What would you say if you met a celebrity?
A humorous paper by Avinash Dixit.
Timothy Knowles calls for an end to tenure in primary and secondary schools.
Why does Levitt find Landis’s allegations so compelling? He describes in great specificity and detail scenarios involving refrigerators hidden in closets, and the precise temperature at which the blood stored in those refrigerators had to be kept; and faked bus breakdowns during which Lance received blood transfusions while lying on the floor of the bus, etc. To make up stories of this kind, with that sort of detail, strikes Levitt as a difficult task.
A European bias in team rankings?
Levitt’s Q&A in Money Magazine.
Jimmy Golen weighs in.
A Freakonomics contest winner.
Where Levitt read a 30-year-old printing of this absurd word?
An interesting politician in Colombia.
Who would you rather buy from on Craigslist?
A guest post from Price Fishback.
Why do people get tattoos?
Freakonomics has a new No. 1 fan.
A copycat logo.
Levitt’s a fan of the documentary.
The award is given to the most influential economist in America under age 40.
Does it work?
The Onion makes fun of Freakonomics.
Levitt weighs in on health care.
This fall, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov made a bold declaration. With the help of the Russian Air Force, he was going to use cloud seeding techniques to keep it from snowing in Moscow this winter. Did Luzhkov vanquish Mother Nature as he predicted he would?
What can a person do to set off alarm bells at work?
When I tell people about my parents, they never believe me. But the truth is, my father really is the world’s foremost medical expert on intestinal gas, and my mom really is a psychic.
Football great Emmitt Smith was just inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had the great pleasure of playing golf with Emmitt a few years back. It is a round I will never forget.
After a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti, many people are moved to make financial contributions. For some people, as my friend and colleague John List’s work has made clear, it is simply the “warm glow” that one feels from giving, or a sense of duty borne out of social pressure, that drives giving. For others, actually making a difference in the lives of Haitians is paramount – the impact of the contribution matters.
Here is a multiple choice question for you.
Read the following passage, taken from SuperFreakonomics:
If you know someone in southeastern Uganda who is having a baby next year, you should hope with all your heart that the baby isn’t born in May. If so, it will be roughly 20 percent more likely to have visual, hearing, or learning disabilities as an adult.
Two articles in Harvard magazine remind me why I am so optimistic about scientific breakthroughs making the world a better place.
If there is one topic that I have no natural affinity for, it is checklists. I don’t use checklists. I’m not interested in checklists.
Yet, against all odds, I read Atul Gawande’s new book about checklists, The Checklist Manifesto in one sitting yesterday, which is an amazing tribute to the book that Gawande has crafted. Not only is the book loaded with fascinated stories, but it honestly changed the way I think about the world. It is the best book I’ve read in ages.
That’s how the Las Vegas Weekly describes economist Pete Leeson’s book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.
The Invisible Hook is an excellent book by one of the most creative young economists around, Pete Leeson, based off some of his academic papers, including this one that was published in Journal of Political Economy when I was the editor. I have to admit that as an editor I was skeptical when I received a manuscript on pirates from an obscure economist, but the combination of careful research and really interesting insights quickly won me over to Leeson’s work.
The MIT Technology Review — one of my favorite magazines —
writes about geoengineering in the January/February 2010 issue. Much of what is said in the article will be familiar to people who have read SuperFreakonomics, but it also talks about carbon capture, which we didn’t discuss much.
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