I stopped by a local fried chicken joint, Harold’s Chicken Shack, the other day. Just to give you a sense of what sort of restaurant this is, there is a layer of bulletproof glass separating the workers and the customers. They don’t cook the chicken until you order, so I had five or ten minutes to kill waiting for my food.
Up until now, the only way to take a course taught by Gary Becker was to be a student at the University of Chicago.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of three students –Dana Chandler, Salvador Navarro Lozano, and Jorge Garcia — that has changed.
I idolized a lot of golfers growing up, but for some reason Gary Player was not one of them. That is kind of strange, because we have some similarities. We are both diminutive. We both fall all over the place on our golf follow-throughs. And the same thing that was said about him and golf has often been said about me and economics: he did more with less talent than just about anyone else.
This guy is a real life Batman. Amazing.
Photo: Sands Beach Lanzarote Despite the fact that I am not very good at golf, my secret fantasy is to someday play on the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for fifty-somethings. As I approach my 44th birthday, I realize that it is time to get serious in this endeavor.
The folks at The New York Times couldn’t have been nicer while we had our blog there, but one thing that always bothered me was that there were way too many rules and restrictions regarding what we were allowed to post.
The best strategy I have found for reducing the aggravation of security screening is to pretend I am a terrorist and think about where the weaknesses are in security, and how I might slip through. I think I figured out a way to get a gun or explosives into the White House during the George W. Bush administration. I only got invited to the White House once, however, so I never got a chance to test my theory for real on a return visit.
Last week, I recounted the story of my golf pro Pat Goss, upon first meeting me, comparing my swing to another player. I invited blog readers to guess the answer.
I recently began taking golf lessons for the first time since I was 13 years old. I got to the range early, and my new teacher, Pat Goss, was finishing up a lesson with another student over on the putting green. He eventually made his way over towards me and introduced himself.
Given the sort of topics that elementary schools emphasize these days (e.g., a few weeks back, it was national anti-bullying day; my 10-year-old has painstakingly spelled out “Save the Earth” on her bedroom door), shouldn’t Helen Keller be front and center in the curriculum?
I can’t say that I am surprised by the latest sumo headline from the Associated Press.
When my wife saw the cover of the new book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, which was sitting on my bedside table, all she could do was shake her head.
Are NFL coaches starting to listen to economists?
My gut feeling is that the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “no.” There are at least three pieces of data that hint at the possibility that economists might be making some headway.
A check-list of things to take care of before December 31 to make sure you minimize your tax bill.
I was talking to an economics Ph.D. student the other day. Presumably hoping to generate some goodwill, he told me how much he enjoys the Freakonomics podcasts.
I asked him what he liked best about them. He gave an answer that I never would have guessed, and that would likely only come from a Ph.D. type.
I remember as a kid growing up watching TV, every once in a while someone at the station would make a mistake and start the wrong commercial. It would run for a second or two, and then the person in charge would realize the mistake and immediately cut to some other commercial or to the actual show.
More than two years ago, I blogged on this site about a puzzling pattern that I had observed in gas prices.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of school buses that are yellow everywhere except for the roof. I was perplexed as to why. According to this nearly 20-year-old New York Times article, the reason is that white tops are more reflective, lowering the temperature inside the bus by an average of 10 degrees during the summer. The source of that statistic is a very non-scientific sounding North Carolina pilot study.
The first academic paper I ever published was an empirical analysis of the “midterm gap” in American politics. (I couldn’t find an ungated version, but it’s not really worth reading anyway!)
An emergency meeting of the Delaware Witches Association.
I did not think that Paul Krugman was still writing academic papers. Nor have I seen any evidence in the last decade that he still has any sense of humor.
Consequently, I was surprised to see an article written by him entitled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade,” published recently in the journal Economic Inquiry.
Even Nobel Laureate economists suffer from lack of name recognition.
The first time I met Peter Diamond, nearly 20 years ago, I was a prospective student visiting MIT. He was wearing sandals without socks as he taught a graduate class. I remember thinking that was odd. As I sit here in my office, I am wearing sandals without socks. Perhaps Peter Diamond influenced me in ways I never imagined.
I was delighted to see that Peter Diamond shared the Nobel Prize today with two other economists (Mortensen and Pissarides, who I don’t know personally but are very highly respected).
Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between “a complete waste of time” and “actually making the situation worse.” Will the Conservative Party do better with health-care reform in the U.K.?
Probably not, but Malcolm Gladwell might.
My source for this conclusion: the always-interesting OKTrends blog, which provides data analysis for the OKCupid online dating site. Its latest analysis looks at how profile essays differ by race.
A new meta-analysis looks at past research into whether a person’s performance on basic physical functions like walking speed or ease in getting out of a chair predicts death.
I happened to be driving by an A&W restaurant the other day. I also happened to be thirsty. So I stopped in to order a frosty mug of root beer.
“We’re out of root beer,” the worker told me.
As widely reported in the press recently, analysis done by the online dating site OKCupid finds that iPhone users are more sexually active than those who have Blackberrys or Androids.
As I’ve blogged about in the past, my father has earned great notoriety for his study of all things fecal.
Our minivan is ten years old, so we went out to buy a new one this weekend. In Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we write a lot about how the Internet has changed markets in which there are information asymmetries. Buying a new car gave me the chance to see first-hand these forces at work in the new car market.
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