Video The latest video on FREAK-TV is about a subject that sets many economists’ hearts a-flutter: externalities. It’s a multiple-choice quiz about car theft, asking what’s the best anti-theft measure to use if you want to protect not only your car but others around you. If you need a clue before making your guess, pause the video and take a . . .
A reader named LLP sent an e-mail early yesterday morning with an interesting question: I was reading this article regarding California farmers moving their operations to Mexico. The following quote struck me, and I’m trying to find an explanation for the difference in productivity: “Scaroni expects [to] recover his start-up costs because of the lower wages he pays farm workers . . .
Last week, I blogged about a magazine fact-checker named Paige Worthy and asked you to submit your best aptonyms. You responded mightily, with nearly 300 submissions. Judging from this sample, the dentists, proctologists, and eye doctors of America seem particularly prone to aptonymous behavior. Below you will find the best submissions. As promised, the readers who sent them will receive . . .
As a big fan of prostitution — er, I mean, as someone who’s very interested in the social, economic, legal, and psychological elements of prostitution — it’s always good to see interesting articles about what’s always called “the world’s oldest profession.” (If I recall correctly, this premise was once countered on an episode of Barney Miller. As I remember it, . . .
In honor of New York Fashion Week, which begins today, our new Q&A subject is John Caplan, the president of Ford Models. In the comments section below, feel free to ask him anything you like, except for personal phone numbers. (See here, here, and here for earlier reader-generated Q&A’s.) Ford is one of the largest modeling agencies in the world, . . .
The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum in Florence, Colorado, widely known as the “Supermax” prison, houses many of the nation’s most notorious and violent criminals. But you probably haven’t read any interviews with any of those prisoners — including Sammy Gravano, John Walker Lindh, and Ramzi Yousef — in the last several years. Why not? According to this article by Alan . . .
Last week, we ran the first installment of Jessica Hagy‘s special- Freakonomics-edition “Indexed” posts. Here is her homepage, and here is her latest for us: DREAMS & NIGHTMARES _____________________________________________________
I have blogged now and again about my undergraduate alma mater, Appalachian State University, especially its accomplishments as a Division I-AA football champ. I also accepted a dubious-achievement award on its behalf for creating the “best” college-recruitment video ever — see No. 8 on the Yahoo! link. But never did I dream that the Mountaineers would play the Michigan Wolverines; . . .
On his excellent blog, the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw (written about most recently here) posted a one-line item about a new ranking of economics blogs. The rankings are apparently determined by the number of incoming links for each blog. A commenter named Karl Smith had this to say: Freakonomics I believe is artificially high because it has a shadow blog . . .
Over the past several weeks, we’ve hosted discussions on obesity, street charity, real estate, and environmental conservation. Here now is a quorum that lets people relive the just-about-gone summer. The participants below were asked the following question: What’s your idea of a nightmare family vacation? Here are their responses. Feel free to give yours as well. Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychology . . .
Video We’ve written about the putative deterrent effect of capital punishment both in “Freakonomics,” and here on the blog. But none of those explanations were delivered by our International Video Woman of Mystery (known to her friends, natch, as Ivwom), whom you first encountered in a video last week about sport and violence.
Can you beat the aptonym “Paige Worthy” for a magazine fact-checker? Come and try your luck in the Freakonomics “Aptonym-Off.”
I am a fan of the blog Indexed, on which a young Ohio copywriter named Jessica Hagy creates sweet and simple graphical pictures, on index cards, that tell a story. The blog allows her, she writes, to “make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual . . .
In the wake of the Andy Rooney scandal and Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, Dubner takes a closer look at the social and political costs of discriminating against Latino-Americans.
Courtesy of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. Last week, we solicited your questions for Playboy editorial director Chris Napolitano. You responded with vigor. And now, so has he. This may be the longest Q&A in the history of the printed word. Unlike our previous Q&A subjects who picked five or ten of your questions to answer, Napolitano answered every last one of . . .
In a new Freakonomics video clip, Levitt explains his own strategies for parenting, and describes a few unique tools for teaching his kids to think creatively.
Here’s my nominee for quote of the day, from a (gated) front page article in today’s Wall Street Journal: “This plant will save humanity, I tell you.” The person who said that is O.P. Singh, a horticulturist for the railway ministry of India. What plant is he talking about? A shrubby weed called jatropha, whose seeds contain an oil that . . .
I blogged recently about a linguistics paper so stuffed with jargon that it read to me as if it had poorly translated from the original Croatian. I also wondered what the paper had to do with belly buttons, as was suggested by its title (“Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of Your . . .
Is cheating really so bad, particularly when there’s no punishment involved? Dubner discusses the vote rigging scandal behind the winners of Fishbowl DC’s “Hottest Media Types” contest.
If you had to guess when the Texas Rangers scored last night’s 30 runs over 9 innings against Baltimore, how would you distribute the runs? Dubner analyzes the answer, which will likely surprise you.
Freakonomics video introduces its mysterious new on-screen talent, who will explore the theory that playing sports may actually encourage teenage boys to commit crime, contrary to the conventional wisdom that athletics instill values and discipline.
Is obesity really the Black Plague the media makes it out to be? Is the “overweight epidemic” real? We’ve assembled a team of prominent economists, doctors, authors and experts to offer inside views on health, nutrition, and whether America is eating itself to death.
The post that follows isn’t likely to make anyone happy. It is our third recent post about Freakonomics.com’s RSS feed. Here is No. 1 and here is No. 2. For the readers who have no idea what a feed is and don’t care, this post is probably of zero value. Feel free to skip it. The people who do read . . .
A while ago, we wrote a New York Times Magazine column about talent — what it is, how it’s acquired, etc. The gist of the column was that “raw talent,” as it’s often called, is vastly overrated, and that people who become very good at something, whether it’s sports, music, or medicine, generally do so through a great deal of . . .
Bruce Wydick, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, has written an interesting OpEd in USA Today about sunk costs and the Iraq war. Here is his lead: Our inability to think clearly about sunk costs is impeding our ability to make clear decisions about our involvement in Iraq. Failing to correctly identify sunk costs (those that . . .
It has recently come to our attention that roughly 90% of the people who read this blog via RSS feed had their subscriptions interrupted when we moved our blog to NYTimes.com about 10 days ago. (If you don’t read this blog via feed, you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and nothing in this post will matter . . .
Video In the video player over to the left, you’ll find a new short video that’s a brain tease about your brain. Go give it a click, and then leave your answer in the comments section of this post.
A one-time religion student at Columbia University, Chris Napolitano took a job at Playboy in 1988 as an editorial assistant in the fiction department. He went on to become features editor, executive editor, and in 2004 reached the top job, editorial director. (The editor-in-chief title remains reserved for founder Hugh Hefner.) In the spirit of Jim Cramer, Mark Cuban, and . . .
One of my favorite people from graduate school (a writing program at Columbia) was Peter Temes. He worked incredibly hard, writing and teaching and raising a family all at once, which meant that he kept his head way out of the clouds, which couldn’t be said of all of our peers. He has gone on to write some books (including . . .
For reasons that may not make sense to anyone else, I recently performed a Google search for “They Might Be Giants” and “Belly Button.” This was the second hit: a paper by a Stanford linguist named David Beaver (that’s not an aptonym, is it?) called “Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of . . .
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
