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 . . .
If this Detroit News article is indicative of behavior around the country, then the recession is turning out to be a good time to be:
A reader named Tomas asks an interesting question: If electric cars became the dominant form of urban transport, would houses on main roads jump in value due to a decrease in noise? Of course Tomas’s scenario may never come to pass, since quiet electric cars pose a danger to blind pedestrians. That’s what the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 . . .
We recently posted a noisy song, “The Final Day,” by an unnamed artist, and ran a contest asking you to identify the performer. It sounded like it might be the latest in our series of recession songs, or maybe an outright apocalyptic number: Click Below to Listen The singer was me. Yeah, it was a song from my old band, . . .
There are three TV shows I have come to love even though I’ve never watched them on TV. Or on DVD. Or via iTunes. They are: Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Rescue Me. And they are all available — the complete catalog, whenever you want, in high-quality video, with a beautiful user interface — on my computer, for free, thanks to Hulu.com.
Well, probably not. But at least one person has lost her job — albeit not an actual full-time, paying job — in a fracas over Freakonomics and other books. A few years back, a school-board member in suburban Chicago named Leslie Pinney wanted to pull nine books from the high school’s approved reading list. Among them were Freakonomics, The Things . . .
It is always interesting to watch what happens when the media latches onto a given issue and then, as the reality on the ground evolves — sometimes radically — the media fails to catch up to, or even monitor, the changes. This means the public is stuck with an outdated version of conventional wisdom which, even if it were true . . .
The Emanuel Brothers — Rahm, Zeke, and Ari — are famously high achievers, one in politics, one in entertainment, and one in medicine (although the doctor has recently crossed over into politics as well). But there’s another family of high achievers, also from Chicago, that is giving them some competition: the Serenos. Of the six grown children, five are prominent . . .
In a recent blog post, we linked to a New York Times article by John Branch showing that the percentage of made basketball free throws has remained steady for 50 years. A reader named Ashley Smart (aptonym?) replied with an amplification/caveat that is well worth sharing: I, like many of your other Freakonomics readers, was intrigued by John Branch’s article . . .
We’ve said it many times before: your name is not your destiny. Unless you choose to make it so. In our continuing quest to bring you Grade A aptonyms from every walk of life, here’s the latest offering: + The author of a new bread cookbook, Kneadlessly Simple, named Nancy Baggett. (HT: Raj Pandravada.) + The president of American Rivers, . . .
In recent months, we’ve posted a few examples of music written about the current recession. Now it’s time to see just how sharp you are with a pop-music quiz. This song is called “The Final Day”: Click Below to Listen Caution: it is very loud. The lyrics are nowhere near as straightforward as, say, “Hey Paul Krugman.” It might be . . .
At least two factors are conspiring to turn a top N.F.L. draft pick into a liability rather than a prize. “A No. 1 N.F.L. draft pick may be one of the most overvalued assets in our society.” The first is the rotten economy, which means that a team with a top pick will be compelled to spend a huge chunk . . .
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate? While none of those reasons are necessarily off the . . .
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