We’ve blogged quite a bit about the vagaries of airline travel. One point we’ve made is that, thanks to fierce competition, the cost of airline travel is, relatively speaking, dirt cheap. This also means, of course, that airlines have to try to make people happy on skimpy revenues, even as prices for things like fuel, labor, and insurance may rise. . . .
Economics and rapping wouldn’t seem to be the most natural bedfellows, but they keep showing up on this blog, including here and here. But this latest instance is probably also the best.
It’s official: Freakonomics is going to be turned into a feature-length documentary film. It will be an omnibus format, with different stories within the film told by different directors. According to Variety: Doc is being produced by Chad Troutwine (“Paris je t’aime”) and Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”), and they have enlisted Morgan Spurlock (“Super Size Me”), Rachel Grady . . .
The 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign is heating up, and as always a lot of the questions revolve around economic issues. So we thought we’d ask the economic advisers to all the main candidates to tell us about their roles. As you’ll see, we didn’t get all that many responses but we’re grateful to those who replied. Economic advisers for John . . .
Sometimes a good idea is so obvious that you can’t believe no one has made it happen yet. That would seem to be the case with something called the Impair Aware Alcohol Level Indication System. It’s a machine you can put in a bar or restaurant that lets you measure your blood alcohol level so you know if you’re fit . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Internet security guru Bruce Schneier. He responded in force, taking on nearly every question, and his answers are extraordinarily interesting, providing mandatory reading for anyone who uses a computer. He also plainly thinks like an economist: search below for “crime pays” to see his sober assessment of why it’s better to earn a . . .
Don Imus is back on the radio, brimming with apology and announcing a new cast that includes two African-American comedians. He was run off the air a few months ago for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” I understand why he was canned. I understand why he is back. I understand that our culture loves the whole . . .
Here’s the latest from Jessica Hagy, the creator of Indexed and our regular guest blogger:
Do the book blurbs that one author gives to another author affect your decision to read the book? The publishing industry certainly believes that blurbs matter a great deal. There is a lot of effort put into sending a manuscript out to authors for blurbs — more effort, I sometimes think, than the editing that goes into books. So do . . .
Apparently, it is dangerous even to be the wife of a semi-famous economist-author. In this blog post about the difference between corked wine and screw-top wine, Levitt’s wife, Jeannette, is revealed to be not only a drinker but a cork snob: We recently had a friend over (her husband, Steve Levitt, co-wrote Freakonomics) and I noticed the strange look she . . .
Bruce Schneier could probably find out just about everything about you without breaking a sweat. He has built a career out of discovering weaknesses in computer systems and has analyzed security flaws in everything from biometrics to post-9/11 airline security. The designer of the popular Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms (the latter was a finalist for the Federal Advanced Encryption . . .
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal about online lending reports that Zopa, a British person-to-person lending market, is starting operations in the U.S. It will join, among others, Prosper.com, which the WSJ reports will issue $100 million in person-to-person loans this year, with future loan originations projected to be $1 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2017. Can . . .
It’s a widely held perception that the professional athletes who constitute Major League Baseball and the National Football League have different levels of power — i.e., players have more juice in M.L.B., while it’s a team’s ownership that has more power in the N.F.L., often at the expense of individual players. Is this true? We put this question to a . . .
Here is a tough little Freakonomics quiz for people who like to bet the ponies: Is there ever a situation in a parimutuel betting system in which you would want to bet on a horse to win, even though you knew for sure that the horse would lose the race? This is a hard one. Had it simply been posed . . .
We recently wrote about the use of commitment devices in weight loss, particularly the recent spike in bariatric surgery. While advocates can make a strong argument in favor of the surgery, especially for the morbidly obese, it is obviously a pretty drastic resort. An article in the current Journal of the American Medical Association highlights a far less invasive commitment . . .
We are taking a couple days off, and hope you are too. FWIW, the tryptophan in your turkey may not be what’s making you groggy; it may, however, make you more trusting. Perhaps Paul Feldman should consider selling turkey bagels.
