Yahoo recently ran a story entitled “Surprising Jobs that Pay $25 an Hour.”
Dubner and I both made a huge mistake: we got married before Freakonomics came out.
Congratuations to MIT economist Esther Duflo who brings home a MacArthur Genius grant!
This month’s Harvard magazine has a nice piece on the founder of the Smile Train, Brian Mullaney.
I love the way he runs his organization, and the way he tells it like it is.
Of all the reasons anyone has ever had for getting breast implants, I’m guessing that no one ever thought of this one.
Does government-provided health care lead to bad teeth?
In the United Kingdom, at least, my former colleague Delia Lloyd says the answer to that question is “yes.”
The problem, as usual, is perverse incentives which arise out of the difficulty of developing sensible formulas for reimbursement.
A few years back Time magazine teamed with automotive critic Dan Neil to compile a list of the 50 worst cars of all time. It is pretty amusing to read. My own opinion is that they are way too tough on SUV’s — among the handful included on the list is the Ford Explorer (one of the best-selling vehicles in this country for over a decade), for example, because its success helped trigger the super-sizing of American vehicles.
Congress set aside $1 billion to fund the program. If all of that money was going to pay these subsidies, there would be enough money to pay for 250,000 clunkers.
The program went into place on July 24th. One week later, the program was said to be out of money.
In 2006, before the current ills of the automakers, the average number of new cars sold in a week in the United States was 125,000.
A few years back, the New Republic accused me of ruining economics.
Now The Economist magazine, in a much more subtle way, makes the same implication. Here’s the second sentence of an article entitled “What Went Wrong With Economics”:
If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.
Referring to a new tax that will fall squarely on the shoulders of his business and just a few others, Steve DeAngelo said in a CNN article,
My sister Linda is the one who came up with the title Freakonomics for our first book. Probably because of that, ever since she has been obsessed with trying to, in marketing lingo, “extend the Freakonomics brand.” Her first idea was the Freakonomics t-shirt. “Everybody will want one of these,” she said. Somehow, even though millions of people were willing . . .
After winning a stage of the Tour de France, Frenchman Thomas
Voeckler was quoted as saying,
IBM researchers are hard at work creating a computer that will match wits against humans on the television show Jeopardy. Compared to checkers, chess, or backgammon, playing Jeopardy would seem to be a hard task for a computer because language is such a fundamental part of answering the questions correctly.
By now, the financial woes of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and the many other troubled banks is old news.
But we may need to start preparing for another round of bank failures … in the virtual world.
If indeed it happens, a character named Ricdic will likely be to blame. Ricdic is part of Eve Online, which I have never heard of, but according to this BBC news report “has about 300,000 players all of whom inhabit the same online universe. The game revolves around trade, mining asteroids, and the efforts of different player-controlled corporations to take control of swathes of virtual space.”
Last week I posed a question: what five cities are home to the greatest number of my Harvard classmates?
Without a doubt, this was the hardest quiz ever on this blog. Over 1,000 guesses were made; the first 851 of these guesses were wrong. (Actually, blog reader Len sort of had the right answer earlier, but it is totally obvious, if you’ve ever seen the red book that is my data source, that he cheated.)
Not until John F. came along with comment number 821 did someone end the misery by getting all five cities correct (with number of my classmates in parentheses):
Usually, when people talk in terms of billions of dollars, they are referring to macroeconomic questions. Recently, however, three economists (Jeremy Bulow, Jonathan Levin, and Paul Milgrom) were hired as consultants to advise a group that was bidding in a spectrum auction that would allow them to provide wireless service.
By following the advice of the economists, the group was able to purchase wireless coverage for the United States for $2.4 billion, while their major competitors ended up paying $3.5 billion for the same spectrum in the same auction. Thus, their advice was worth more than $1 billion to their clients.
We are delighted to welcome Robin Goldstein to our family of Freakonomics blog contributors.
We’ve blogged in the past about Robin’s research involving blind wine tastings, as well as his research on whether people can tell the difference between pate and dog food.
I could find nine people from my class who are famous/semi-famous/infamous. Interestingly, not one of them sent in an entry to be published in the book. Overall, about 40 percent of the people in the class sent in updates. What was most surprising about the famous people not writing in is that many of them are famous because they are writers.
The other thing that struck me as interesting and somewhat surprising was the geographic distribution of my former classmates. Let’s see whether the distribution is surprising to the blog readers by running a contest.
Last year I blogged about the Cash for Clunkers program in which the government subsidizes consumers who turn in their beat-up old cars to buy new ones. I noted that this program was likely to have a host
of negative unintended consequences that its proponents were ignoring.
The bad news is that the House of Representatives has now passed a Cash for Clunkers bill. The good news is that the version they passed applies to so few vehicles that there is virtually no incentive for anyone to take advantage of the program, so its unintended consequences will be smaller than they otherwise would be.
John List and I stumbled onto the original, never-analyzed data from the original illumination experiments done at the Hawthorne Plant. These studies gave rise to what is now known as the Hawthorne Effect.
Take a look at the final vote tally in Time magazine’s online poll of the most influential people.
It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that things didn’t turn out quite as one would expect; I’d never even heard of a handful of the folks who ended up near the top of the list, including the winner, Moot, who both has way more votes than anyone else and a much higher average rating.
In a reasonably interesting Guardian article Larry Elliott argues that the macroeconomists of yesteryear were superstars, but the current crop have lost sight of what macroeconomics is supposed to be about: describing the macroeconomy, not writing down fancy mathematical models.
Last week, I offered up a quiz asking what Gary Becker thought the only purpose of economics was. His answer was so surprising to me, that just to make sure I had it right, I asked him again after I made the post.
He confirmed his answer, and said that it is the same answer he would have given 50 years ago when he started studying economics.
The Smile Train is one of my favorite charities. Combining insightful business-oriented thinking with an unquenchable thirst for helping children born with clefts, in just ten years the Smile Train has completely transformed the lives of over 500,000 people via a simple 45 minute operation.
The Smile Train has a “problem.” It’s a long story, but here is the abbreviated version. Bacardi, the makers of Bombay Sapphire Gin, got together with crystal maker Baccarat, Garrard the jeweler, and designer Karim Rashid, to produce five “priceless” handmade crystal decanters.
The annual skit party in the University of Chicago economics department gives the graduate students their one chance each year to exact revenge on the faculty for all the tough love/mistreatment we give them the other 364 days of the year.
At this year’s skit party, there was a faculty version of the old Bob Eubanks TV show The Newlywed Game. My partner was the legendary economist Gary Becker. Alas, we did not fare well.
A group of us went out for dinner the other night at a reasonably fancy restaurant. As we looked over the menu, the waitress was kind enough to let us know that the salmon was particularly delicious. We might also want to try the artichoke dip, she told us. It was her personal favorite. Half-joking, one of us asked her if there was a particular reason why she wanted us to try the artichoke dip.
My former student Emily Feldman informs me now that even Beccaria was a few hundred years too late. Back in 1516, Sir Thomas More already understood the concept of marginal deterrence.
Cigarettes are some of the most heavily taxed goods around. According to this source, the average state tax per pack of cigarettes is $1.23, plus an additional $1.01 of federal taxes, as well as any local taxes. With an average price per pack in the United States of $4.82, the combined state and federal taxes make up 46 percent of the price. In Chicago, total taxes per pack are a whopping $4.67 per pack! I don’t know the exact price of cigarettes in Chicago, but taxes must be around two thirds of the total cost.
There is likely no prediction I can make for the Preakness that will generate as much entertainment value as my ill-fated Kentucky Derby picks.
But here goes anyway.
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