakonomics is even better. … I recommend this book to anyone who reads nonfiction. It is very well written and full of great insights.”
A reader who works for a start-up NGO in Mali solicits your ideas for creating new public health incentives there.
We have blogged a few times about financial and economic illiteracy in the U.S., particularly among young people.
So it’s nice to see a counterexample.
A blog reader named Christopher Galen has sent us his daughter Grace’s third-grade economics quiz. Yes, that’s right: a third-grade economics quiz. She goes to a public school in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Whatever the case, a downturn in bike ridership may strike some people as a grievous strike against the American character. On the other hand, it’s great news for the likes of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft.
In a recent post, we linked to a blog’s photo essay on Biosphere2, the “failed” and “abandoned” enviro-architectural project in the Arizona desert. But that information wasn’t accurate.
“My attitude is this,” he said. “If you are getting attacked by Krugman, you must be doing something right.”
Is there any other academic field in which standard decorum is valued so low?
Quite a bit more than on Saturday, to be sure — which is when the Wall Street Journal published this article about the psychic value of the Vikings to its fans. The tally: $530.65 per year.
One problem faced by a society that is always working toward solutions to various problems is that certain solutions, however effective, may go unused because they cannot be commodified.
We write at some length in SuperFreakonomics about a physician and technologist named Craig Feied, who is responsible for not only for a lot of medical innovation but who looks at problem-solving in a resolutely unorthodox manner.
Whenever you write a book, it’s interesting to see which parts of it people respond to en masse. With SuperFreakonomics, the global-warming chapter has certainly gotten its fair share of attention, and Levitt noted a lot of feedback about the perils of drunk walking.
It is no secret that weather affects mood, and even behavior. The Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics, who ran an honor-system business, received lower payments during foul weather. Now along come Donald Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter from the University of Toronto with an interesting question: do applicants to medical school suffer if they happen to be interviewed on a rainy day?
John List had better be careful. His research is very valuable to the philanthropic community; but if this latest paper engenders a public outcry for a “do-not-knock” registry, he might quickly become a pariah.
It is commonly thought that the nearly-40-year “war on cancer” has largely been a failure, since the age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over that time. But that’s a deceptive metric. Consider this…
We recently solicited your questions for Ralph Keeney, a decision analyst at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
In his answers, you’ll find that Keeney discusses how to avoid making the wrong decisions, how to figure out what you really want, and why neither psychologists nor economists have definitively figured out how to make good decisions.
Yes, today is December 31. So get off this site and go find someplace to exercise your altruism, as impure as it may be.
Levitt recently wrote about geoengineering going mainstream – i.e., being featured in the M.I.T. Technology Review. That fine publication may not be as “mainstream” for the rest of us as it is for Levitt. But now NBC Nightly News has weighed in on the topic.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, E.S. Browning has written a quietly important article (gated) about the fact that stock-market returns are almost never adjusted for inflation. While most shrewd investors factor in this omission, my sense is that a great many people never think about it, and therefore significantly overestimate their investment gains.
For a few months now, we’ve been soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline. You can find his first few batches of answers here, and he’s back now with another round. You can leave new questions for him in the comments section below.
The second chapter of SuperFreakonomics, which is primarily about catching terrorists and running an emergency room, includes a few passages about the timing quirks of births and deaths.
Christmas and economists go together like – well, like drinking and walking. Joel Waldfogel, the economist who is famous for highlighting the deadweight loss of gift-giving, has a new book out called Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.
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