But this one is. At least I hope so. Otherwise I just lost myself a co-author. Excerpt: Continuing to make bold moves in the first 100 days of his administration, Obama will announce this week two blockbuster appointments to senior positions at the Department of Treasury. Sure to raise eyebrows will be the appointment of University of Chicago economist Steve . . .
From a reader named Thomas Kennedy comes the following e-mail: I am an economics teacher from Alaska. I can personally list my top 10 favorite actors, top 10 favorite living writers, top 10 favorite rock groups, and even my top 10 living economists and top 10 entrepreneurs; but how many out there can name their top 10 living scientists and . . .
We are hard at work on SuperFreakonomics, which will be published as soon as it finishes simmering in our computers. This may well occur before the end of the year. In the meantime, how about some pants? A company named Bonobos makes what it calls “awesome fitting trousers.” New York magazine agrees, as does The Times; their pants have even . . .
Photo: hoggardb The Internal Revenue Service presumably never likes tax cheats, but when money is tight there is more pressure put on the I.R.S. to step up enforcement and collect more money. The most recent gambit, reported today, is an amnesty program designed to root out offshore tax havens. We once wrote of another I.R.S. measure that produced $3 billion . . .
A reader named Eric Eilberg writes with the following bleg: My family has run Marlen Jewelers since 1914. Over the years a lot of things have changed, and the business has survived and prospered. We’re a freestanding building in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. We employ six full-time and one part-time sales associates. Dad is the third generation to run . . .
Yesterday my 7-year-old daughter, Anya, was wearing a T-shirt I’d never seen before. It was a Barack Obama shirt. I asked where it came from. She said that someone gave it to her back in the fall, after he was elected. But why finally wear it now? Well, the kids are on spring break and Anya had a chance to . . .
Paul Collier, an award-winning Oxford University economist, is a self-described Africanist who researches the effects of civil war, aid, and the “problems of democracy” in societies that have lots of resources but low incomes.
As noted here earlier, this recession (depression? repression?) is inspiring some pretty decent pop music. I think the apex has been reached. Listen for yourself to “Hey, Paul Krugman,” by Jonathan Mann: It’s a pretty great song, and not just because of the lyrics:
I was recently reading a famous old economics paper called “The Fable of the Bees,” by Steven N.S. Cheung. In a footnote, Cheung writes one of the most wonderful sentences I’ve read in a long time: Facts, like jade, are not only costly to obtain but also difficult to authenticate. From what I can tell — hey, I’m no Fred . . .
Reading about the sad and sudden death of the actress Natasha Richardson, I’ve come to wonder if perhaps, in some small part, she died not in spite of her fame but rather because of it.
Last week we solicited your questions for Penn Jillette, the prolific (and, yes, libertarian) entertainer.
Among other interesting topics, your questions covered magic, politics, Scientology, and Jillette’s red fingernail.
Computers are sophisticated enough to play a flawless game of checkers. They can beat the world’s greatest chess masters. But humans still put them to shame on the Go board.
When the stock market plummets, where does the value of your holdings actually go? This article from Investopedia explains it well.
Matthew J. Darnell, writing on Yahoo!’s N.F.L. blog, talks about how Andre Smith, an Alabama offensive lineman slotted as a potential overall No. 1 draft pick, has destroyed his own value with a series of bad decisions and, most recently, a really bad workout in front of pro scouts: I can’t recall anyone’s draft stock falling quite like Andre Smith’s. . . .
Nate Silver is the proprietor of FiveThirtyEight.com, where his statistical wizardry (and common sense) during the recent elections made him the biggest new political star after a certain family named Obama.
He didn’t do quite so well on the Oscars but, really, do we care?
That’s the judgment of the esteemed Richard Posner, whose forthcoming book, to be published in May, is called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression. Here are a few excerpts from the preface:
At about 8:30 a.m. yesterday, Yahoo!’s Tech Ticker posted an interview with Barry Ritholtz, noted finance guy and blogger. In recent times, he has also been very bearish on the market. But he thinks the bottom may be near. Here’s his money quote from the interview: “There’s a big bear market rally coming.” Seven and a half hours later, the . . .
