I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wednesday, Jan. 16) at about 8:30 EST to talk about one issue that is, almost bizarrely, missing from all the campaign talk. It’s a subject that has figured prominently in past campaigns. Any guesses? (Addendum: I’ll post the answer sometime tomorrow late a.m./early afternoon.)
Tim Harford, a.k.a. the Undercover Economist, has a new book out called The Logic of Life. Tim is a very fine economist, writer, TV host, and “agony uncle” (that’s British for “advice columnist”). Yes, he is also British. Although I have blogged in the past about the untrustworthiness of book blurbs, let me say here that I both blurbed Tim’s . . .
We’ve written quite a few times about the helter-skelter path that nuclear power has taken in this country; see this Times column, this supporting evidence, and this blog post for a quick summary. Here, from today’s Times, is an assessment of nuclear power that has a good deal in common with ours: “All careful analysis confirms that the risk of . . .
Warning: what follows is a long blog post, perhaps better suited for a newspaper or magazine, and it will at times require your close attention. But I believe it is easily one of the best quorums we’ve ever published here. I’d like to thank all the participants for their thoughtful, well-considered, and fascinating answers, and for taking the time to . . .
That is the headline of Rafe Furst‘s blog post here, and that is the subject of his post as well. It is a very entertaining read (hardly surprising, coming from Rafe), especially as he leads up to describing the holy grail of Amazon free grazing: the Minimal Amazon Covering Set, about which Rafe has also set up a Wikipedia page. . . .
If I am someone who profits from other people paying their bills late — a big landlord, perhaps, who charges a 5 percent late fee on rents — I would have to think that January is my favorite month. Why? So many people are traveling during late December, or having their schedules otherwise interrupted, or are perhaps afraid to open . . .
No typo is a good typo. I’ve had more than my share. In a long-ago article about Central Park, I referred to its bridal trail, which implies it is a place that brides, not horses, do their running. Another memorable snafu wasn’t technically a typo, but it was still pretty terrible. For a profile of Catherine Abate, the commissioner of . . .
Apparently a lot of people do, or at least the people working at newspapers and blogs. The annual American Economic Association meeting was held over the weekend in New Orleans, and there’s been a virtual flood of press coverage: 1. A report on a new paper about Google’s internal prediction markets (which Justin Wolfers, one of its authors, previewed here); . . .
The Education Life supplement in yesterday’s Times included an intriguing article simply called “Data” and subtitled “Law and Order.” It listed crime statistics for roughly 120 urban college campuses across the country. A brief introduction warned that the statistics could easily be — well, junk: With so many ways to consider and report crime, statistics are inconclusive. But by federal . . .
We’ve been running lots of Q&As of late, with you, the readers, asking the questions. A fellow named Thomas Whitaker recently wrote us to suggest that we submit to a Q&A ourselves. This seemed like a sensible suggestion. We did a bunch of Q&As back when the book came out (see here and here and here, and these FAQs), but . . .
The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own religious tradition. An excerpt: Nearly . . .
That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” Here is their abstract: This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, . . .
The Harvard economist (and blogger) Greg Mankiw has written an excellent primer on the Federal Reserve’s power to influence the economy, making much of the the fact that the Fed is politically independent and can therefore afford to ignore public sentiment more than politicians can. His piece got me thinking about what a lot of people have been thinking for . . .
This is the time of year when a lot of people give to charity, in part because of the holidays and in part because of year-end tax considerations. Below you will find a few loosely connected observations about charity and then, at the end, some questions for all of you. It is probably not fair that I am not answering . . .
What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools? We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play — including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, . . .
We posted an item the other day from a reader who kept landing on General Motors’ Web site when he went to use his Gmail account; he wondered if many Gmail users did the same, and subsequently wound up buying cars. We don’t have an answer to that question, but the whole scenario is starting to look a bit less . . .
