Anyone who’s ever written a book — and these days, who hasn’t? — can tell you that watching your sales rank on Amazon.com can be a pretty fun sport. But something happened recently that made it a lot more fun for some people, and a lot less fun for others. I noticed the change the other day when I checked . . .
Arthur Frommer Last week, we solicited your questions for travel pro Arthur Frommer. Thanks for the strong response and thoughtful questions. As for Arthur’s answers, below — well, they are IMHO fantastic. Now I see why his books are so popular. He is opinionated, colorful, informed, passionate, and a few dozen other things. We hope you enjoy. Q: As the . . .
We wrote recently about nuclear energy in the U.S. — how, after much early promise, the industry faltered badly but now seems poised for a renaissance. (Here is some supporting evidence for the column.) Two related stories broke yesterday, one of which is good news for the nuclear industry. The other is probably — hopefully — not very consequential in . . .
I first became a published writer at age 11, when a poem that I wrote for school (“The Possum”) appeared in Highlights magazine. While I have since written about thieves, terrorists, and even economists, I guess it is fitting that I have finally written a children’s book. It’s called The Boy With Two Belly Buttons, with illustrations by the remarkable . . .
In Freakonomics, we make the argument that a child’s first name doesn’t affect his or her life outcome. I am guessing that most inanimate objects, too, are relatively unaffected by the names they happen to pick up — even if the names aren’t very good. It has always struck me that a lot of the things we do and use . . .
Last week, Passenger X arrived at the Orlando airport with a first-class e-ticket for New York City. At the airport, the ticket machine spat out a boarding pass for a seat in the back of coach. Why? The plane, he was told, had been “downsized” from a large jet to a smaller one. There was no first-class section on the . . .
Video Our International Woman of Mystery returns in a new video, “Do Doctors Wash Their Hands?” Here’s a column we wrote on the subject, and here’s some recent bad news. For a real time warp, read this 1859 essay by Ignaz Semmelweis, and ask yourself why on earth we are still talking about hand washing.
The latest in our Freakonomics Indexed series, by Jessica Hagy, needs no introduction — although, if you’re wondering, as I was, what goat she was thinking of, you’ll find the reference here, in a BoingBoing/BBC mention of how Nepal’s state-run airline fixed an electrical problem on one of its planes by sacrificing a goat. Hanging Out:
Before I was in the writing industry, I was in the music industry. While the economics of journalism have changed a lot over the past 20 years — witness the demise of Times Select and the potential demise of the Wall Street Journal‘s pay site — many other aspects of the writing industry haven’t changed much at all. If you . . .
Video There’s a new Freakonomics video today, the third and final installment of Levitt talking about his academic research, co-authored by John Donohue, that linked a rise in legalized abortion to a drop in crime. (You can access Parts 1 and 2 in the thumbnail images beneath the video player.) In this piece, Levitt talks about the initial, stormy reaction . . .
Travel much? While we’ve written a good bit about traveling on this site, from airplane dining to nightmare vacations to chocolate-friendly hotels, we are plainly pikers compared to Arthur Frommer. He is the founder of the omnipresent Frommer’s Travel Guides as well as Budget Travel magazine. His career was accidental: after graduating from Yale Law School in the midst of . . .
There were two fascinating page-one articles in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that reinforce why it is so hard to predict the future. “U.S. Farmers Rediscover the Allure of Tobacco,” by Lauren Etter, is about how tobacco farming has spiked in the U.S. in the three years since federal tobacco subsidies ended. Although the U.S. tobacco/cigarette industry has taken a few . . .
Randy Pausch, a prominent computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon, yesterday gave his farewell lecture. He is 46 years old, and he is dying from pancreatic cancer. Read this remarkable article, by Mark Roth, about a remarkable man. I will give you a dollar if you make it to the end without crying. My condolences and best wishes to Pausch’s family . . .
Among a certain type of criminal — think mafia, think crack gang — there is no greater dishonor than to snitch. Giving information to the police is a betrayal of the worst sort, often punishable by death. Which is why this article from the British magazine New Statesman is so interesting. The article, by Martin Bright, is about the recent . . .
