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.
At my kids’ school, parents are trained from pre-K onward to send in any “beautiful junk” they amass at home: egg cartons, shoe boxes, packing peanuts, etc. It is all recycled by the kids into artwork, some of it pretty splendid.
Here’s a neat look at the “beautiful junk” being amassed by Intellectual Ventures, the invention company near Seattle we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics.
Yes, the U.S. healthcare system is full of inefficiencies which lead to bloated costs. But no, that’s not the reason that U.S. longevity ranks only 29th in the world.
Ralph Keeney, a decision analyst at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, uses decision sciences to give “practical and usable advice” to help people make decisions, from lifestyle choices to management strategies.
Climate officials from around the world have assembled in Copenhagen for two weeks to address global warming. Here’s an interesting article from today’s Guardian. Highlights:
It’s legal to give certain things away for free, and illegal to sell them. Sex, for one. A few more of our favorites are inside this post. Can you think of other examples where money doesn’t necessarily make a practice illegal, but at the very least taboo or socially repugnant?
We recently solicited your questions for George Atallah, the assistant executive director of external affairs for the N.F.L. Players Association. Atallah responded in a fashion that I believe is unique among all previous participants in our reader-generated Q&A’s: he answered every question you asked. If thoroughness counts for anything – not to mention candor and the willingness to engage sticky subjects – then the players would seem to have strong advocates in Atallah and his boss DeMaurice Smith.
In the 10 days since we first blogged about “ClimateGate” – the unauthorized release of e-mails and other material from the Climate Research Unit (C.R.U.) at East Anglia University in Norwich, England – it’s become strikingly clear that one’s view of the issue is deeply colored by his or her incoming biases. No surprise there, but still, the demarcation is clear. One of the best indicators: when you stumble onto a blog post about the topic, you can tell which way the wind is blowing simply by looking at the banner ad at the top of the site: if it’s for an M.B.A. in Sustainable Business, you’re going to hear one thing about ClimateGate; if the ad shows Al Gore with a Pinocchio nose, meanwhile – well, you get the idea.
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