I blogged a few days back about how letters without postage still get delivered and urged blog readers to carry out some field experiments on the subject. It turns out that blog reader Aaron — who wants his last name withheld (you know how ruthless the Canadian Postal Service can be) — had run a somewhat different experiment in the . . .
My college friend Greg Spira writes in Slate about the exaggerated share of American-born Major League Baseball players with fall birthdays. This is more evidence in support of the idea that arbitrary eligibility cutoffs for youth sports programs have long-term impacts on who invests in the sport and eventually reaches the highest levels. One of our earlier Freakonomics columns in . . .
Moscow Times journalist Nabi Abdullaev wrote an interesting article a few days back reporting on statistical aberrations in the March 2 presidential elections. Just as interesting: Moscow Times has killed the link to the story which initially worked, then went dead, and now leads to a story about Italian elections. The conspiracy theorist in me finds that very suspicious. Luckily, . . .
If you had asked me that question a week ago, I would have said with great certainty that the post office would not mail a letter without a stamp. A few days ago, however, my daughter got a letter delivered in the mail. Where the stamp should have been, the sender had instead written, “Exempt from postage: Guinness Book of . . .
I am not a huge fan of what people call “behavioral economics,” which is a subfield of economics that expands the standard economic models to incorporate systematic biases in the way humans act. I’ve written about some of my concerns elsewhere, so I won’t reiterate them here. I don’t deny that the insights that emerge from behavioral economics can be . . .
John Tierney hits a home run with this fantastic column about a recent paper by Keith Chen (whose work on capuchin monkeys has previously caught our attention). The Monty Hall problem is as follows: You are chosen to compete on Let’s Make a Deal. There are three curtains. Behind one of the curtains is something wonderful like a new car. . . .
Some friends of mine recently were trying to get pregnant with the help of a fertility treatment. At great financial expense, not to mention pain and inconvenience, six eggs were removed and fertilized. These six embryos were then subjected to Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (P.G.D.), a process which cost $5,000 all by itself. The results that came back from the P.G.D. . . .
I became an editor at the Journal of Political Economy eight years ago. The J.P.E., as it is known within the economics profession, is one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics. Having a paper accepted or rejected at J.P.E. can make or break a young academic’s career. My guess is that having a paper published in the journal . . .
Michael Shermer, author of Mind of the Market and columnist extraordinaire at Scientific American, delivers an excellent column in this issue on sports doping. Shermer, it turns out, was a competitive cyclist who observed the rise of doping first-hand. He offers a number of suggestions for fighting illegal doping, such as disqualifying all team members from any event if one . . .
I was pondering why many of my undergraduate students performed so poorly on my recent final exam when this video and a second one came across my desk. Perhaps my students are just investing in skills that are not tested on my exam. (Hat tip: Peter Thompson and Bob Warrington.)
I got an email the other day from a blog reader who tells me that there are now more non-native English speakers than native English speakers. That leaves ample opportunities for linguistic subtleties going unnoticed. I suppose it can happen to native English speakers as well. Here is an example: Back in 2006, I wrote a blog post entitled “You . . .
Earlier this month I asked readers what I should do to fill my post-Harry Potter void. I didn’t anticipate just how full of reading suggestions blog readers would be — 270 comments. Of the hundreds of books mentioned, I had to start somewhere, so I read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I can’t really say that I liked it. . . .
It blows my mind that Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video on YouTube has over 45,000 comments. I’ve said this before, but I just don’t understand what motivates commenter No. 45,093. There’s no video — only audio — but if you like “White and Nerdy,” you will love “Baby Got Stats” — courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Department of . . .
This doesn’t really seem possible, but Edward Martin has found 160,000 four-leaf clovers. I’ve been looking my whole life and never found one. Trying to find one was my main reason for playing Pee Wee Baseball, but then I got moved from outfield to shortstop and my baseball career ended shortly thereafter. How fast does Martin find them? He is . . .
New research suggests that female mosquitofish can count, but only up to four with any precision. No word on how high male mosquitofish can count. The research design is quite clever: When males bother females, the females try to flee to the biggest group of nearby females. When given the choice between two groups — one with three other fish . . .