I am a big fan of cheap, simple solutions to complex problems – but really, who isn’t? One example is a column we wrote a while back on incentivizing doctors to do a better job of washing their hands to fight hospital-acquired infections. Similarly, this New York Times article described a study at a V.A. hospital in Pittsburgh where “the . . .
I’ve been reading and enjoying Super Crunchers, the new book by Ian Ayres that we excerpted earlier on the blog. One section of the book deals with the data that firms gather on their customers, and how the firms can use that data to address customer habits: Hertz, after analyzing terabytes of sales data, knows a lot more than you . . .
I just received galleys of what looks like an interesting book: The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism, by Matt Mason. I haven’t cracked it yet, but the Mason book reminded me of another recent book about piracy — the real, old-fashioned kind, with peglegs and pieces of eight — called Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate . . .
Video We’ve got a new column in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the past, present, and future of nuclear energy. The column is called “The Jane Fonda Effect” — any guesses why? — and the research took me down to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harrisburg, Pa. (That’s why my family and I got to spend . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for John Caplan, the president of Ford Models. Amidst all the Fashion Week furor, he took the time to answer. Q: Have models truly gotten smaller over the past, let’s say, 30 years? Is it a result of demands from designers, editors, and/or advertisers, or did it start with the kinds of models that . . .
Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia, has written an interesting working paper called “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trade.” His abstract sums it up well: Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct . . .
Here is the latest installment of Jessica Hagy’s “Indexed” series. (You can find her past Freakonomics posts here, and her website here.) This one is called “Milestones & Blips.” Personally, I think she will have a hard time ever surpassing the the bottom card in this series. Milestones & Blips Milestones
Video In the video player on the left, you’ll find Part 2 of Levitt’s discussion of the research behind the abortion/crime link. (You can find Part 1 in the video player as well; here’s the blog post that accompanied it.) In this installment, he discusses the collage of evidence that convinced him and John Donohue of the link between legalized . . .
The rising price of corn due to ethanol demand will have a variety of unintended consequences. As noted earlier on this blog, it might even make Americans skinnier, since food manufacturers may start using a cheaper (and less fattening) substitute for corn syrup. Along these same lines, I heard a story not long ago at an event full of bankers . . .
We have blogged occasionally about different pieces of the global-warming puzzle (see here, here, and here), and we touched on the subject briefly in a New York Times Magazine column. It is an extraordinarily interesting issue, to say nothing of its importance and complexity, in part because there are so many foundational economic principles at play: not just supply and . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Once in a while, someone writes to ask if we would autograph his or her copy of Freakonomics. And we say: sure, thanks for asking. But the logistics aren’t very smooth. A person would have to mail the book to one of us, and include a . . .
A few months back I met a remarkable man named Gene Sit. He is a money manager in Minneapolis, with more than $6 billion under management, but that is not what makes him remarkable. He was born to a wealthy family in late 1930s China and, in the lawless years after World War II, was kidnapped and held for ransom . . .
Video It’s always interesting to see where smart people get their ideas. Often, especially in the creative arts, it’s impossible to trace an idea down to its roots. But it’s easier in the social sciences. I, for one, believe that Steve Levitt has had an awful lot of good research ideas, and it’s good to hear how a particular idea . . .
I am flying to Brazil today for a very brief visit. The Wikipedia entry on Brazil is very good, if true, and now I feel a little bit bad about some of the Wikipedia posts I’ve written in the past. Here are a few interesting facts about Brazil that caught my eye: 1. “Major export products include aircraft, coffee, automobiles, . . .
The U.S. reportedly has the highest concentration of private gun ownership in the world. It is estimated that Americans buy more than half of all the guns that are manufactured worldwide each year. We wrote a good bit about guns in Freakonomics — primarily about the lack of efficacy of gun-control laws and gun buybacks on the crime rate — . . .
We hope to have something meaningful to say in our next book about the efficacy of advertising. This is a huge question that impacts everything from commerce to politics to journalism. But for now, let me give one example. My kids were recently watching a Yankees-Red Sox day game on TV, broadcast on the YES network. One of the commercials . . .
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