Dan Hamermesh, on his Economic Thought of the Day blog — it is excellent, and always fun — wrote this recently: A disaster has occurred in Germany: The staple drink – beer – is rising in price. The reason is that there is a worldwide shortage of barley, a major ingredient in the brew. This has pushed up the price . . .
Remember our contest on the Coase Theorem? It asked for good examples of the Coase Theorem failing in regard to URLs — i.e., instances in which a company that is most motivated to own a URL for some reason doesn’t. The winner of the contest proposed Nissan.com, which belongs not to the car company, but to a far lesser-known computer . . .
Rocco Landesman is a Broadway original, a producer with the heart of an artist, and a rogue businessman if ever there was one. (He is also, I am happy to say, an old friend of mine.) He is president of Jujamcyn Theatres, one of the big three Broadway theater companies, and is also one of the most prolific and award-winning . . .
What does it mean to use “the economic approach” to thinking about the world? In the old days, if you asked 100 people this question, I bet at least 80 of them would have given some kind of answer having to do with dollars and cents, supply and demand, etc. Over the past few decades, however, “the economic approach” has . . .
A new healthcare Web site called iMedix has just been launched, and it could revolutionize the way people take care of themselves. Or it might gum up the works further; at this point, it’s hard to tell. But you have to applaud the effort. A privately funded startup launched by Amir Leitersdorf and Iri Amirav, it allows users to search . . .
… to support my alma mater, Appalachian State University, in its quest for a third consecutive national football championship at the FCS (formerly Div. I-AA) level. But I won’t be, so I will cheer them on in absentia. These are the guys, remember, who beat (presumably) mighty Michigan at the start of the season, so hopefully they can handle the . . .
I had my annual physical the other day, and my doctor asked the typical battery of questions before the physical exam began. As we got to the end of the questions, I couldn’t help but note that she’d added a few questions that doctors didn’t ask in years past: “Are you sexually active?” … and then: “Is there any reason . . .
Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell today released his long-anticipated report on steroid use in baseball. It charges many star players with having used steroids, including Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire. Here’s one thing about the report that really jumped out at me, as portrayed by Michael Schmidt and Duff Wilson in the Times‘s lead story: [Mitchell] did say . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Second Life creator Philip Rosedale. Your questions were excellent, as are his answers. Thanks to all. Q: Do you have macroeconomists regulating the supply of Linden dollars? [Some virtual worlds do.] Are they Keynesians? Monetarists? Does the economy experience inflation? A: We don’t have an economist on staff yet, but we’d love to . . .
We have blogged repeatedly — mercilessly, some might say — about the serious shortage of human organs for transplantation, and what might be done about it. The basic problem is that relying on altruism doesn’t produce enough donated organs, but there is widespread repugnance at the idea of paying people for organs. There’s a fascinating article by Laura Meckler in . . .
The Great Penny Debate continues to limp along. One hundred million pennies, collected by schoolchildren, were put on display at Rockefeller Center. Meanwhile, lots of people continue to argue for elimination of the penny. I am firmly on the abolitionists’ side, as stated previously here and here. The only reasons I can think of for keeping the penny are inertia . . .
Last time out, we asked if you’d rather be arrested for embezzlement or prostitution. Your response was overwhelmingly in favor of prostitution. Here’s another choice between two bad options: Would you rather be Conrad Black or Michael Vick? Yesterday, both of them were sentenced to prison terms, Vick for nearly 2 years and Black for 6-1/2 years. (Black’s sentence was . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. I am happy to announce that after some two years of offering free signed bookplates, which turn a plain old copy of Freakonomics into an autographed copy of Freakonomics, we have finally squashed every bug in the system, and we have even caught up with demand. . . .
I am wondering if perhaps we should try to enlist John McEnroe to write with us in the future, although I’m sure we couldn’t afford his fee. In this interesting (London) Telegraph article on the reported rise in fixed tennis matches, McEnroe nicely parses the incentives at play for top-ranked players versus lower-ranked players. While lower-ranked players may be willing . . .
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