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.
The Economix blog links to a PBS Newshour piece that includes two discussions of the current macroeconomics debate — one between talking heads, and the other in the form of economics hip hop (a genre we’ve reported on previously).
And, Nathan being Nathan, there is a brief discussion of penguin poo.
Nope, not that famous Alaskan woman.
In SuperFreakonomics, far and away the most common subject of emails is drunk walking vs. drunk driving. In particular, every few days someone writes us to tell us that our analysis is wrong because we are comparing the rate of death per mile driven drunk versus the rate of death per mile walked drunk. Sure, they say, drunk walkers get killed more per mile. But since cars travel much faster, per hour, it is safer to drive drunk than to walk drunk.
Gautam Naik provides an interesting and cleverly written piece on the search for a biological basis of violent behavior.
I got a good chuckle out of this piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian about the recent global warming e-mail controversy.
My view is that the emails aren’t that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals?
When blog reader Kyle contacted us with his story of how thinking “freakonomically” first netted — then lost — him significant amounts of incremental income, we had what we’d call an “aha moment,” if Oprah hadn’t apparently patented that phrase.
Here’s Kyle’s story — and if you have a tale of “applied Freakonomics,” we’d love to hear it, too, and possibly feature it on the blog.
I respect Bill Belichick more today than I ever have.
Last night he made a decision in the final minutes that led his team the New England Patriots to defeat. It will likely go down as one of the most criticized decisions any coach has ever made. With his team leading by six points and just over two minutes left in the game, he elected to go for it on fourth down on his own side of the field. His offense failed to get the first down, and the Indianapolis Colts promptly drove for a touchdown.
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