I never set out to be anti-penny, but somehow it happened, and I have gone on the record more than a few times arguing that the penny should be eliminated.
While I stand by my belief that the penny is lousy as currency, someone has finally come up with a use for pennies that has made me reconsider my extinction argument: make a floor out of them!
In two previous posts, we examined laws exempting family members from prosecution for harboring fugitives and laws either granting or permitting sentencing discounts on account of one’s family status, ties, or responsibilities. These are two of the benefits defendants receive on account of their family status in the criminal justice system.
If you care about baseball, you should care about Buster Olney. He is the ESPN baseball reporter who seems to know everything about everything, on the field and in the general managers’ offices, and presents it with a calm authority.
A long-standing pet peeve of mine is that so much academic research is funded by public tax dollars and yet the public is rarely given access to the findings of that research.
In a short Times piece today, I found a hero: Michael Tuts, a particle physicist at Columbia who, among other things, is doing work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research:
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist.
Two weeks ago, we solicited your questions for White House economist Austan Goolsbee. You will find his answers below. Among the highlights: no, the Obama administration is not socialist; and no, Goolsbee will not be trapped into telling you whether he’d buy an American car. Thanks for the good questions and thanks especially to Goolsbee for the interesting answers.
We recently introduced you to Captain Steve, an airline pilot for a major U.S. carrier, who will be regularly fielding your questions about any and all aspects of air travel. But before we get to that, Captain Steve had something he wanted to say about the overall state of the industry, and particularly how pilots fit in — or don’t.
Last week we solicited your questions for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In the interim, Twitter has announced it will begin verifying some high-profile accounts to make sure the Tweeters aren’t impersonators. What was most interesting to me about your questions was that so many of them were skeptical of Twitter’s underlying value.
What he hadn’t written yet, however, was a Freakonomics theme song. That’s the request Mann decided to fulfill. It came from a reader named Spencer, who’ll get his choice of Freakonomics schwag for winning the contest.
So here it is, the theme song we never knew we needed but now wouldn’t want to live without. Thanks to all for participating, and especially to Jonathan Mann for lending his talents to our cause:
A couple of months ago, some Freakonomics readers wondered whether the president really had any discernible impact on the economy. This question has actually received a lot attention from political scientists and political economists. Although these scholars still dispute precisely how presidents influence the macroeconomy, few would deny that the impact is real. The following are three macroeconomic phenomena that have been attributed to a president’s party affiliation.
I wish I had more details, and/or I wish I knew how true this story may be. But the point is that, like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns — whether it’s a lack of vacation or a string of Thursdays — that point the finger right at them.
Surely by now you have some questions about Twitter, no?
Few other phenomena have entered the public consciousness so quickly and brashly, to be so rabidly embraced and so grievously disparaged at the same time….
You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
Now, on his Market Design blog, Al Roth writes about something that’s perhaps even more interesting: the opposite of repugnance. Or, as he puts it, “transactions that, as a society, we often seek to promote, for reasons other than efficiency or pure political expediency.”
Now even better, the original song-a-day man, Jonathan Mann, has agreed to take a request: he’ll write a song about whatever you want. Leave your suggestions below. It doesn’t have to be about the recession — just make it clever, entertaining, wise, witty, etc. Jonathan (maybe with our input) will pick the best suggestion — and the winning suggester will get a piece of Freakonomics schwag. And, of course, a song. We will, of course, post the song here once it’s recorded.
Good luck.
The good news is that he has agreed to share this knowledge with the rest of us on a regular basis. As longtime readers of this blog are well aware, airline issues have been a recurring theme, ranging from the old cellphone debate to safety precautions to the question of why flight attendants aren’t tipped.
So leave your questions for Captain Steve in the comments section and over time he will answer them in small batches.
So we asked a group of people — Paul Armentano, Mike Braun, Joel W. Hay, Jeffrey Miron, and Robert Platshorn — to think about a national decriminalization of marijuana (unlikely, let’s be honest) and answer the following: What would be some of the most powerful economic, social, and criminal-justice effects?
Yesterday we solicited your questions for an author Q&A that will go in the paperback edition of Freakonomics. Your response has been phenomenal! Great questions, covering the gamut, suitably irreverent, and far better than anything we could have made up ourselves. So … thank you.
Last week we solicited your questions for New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Here are his answers to a selection of them. Thanks to all.
In the comments below, please pose some questions that you would like to see answered in the paperback Q&A. They can concern anything you’d like: material in the book, modes of collaboration, the price of tea in China, material in the upcoming SuperFreakonomics, etc. We will probably use 8 or 10 or 15, but the more we have to choose from, the better off we’ll be.
Our post last week about shutting down LaGuardia Airport in order to ease New York air congestion filled up the in-box more than usual. The feedback was diverse, with readers calling the idea everything from idiotic to obvious.
Patrick Smith, author of Ask the Pilot, wrote in with some helpful analysis:
New York Congressman Anthony Weiner takes your questions.
During a recent ground delay at LaGuardia, I got to talking with an off-duty pilot for a major airline who was extraordinarily knowledgeable about every single airline question I could think to ask him. (With any luck, he’ll soon be joining us here as a guest blogger.) When I asked for his take on New York air congestion, he said the solution was easy: shut down LaGuardia.
In a column we wrote a while back about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, we highlighted one of the failures of the Endangered Species Act: in the lag time between when an animal’s habitat is announced to be under consideration for the E.S.A. and the protection actually goes into effect, landowners have incentive to prophylactically destroy the habitat.
Hulu’s CEO, Jason Kilar, answers reader questions.
We love taking our kids to the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, which were made famous by the late, great Leonard Bernstein.
The four programs this year were each devoted to a different “capital of music”: Mozart‘s Vienna, Ravel‘s Paris, Mussorgsky‘s St. Petersberg, and Bernstein’s New York.
Feedback is such an elemental ingredient of nearly any human activity — consider the importance of coaching and teaching in particular, but also think about the creative arts — and yet there is huge variance on how much feedback a given person may get, or choose to accept. The web is probably the grandest (or at least the noisiest) feedback . . .
Conor Hunt, an I.T. consultant in Chicago, writes with a dilemma that, while common, seems to be always unsatisfactorily solved. Two friends — a merchandising analyst and a law student — and I are attempting to split up rent of a three-bedroom apartment with two common bathrooms. All rooms have their pros and cons, with the major differentiators being closet . . .
I like hunting for silver linings as much as the next guy. But there is one group of people who are so good at finding them that I can only dream of matching their prowess. I am talking, of course, about C.E.O.’s. It is earnings season and we are of course in the grip of a recession, so you would . . .
Anu Garg, who runs the wonderful site Wordsmith.org, sends a weekly e-mail describing the theme of the words that will be featured in his word-a-day e-mails. This week’s theme is interesting for writers of every sort. (I would particularly like to see professional economists impose a few constraints.) Negativeland is the title of a slim novel I came across recently . . .
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