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.
If nothing else, getting an economics Ph.D. should teach someone how to complicate and obfuscate the issue so that it isn’t so obvious to outsiders that the argument makes no sense.
Just about every university has an alumni magazine, and they all follow the same tried-and-true recipe: highly partisan stories touting the wonderful accomplishments of the faculty, students, athletics, and alumni.
I had always thought of my university’s alumni magazine as being cut from the same cloth.
Until I read the most recent issue, that is.
I gave a talk not too long ago on a college campus. The event was sold out, so the administration started a waiting list for seats. The daughter of a good friend found herself on the waiting list. When I heard she still hadn’t gotten a ticket the day before the event, with just a touch of guilt for trying to bend the rules, I emailed a Dean at the college whom I know:
On his blog, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood dismisses my research (see here and here) on car seats.
My favorite quote from the secretary:
“Now, if you want to slice up the data to be provocative, have at it. As a grandfather and as secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety, I don’t have that luxury.”
Reading the Secretary’s blog post, it strikes me just how differently he is reacting to a challenge than Arne Duncan (now the Secretary of Education) did when I first told him about my work on teacher cheating when Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools.
I ran into someone the other day whom I had never met and who fit the following five criteria:
1. He/she attended the University of Chicago.
2. He/she is still alive.
3. He/she is a whole lot smarter than I am.
4. He/she is a whole lot more famous than I am.
5. He/she is even more controversial/notorious than I am.
In the wake of the national publicity that accompanied the beating death of Chicago Public Schools student Derrion Albert, the issue of teen violence has come to the fore.
Violence toward students in the Chicago Public Schools is, however, neither new nor rare.
By the time you finish this blog post, you will understand why we differ from our critics in our conclusions.
My son Andrew died exactly ten years ago today, October 23, 1999, nine days after his first birthday. No one would describe me as emotional. And yet the wound still remains remarkably raw.
The popular Becker-Posner blog has been turned into an excellent book entitled Uncommon Sense.
For anyone who wants a quick and easy crash course on Chicago economics-style thinking, this book is as good as it gets. I
One of the hottest topics among business people is how to increase profits by being environmentally friendly. There are many ways to achieve this. At hotels, for instance, by not washing towels during a guest’s stay unless the guest asks, the hotel saves both money and the environment. Green innovations can be featured in advertising campaigns to attract customers. Another potential benefit of “going green” is that it makes environmentally-minded employees happy, increasing their loyalty to the firm.
A Berlin brothel has hit on another way to use environmental arguments to its benefit.
SuperFreakonomics isn’t even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway. We are working on a thorough response to these critics, which we hope to post on the blog in the next day or two. The bottom line is that the foundation of these attacks is essentially fraudulent, as we’ll spell out in detail.
Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem.
The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve known my father as the King of Farts. It was a matter of great pride in the family. After all, if he was the King, that made me the Prince of Farts, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be royalty?
Only recently, however, did I discover the not-so-fragrant story as to how my father became King.
A young economist I know, Patrick DeJarnette, believes a much more radical change in currency is warranted. Here is what Patrick writes:
Late one night I was curious how efficient the “penny, nickel, dime, quarter” system was, so I wrote a little script to compare all possible 4-coin systems, with the following stipulations:
Here’s an interesting article by a man who says he has slept with over 1,300 prostitutes.
If he were an economist, he would have kept track of the data and gotten a nice academic publication out of analyzing it.
I visited Bogota, Colombia last week. When I was introduced to my translator, he told me how good it was to see me again.
I complimented him on having a great memory (my last visit to Colombia was almost a decade ago) and made the usual sorts of excuses I make when I can’t remember someone I should clearly remember. (By now I have a great deal of practice with this particular line of conversation.)
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