The first sign of middle age has hit home with my wife: she can no longer read small print up close and has to resort to the “reach,” where she extends her arm as far as she can to read books. That same fate probably soon awaits me as well, which makes me glad I am not Thai. I’ve never . . .
Courtesy of Greg Mankiw‘s blog, here is a link to Ed Glaeser‘s interesting critique of the Dr. Seuss story The Lorax on the New York Times‘s Economix blog.
The American Society for Aesthetic Cosmetic Surgery released its annual statistical report this week. It makes for surprisingly interesting reading. The headline is that total procedures (surgical and non-surgical) fell by 12 percent between 2007 and 2008. If anything, that decline strikes me as small. In economic terms, cosmetic surgery would be thought of as a luxury durable good that . . .
Nearly two years ago, I blogged about my fear of global pandemic and how I thought Google might be the thing that saves us by providing an early warning system. Since that time, Google.org has instituted a system that provides real-time measurement of flu queries. (By the way, Google flu trends shows that this was not a bad year at . . .
Aaron Zelinsky is a Yale law school student with a knack for coming up with interesting ideas. Last year, I blogged about his proposal for fighting steroid use in sports if the governing bodies really cared. Now, on the Huffington Post, he has an interesting angle on how the federal government might stop the A.I.G. bonuses that have everyone so . . .
Economist Al Roth has an interesting blog post that describes how one altruistic kidney donor saved 10 lives. Here’s how it worked.
One of the things Roth has been working
on, given the repugnance many noneconomists feel about paying for organs, is creating chains of organ donations. Many people who need kidney transplants have a donor who is willing to donate one, but who is not a good match for the recipient.
I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted by polio. Though frail, she managed to survive all these illnesses until the age of 4. It was the fall, and Fuller headed off from New York to Boston by . . .
I don’t know why, but academic economists just love to use cartoons in their presentations. I would guess that one out of three academic seminars includes a cartoon, and if it is a plenary talk, a cartoon is virtually guaranteed. I don’t have anything specifically against cartoons, but to the best of my recollection, I have never in my life . . .
I asked my 8-year-old daughter Amanda if she had any suggestions as to how I could be a better dad. “Finish SuperFreakonomics,” she answered. “I am tired of waiting to read it.”
It probably seems obvious to most people that being likeable and having good friends could be valuable in life. Since most economists are neither likeable nor have good friends, it is an idea that hasn’t been studied by economists until now. My friend Gabriella Conti and a host of co-authors try to quantitatively measure the association between high-school popularity and . . .
I was drinking Tropicana orange juice this morning. They’ve got a clever marketing campaign. If you go to their website and type in the code on the Tropicana carton, they will set aside 100 square feet of Rain Forest to preserve on your behalf.
I took my four children to the movie Coraline this weekend. After the movie, I asked them how they liked it. Their four answers: “great,” “good,” “O.K.,” and “Thank God it is over.” Coming from my kids, who always say the latest movie is their favorite, those are not very positive reviews. I have never been in a movie theater . . .
Here’s an interesting concept from blog reader Todd Palmer, who wants reader opinions as to whether his concept can work in the marketplace; and he also needs a good domain name. Todd’s idea: The site would function as a recruiting network, giving students and corporations an entirely new dimension of access to one another. Corporations would post tasks, real or . . .
The University of Chicago hospital made headlines this week when it was criticized by the American College of Emergency Physicians for a plan that tries to get non-emergency patients out of its emergency room. I’ve been fortunate to have only made one visit to the University of Chicago emergency room in the five years I’ve lived in Hyde Park. My . . .
I blogged a while back about the remarkable documentary film Smile Pinki that follows two young children as they have cleft surgery. One of those children is named Pinki. Last night Smile Pinki won an Academy Award. Pinki was there, having flown in from India.
That is what Andrew Rosenfield argues for in this extremely cogently argued piece, and I agree with him. He makes a number of points about the bailout that I hadn’t heard before. Rosenfield ends the article with the following sage words: The present practice of subsidizing shareholders and debt holders of large insolvent bank holding companies is unprecedented, improper, and . . .
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is offering three $5,000 prizes for the best new ideas that “nudge” people towards better health.
University of Chicago Professors Douglas Diamond and Anil Kashyap, whose description of the causes of the financial crisis is the most widely circulated post ever to appear on this blog, are back to explain the Geithner Plan in simple-to-understand terms, along with what they do and don’t like about it. For this post, they’ve also drafted highly respected Chicago economist . . .
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the earlier decision in my favor in the defamation lawsuit filed by John Lott against me. Knowing John Lott, U.S. Supreme Court, here we come.
In order to become a U.S. citizen, one has to complete the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Form N-400. How long do you think it has been since someone answered “yes” to question 12(c) in part 10(b): Between March 23, 1933, and May 8, 1945, did you work for or associate in any way (either directly or indirectly) with any German, . . .
The Australian has an excellent profile of Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor and Freakonomics favorite who has done seminal research on talent. I had the pleasure of getting to know Ericsson well when we both spent a year visiting Stanford’s Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences six or seven years ago. His research was the inspiration for the . . .
Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy write today in The Wall Street Journal about their concerns regarding the stimulus package. There are no two economists in the world who I respect more than Becker and Murphy. Whatever your political bent, when these two write something, you should think hard about their arguments.
The A.C.L.U. has done it again, but this time on a grand scale.
I published an academic paper back in 1996 that tried to measure the impact that changes in the prison population have on the crime rate. It turns out that this is a hard question.
Reuters reports that the “cash for clunkers” program, which I criticized in an earlier blog post, has been removed from the stimulus package. I wish I could say that the reason for abandoning the program was that policymakers had come to understand the likely adverse economic consequences of the program. The real explanation, as usual, appears to be political, not . . .
The gloves are definitely coming off. This piece by Chicago economist John Cochrane and another by Chicago’s Eugene Fama get under the skin of Brad DeLong and lead Paul Krugman to denounce Cochrane and Fama as barbarians.
In Freakonomics we poke fun at “experts” — folks who go around speaking with great authority about topics they don’t actually know that much about. I can be criticized for a lot of things since Freakonomics came out, but one thing that I have been pretty good at is not masquerading as an expert on topics I know little about. . . .
My colleague Luigi Zingales has some words of wisdom for the incoming Treasury secretary.
For the more academically inclined among you, Princeton economist Angus Deaton offers his appraisal of the state of development economics. Deaton writes: The wholesale abandonment in American graduate schools of price theory in favor of infinite horizon intertemporal optimization and game theory has not been a favorable development for young empiricists. Empiricists and theorists seem further apart now than at . . .
The answer to that question is almost certainly “no,” but a new study that is getting lots of media attention does claim that there is a correlation between having an uncommon name and being more likely to show up in the juvenile justice system. The study finds this relationship to be true both for blacks and whites.
My former student Sean Harper has put together a nifty little web site, truecostofcredit.com, that allows you to see how much merchants are charged when you use your credit card. I was surprised at how high the fees were. For instance, in this example of a Mastercard, when you buy a $1.50 pack of gum at a convenience store, the . . .
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