We blogged a while back about the sad state of financial literacy in this country. This has been diligently investigated by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, who insert a few financial questions in government longitudinal surveys. Here’s an example.
Our critics accuse us of manipulation and cherry-picking and misrepresenting a variety of arguments about climate change and energy production. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it�s not.
We have a chapter in SuperFreakonomics about global warming and it too will likely produce a lot of shouting, name-calling, and accusations ranging from idiocy to venality. It is curious that the global-warming arena is so rife with shrillness and ridicule. Where does this shrillness come from? Some say that left-leaning activists have merely borrowed their right-leaning competitors from years past. A reasonable conjecture?
In Stockholm’s Odenplan subway station, the staircase has been retrofitted to resemble giant piano keys, which produce real sound, to encourage commuters to climb the stairs rather than ride the escalator. According to this video — which seems to be part of a Volkswagen marketing initiative, though it’s unclear — it’s been a raging success.
For a few years now, this blog has included a link whereby readers could sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Many of you did so but for whatever reason we never actually sent out anything. If we had something to say, we’d just say it here on the blog. But now with a new book finally about to be published here and in the U.K. (and other English-speaking nations), we have fired up the e-mail list. The first missive went out last week. If you wanted it and got it, do nothing. If you got it and didn’t want it, you may unsubscribe and our feelings won’t be hurt. If you didn’t get it and want it, sign up here.
A quick visit to the U.K. confirms that environmental and global-warming concerns are, on the surface at least, acutely more pronounced here than in the U.S. Reminders and nudges seem to be everywhere, many of them seemingly intended to make you feel guilty for every breath you draw and every bite you swallow. A bottle of Belu water arrives at the table: “All Profits to Clean Water Projects,” it says. “The U.K.’s First Carbon-Neutral Bottled Water.”
Just landed in the U.K. for a quick bout of pre-release publicity for SuperFreakonomics.
Checked in at the hotel, turned on the TV to unpack, flipped through the channels, and came to CNN. I was expecting to see a familiar face, and I did. But not Wolf, not Campbell, not Larry: instead, it’s Jon Stewart.
Maybe it was because I saw the headline early this morning not on the N.Y. Times’s website or the Wall Street Journal’s, but rather on Google News. I instantly assumed that the Onion had successfully landed a story on the home page of that fine aggregator. “Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize,” the headline said. I chuckled, silently congratulated the Onion on its clever idea, and clicked the link.
Some time ago, we wondered if New York City’s new law requiring certain restaurants to post calorie counts might provide good material for academic researchers who careabout obesity.
The answer: yes!
Is this the only academic paper ever written where the total number of letters of the abstract (36) is less than the number of letters in either the title (42) or the authors’ names (46)?
Our new book comes out on October 20.
If you’d like to own this first copy and be a good citizen at the same time, here’s your chance: it is being auctioned off on eBay, with the proceeds going to The Smile Train, a charity which performs cleft-repair surgery on poor children all over the world.
We recently posted about a taxi driver who runs his business on a pay-what-you-wish (PWYW) model. In response, a few readers sent along interesting notes.
Gregory Taylor tells us about a law firm in Chicago called Valorem that pitches itself as revolutionary on several fronts, including its use of “Value Line Adjustments” in its pricing:
It is fascinating to poke through history and see how often cheap and simple fixes solved problems that were routinely thought to be either unsolvable or, at best, solved by very expensive, complicated, and invasive means.
Amadu Jacky Kaba is a Liberian-born striver who first came to Seton Hall University as a basketball player and, several degrees later, has returned as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. Like our friend Roland Fryer, Kaba is a black scholar who studies a lot of racial issues with a perspective and a latitude that is unavailable to white scholars.
Tyler Cowen shuns the doubters and blogs about what Tweeting means to him: instant feedback on lectures, an essential tool for researching blog posts, and an efficient alternative to a Google search.
There is nothing conclusive in this report, but it is nevertheless sad and remarkable: Malcolm Casadaban, a University of Chicago medical researcher working on a better vaccine for the plague (Yersinia pestis), has died at the age of 60 and was found to have Yersinia pestis in his bloodstream.
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
All the economists who read this blog will no doubt be familiar with the popular instrumental variables (IV) regression technique, which is used to estimate the coefficient of endogenous variables. But who established the technique as a solution to the identification problem?
Representative Joe Wilson’s much discussed “You Lie” outburst last Wednesday during President Obama’s health care speech has been compared to the 1856 savage caning that Representative Preston Brooks delivered to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (for example, see here and here).
If you had to point to one person who helped the global population surge over the past several decades to nearly 7 billion rather than succumbing to mass famine, as was widely predicted (and, indeed, has been predicted throughout history), a person who well understood the paradox that population growth was both the reward of his life’s work as well as the problem that necessitated it, that person would likely be Norman Borlaug, the most important plant scientist behind the Green Revolution, who has died at the age of 95.
As bad as most prognosticators are about most things, football prognosticators are really bad. Go back and look at just about any group of experts’ predictions for the coming season and you’ll see that their success rate is lower than that of the average monkey with a dartboard.
Last week, we solicited your questions for former astronaut and second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin, and we asked him a few of our own:
Let’s say you are currently running your own shady investment scheme. Perhaps you, like Madoff, have anticipated many times over the day that you would be exposed. And yet you haven’t yet been. Do the current revelations about the S.E.C.’s ineptitude give you comfort, believing the agency is congenitally incapable of rooting out fraudsters unless they confess to their own sons, or are you more frightened today than you were yesterday, believing the agency cannot possibly perform any worse than it has in the past and that your days are numbered?
James McWilliams is an historian at Texas State University-San Marcos who has appeared on this blog before. He writes to tell us that he was driving in Austin when he passed a (presumably) homeless man holding up this sign:
A reader named Ben Muschel of Flushing, N.Y. (that’s where Citi Field is), writes in with a question that he admits is trivial.
I have been participating in a fantasy football league for the last few years with many former college econ majors as well as two econ Ph.D. students. We are all still very plugged in to economic policy debate too. Anyway, we all pride ourselves on having amusing or clever team names. This year, with the current economic crisis, I thought a team name related to economics (in the academic or popular sense) would be appropriate.
One of the people you’ll meet in SuperFreakonomics is a remarkable physician at Washington Hospital Center (WHC) named Craig Feied. He has had a hand in many technological innovations that are pushing medicine, hard, into the future (or at least the present).
In a trenchant Times Op-Ed, Michael Lynch explains, point-by-point, why the “peak oil” concept is so wrong.
The paperback edition of Freakonomics goes on sale today. As with the Revised and Expanded hardcover (which, we are told, will stay in print), it includes several of our New York Times Magazine columns; it doesn’t, however, include a chapter of blog excerpts.
Aldrin has agreed to take your questions — about NASA, walking on the moon, the value to society of space exploration, or anything else you can conjure — so ask away in the comments section below. As with all Q&A’s, we will post his answers here in a few days.
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