When it comes to saving the environment, things are often not as simple as they seem at first blush. Take, for instance, the debate about paper bags vs. plastic bags. For a number of years, anyone who opted for plastic bags at the grocery store risked the scorn of environmentalists. Now, it seems that the consensus has swung the other . . .
Not long ago Dubner and I wrote in our Times column about some innovative approaches to solving big problems. Here is another example: The Victory Project, which pledges to give $1 billion to the first person to solve any of the following problems: 1. Develop a cure for breast cancer. 2. Develop a cure for diabetes. 3. Reduce greenhouse emissions . . .
George Bibel has written a fascinating book entitled Beyond the Black Box: The Forensics of Airplane Crashes. I suspect this is one book that you are never going to find in the airport bookstores. Bibel tells you when planes crash (focusing in particular on DC-10s). Forty-five percent of the crashes happen on landing, but remarkably these crashes account for only . . .
Michael Knetter may just go down in history as one of the greatest fundraisers of all time. Knetter is the dean of the Wisconsin Business School. Other universities have managed to raise substantial amounts of money by naming their business schools after generous donors (think Carlson, Tuck, Goizueta, Sloan, etc.). But Knetter did something far more impressive. He managed to . . .
There is nothing in the world that can prepare someone for what my co-author Sudhir Venkatesh (Freakonomics guest poster and author of Gang Leader For A Day) has on tap tonight: being a guest on the Colbert Report. I speak from experience. There is nothing I wanted to do less than go on Colbert, but Dee Dee DeBartlo, the dear . . .
Last week I posed what I thought would be a very hard question asking which player Roy Williams called the best 3-point shooter he had ever coached. I even did some Google searches to make sure that the answer wasn’t out there. I suppose I should have assumed that something that gets announced over the loudspeakers at a Celtics game . . .
That’s the clever title of the latest paper from Dean Karlan (one of the founders of StickK.com, who was featured in this New York Times Magazine article yesterday along with my colleague John List) and co-authors Xavier Giné and Jonathan Zinman. The researchers had surveyors approach people on the streets of the Philippines and offer them the opportunity to open . . .
One of the perks of being an M.I.T. graduate is that I get an automatic subscription to the magazine Technology Review. I highly recommend it to anyone with a curiosity about science and technology. It is not technical or hard to understand (like, say, Scientific American). Rather, it is loaded with fascinating articles about cutting edge advances in technology, written . . .
Professional golfer Tripp Isenhour is learning this subtle distinction the hard way.
When it comes to Harry Potter, I was a late adopter. For years, I chuckled at the avid readers who camped out at book stores the night before the latest book’s release. My wife is hard to buy for, so when she mentioned half-heartedly that she should read Harry Potter because all of her friends were fans, I bought her . . .
I have not seen the film Beyond Belief by Beth Murphy, but I have heard spectacular things about it. The film tells the story of two Sept. 11th widows who are working to help widows in Afghanistan. Here is the trailer. For those of you in Chicago, the local chapter of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is . . .
Here is a hard quiz for you. Very hard. Even if you are both knowledgeable about college basketball and clever, I doubt you will answer this quiz correctly. It is a two part question: I heard Roy Williams speak recently. (1) Who did Williams describe as “the best 3-point shooter he ever coached?” (2) On what basis did he make . . .
Roland Fryer and Joel Klein are back at it again, trying innovative approaches to help students in the New York City schools learn. Fryer, who is a tenured professor at Harvard, a frequent co-author of mine, and Chief Equality Officer in the New York City school system, was the driving force behind a pilot program now ongoing in New York . . .
As a Valentine’s Day present to my wife, Jeannette, I flew her to romantic Council Bluffs, Iowa, and bought her an entry into the High-Heeled Poker Tour event being played there over the weekend. These are women-only events, with the winner taking home the coveted “high-heel” necklace. Just so she understood that this truly was a Valentine’s gift to her . . .
There is no shortage of groups made up of citizens banding together for a cause: Greenpeace, Doctors without Borders, Save the Children, the KKK, etc. I suspect that if you look at the data, you will see that economists are nearly always underrepresented in these organizations. No doubt there are many factors contributing to this result. In general, economists tend . . .
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