Susanne Freidberg is an associate professor of geography at Dartmouth and the author of a forthcoming book called Fresh: A Perishable History. It’s about food.
Susanne has agreed to write a few guest posts for us on the topic. We present her first one today but, before that, a brief Q&A with the author:
We wrote a column a while back about a variety of powerful unintended consequences.
One example was the Americans With Disabilities Act, and we told the story of a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon named Andrew Brooks. When a deaf patient came to him for a consultation, he realized that the A.D.A. required him to hire a sign-language interpreter for each visit if that’s what the patient wanted.
The subject of piracy — real pirates attacking ships on the high seas — has come up more than a few times on this blog, notably with the guest posts of economist/pirate scholar Peter Leeson. His book on the subject, The Invisible Hook, will be published next month. In the meantime, those of you looking for a pirate fix should . . .
We’ve said it before many times: the best feature of this blog is its readers. Case in point is a recent e-mail from one Chris Markl. It concerns philanthropy, a topic we’ve covered in various ways before on this blog: the economics of street charity; conservative vs. liberal giving; the efficiency of Smile Train; and most recently, Penn State’s THON . . .
Guy Judge is deputy head of the economics department at the University of Portsmouth (U.K.), and is a principal lecturer in quantitative economics and computing. He is also a football (soccer) fanatic, a 50-year fan of Watford Football Club and contributor to that team’s now-defunct fanzine, BsaD (Blind, Stupid and Desperate). Like our friend Dan Hamermesh, who put a summary . . .
Here’s an e-mail I received the other day: I own a manufacturing company and have been a successful investor and equity trader for 20 years. I have an in-depth understanding of the current O.T.C. derivative crisis that is infecting the global financial system. This led me to the acquisition of [REDACTED]-nomics.com as I saw the developing theme. I currently do . . .
Penn Jillette is a magician, comedian, actor, producer and, generally, a curator of interesting and intelligent things. But he is best known as the self-described “larger, louder” half of Penn & Teller, a stage show that Penn and his magician partner Teller Jillette have put on since 1975. It currently plays at the Rio in Vegas. I saw it there not long ago, and it was phenomenal.
Saw this poster taped to a lamppost in my neighborhood last weekend. There is so much to admire about it. My first thought concerned the talent/practice angle as espoused by Anders Ericsson.
I played in a bunch of bands when I was a kid. Although we were generally dreadful, playing clumpy versions of bad cover songs at poorly attended basement gigs, it was hard to deny that all that very deliberate practice paid off.
There’s been much talk about how philanthropies may be one of the greatest casualties of the recession. (Considering their various inefficiencies, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.) It’s hardly just the foundations who were invested with Bernie Madoff; donors simply have fewer discretionary dollars. (And, long-term, the picture may get bleaker if President Obama downsizes the charity . . .
Last week we solicited your questions for Stanford Law School Professor (and open-source hero, and anti-corruption leader) Lawrence Lessig. (Past Q&A’s can be found here.)
You asked good questions about copyright, corruption, and other topics, and Lessig responded with equally thoughtful answers, including such tasty pieces of advice as:
This blog’s host, The New York Times, has a set of guidelines for blog commenting, available here as an FAQ, that are worth glancing at now and again. Everyone who moderates comments on this blog tries to be as inclusive as possible. But when your comment fails to show up, the odds are that it crossed one of those guidelines. . . .
As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.
Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.
Laura Goldman is a money manager who claims to have figured out back in the 1990’s, in the space of about 45 minutes, that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. In this Fox Business interview, she discusses (very entertainingly) her encounters with Madoff. At the time, Goldman worked for Paine Webber (remember them?): He was buying stocks and also trading options . . .
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