There’s been a good bit of back-and-forthing on this blog about nuclear power, most notably regarding a Times Magazine column we wrote recently about the past and future of the nuclear industry. In a nutshell, we posited that the U.S. anti-nuke revolt in the 1960s and 1970s may look misguided in retrospect since it helped thwart the proliferation of nuclear . . .
Video My first job in journalism was as an editorial assistant at New York magazine, writing up the back-of-the-book culture listings. This meant that I received a lot of promotional mailings from movie studios, PR firms, etc. I was consistently surprised by the 8-by-10 promo pictures sent out for young female classical musicians: they were invariably all sexed-up, as if . . .
A while back, I solicited your suggestions for great children’s books, and you responded mightily, with more than 270 comments. Your answers made me realize how many children’s books we already own, which is probably a good thing, at least according to these guys. But you also suggested a lot of books we’ve never read, and you made them sound . . .
This time of year in New York City, it’s easy to find elderly Chinese women in Central Park stooped beneath trees, gathering up what look like small plums. The trees are ginkgo trees, which drop their fruit when ripe; the fruit has long been prized in China and Japan as both a food and a medicine. A helpful friend tells . . .
That is the subject of our most recent Times Magazine column, with some background research and other related material posted here. As in many of our columns, we pair a particular subject (in this case, weight-loss — a.k.a. bariatric — surgery) with an economics concept (in this case, a commitment device). Sometimes these pairings can be a bit of a . . .
Singer/songwriter/Internet celebrity Jonathan Coulton may well represent the future of recorded music. A folk rocker perhaps best known for his hilariously deadpan acoustic cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 hit “Baby Got Back,” Coulton has demonstrated an uncanny ability to merge music with technology. A major Web presence with a pioneering attitude toward offering free content online, he holds the titles . . .
Kip Viscusi, who teaches economics and law at Vanderbilt Law School, has written widely and well on the risky choices that people make, especially smoking. A new working paper, co-authored with Joni Hersch, attempts to put a price on each pack of cigarettes smoked: This article estimates the mortality cost of smoking based on the first labor market estimates of . . .
That is the finding of our informal “Would You Rather” poll, asking if you’d rather be arrested for embezzlement or prostitution. By a measure of nearly 4-to-1, you chose prostitution. It’s amazing what you learn about people when you have a blog. As promised, a piece of Freakonomics schwag goes to someone who wrote a particularly entertaining reply. That someone . . .
Here is the latest Indexed installment from Jessica Hagy (you can find her past posts here, or visit Hagy’s blog here. She titled this twosome “Move Out and Join Up,” though one might also be tempted to call it “Gentrify and Purify.”
It may not be surprising to you that Trevon D. Logan, an economics professor at Ohio State University, is interested in college football. Ohio State is, after all, a football mecca (as we experienced first-hand some time ago). What may surprise you, however, is what Logan has concluded about college football polls. In a new working paper, Logan used 25 . . .
Video In an earlier video, Levitt talked about how hard it is for economists to make good predictions about the macroeconomy. He continues that theme in this new piece, explaining why he’d rather tackle a much smaller question and try to answer it well.
A couple of weeks ago, Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson got so fed up with receiving pitches from clueless (or lazy) publicists that he screeched out in protest, permanently banning said publicists from his in-box and, to the delight of some onlookers, publishing their e-mail addresses on his blog in a spammer-friendly format. Reaction to Anderson’s . . .
After overcoming some technical difficulties, we seem to have perfected the process by which we send out free autographed Freakonomics bookplates. This allows you to turn a common, mass-produced object into an autographed common, mass-produced object (and, thereby, a cherished keepsake). While we are not making any promises, there is a good chance that if you order a bookplate in . . .
A few weeks ago, I gave a bookstore reading for my new kids’ book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. I was sitting on the floor, reading to a bunch of kids, when suddenly something seemed wrong with the story — it didn’t track, didn’t make sense to me at all. Befuddled, I stopped reading. I remember thinking, “Wow, has . . .
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