… because today the Science journal published a short commentary [subscription required] written by myself and John List, on the topic of behavioral economics. Our piece begins like this: The discipline of economics is built on the shoulders of the mythical species Homo economicus. Unlike his uncle, Homo sapiens, H. economicus is unswervingly rational, completely selfish, and can effortlessly solve . . .
If you thought the cheating in sumo was bad enough, now they are talking about murder charges.
I make a brief cameo appearance in this Chronicle of Higher Education article about how universities allocate students to popular courses. It mentions the student who tried to sell her spot in my class, thereby bringing down the wrath of the University administration. I liked her approach, though, so we’ve now got her employed doing research assistance for the sequel . . .
Earlier this week, we linked to a news article about a medical study finding that rats gained about the same amount of weight (80 grams, versus 72 grams on average) when they ate saccharine sweetened yogurt as when they ate yogurt sweetened with glucose. In both cases, the rats ate the yogurt in addition to their regular food. If I . . .
In Freakonomics, we argued that campaign spending matters a lot less than people think. Mitt Romney‘s presidential campaign would seem to offer a fresh bit of evidence in favor of our theory. Viewed in this light, Hillary Clinton‘s decision to loan her campaign $5 million looks like the wrong move. It isn’t the money that is boosting Obama. Rather, it’s . . .
Economist Austan Goolsbee has a $44 billion idea called the “Simple Return”: Around two-thirds of taxpayers take only the standard deduction and do not itemize. Frequently, all of their income is solely from wages from one employer and interest income from one bank. For almost all of these people, the IRS already receives information about each of their sources of . . .
As mentioned on MarginalRevolution, the economist John DiNardo has been quite busy over the last few years criticizing Freakonomics. He has written no fewer than three papers on the subject. It’s too bad that he didn’t offer the standard academic courtesy of sending his criticisms directly to me before writing them up; if he had, I could have helped clarify . . .
Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not . . .
I have often heard people say that robots will prove immensely useful in performing household tasks, but I have had a hard time understanding how. I have also wondered why so much scientific effort goes into making robots look like humans. It is not easy to design robots that walk on two legs, for instance. But after reading this interview . . .
John Tierney has writen an interesting column about competing online dating sites and the squabbles between them over whose matchmaking algorithm is more scientific. A recently divorced friend of mine just dipped her toes into the online dating world for the first time. She entered her information: lives in a large city, late thirties, divorced, well-educated, loves to dance, etc. . . .
A Cal Tech grad student put together a list of the most popular books across college campuses and then correlated those book choices with S.A.T. scores at those schools. His results reveal that the five books with the highest average S.A.T. scores are Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment, Freakonomics, and Atlas Shrugged. Among those five books, I . . .
Hannah Montana is the hottest thing going. Her concerts are all sold out and scalpers are netting thousands of dollars for her tickets, according to media reports. What is an economist who wants to see a Hannah Montana show to do? Here is the true story of one such escapade. (The economist in question has asked me to keep his . . .
The Times of London has an excellent article on “rogue trader” Jérôme Kerviel, who recently lost 5 billion euros for the French bank where he worked. Even when caught red-handed, he didn’t give up the charade. His escapades make my poker losses look small by comparison. Even if you add in my wife’s poker losses, we are only starting to . . .
Not the sort of diamonds you wear on your finger, but baseball diamonds. Randy Newsom, a minor league baseball player, recently offered himself up as an I.P.O. Interested investors can buy up to 4% of his future major league income. The price is not that high: $20 per share, with each share entitling the owner to .0016% of his potential . . .
Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball: 1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available. 2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval. 3) . . .
The abortion rate in the United States is at a thirty year low — though even with the decline, we are still talking about a large number of abortions in absolute terms, or 1.2 million per year. To put this number into perspective, there are about 4 million births per year in the U.S. John Donohue and I have argued . . .
Back when I was an undergraduate, I took a class from the future Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling. One day in class, he was talking about commitment problems: when you want to achieve a goal, but lack the self control to do it. As I recall, he offered two pieces of advice for those trying to lose weight. The first was . . .
Michael Shermer, a noted skeptic who writes a monthly column for Scientific American, is visiting the University of Chicago campus tonight to talk about his new book, The Mind of the Market. I’m halfway through the book, which explores how evolution has shaped the way people interact with the modern economy. It is extremely interesting, and I will write more . . .
There are few people I have ever met who are more interesting to talk to than Sudhir Venkatesh. I’ve known him for over a decade, and I cannot remember ever having a boring conversation with him. This Q&A with Venkatesh gives you a sedate and sanitized peek into the sorts of things he has been part of throughout his career. . . .
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is one politician who can credibly claim that he is truly responsible for reducing crime, at least if you believe a new study by economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna. It isn’t his policies as governor, however, that he can take credit for, but rather his acting roles. In their new paper entitled “Does Movie Violence . . .
I sometimes do wear a wig and too much eye makeup, but that’s not what I had in mind. The answer to the question is that people are scalping tickets to both of our performances. There was uproar recently about the steep prices resellers were getting for her concert tickets — sometimes upwards of $2,000. My venue is a little . . .
My daughter Olivia, who is seven, proudly calls herself a scientist. Mostly what that means is that she likes to break things open and see what’s inside. Seeing a fantastic series of scientific experiments done as part of a holiday lecture put on by the University of Chicago Physics Department more or less confirmed her definition of science. In “Physics . . .
… just one of the choice quotes delivered by my father in this informative article about his life’s work.
Most people, given the opportunity, would like to have a say in what other people earn. If someone is nice to me, throw a little extra Christmas bonus their way. If they are rude and surly, how about a 3 percent pay cut? So I find it interesting that the Baseball Writers of America (BBWAA) recently approved a rule which . . .
According to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of housing prices, home prices have fallen by about 6 percent in the United States on average over the last twelve months. By my rough calculations, that means that home owners have lost about $720 billion in wealth as a consequence. That is about $2,400 for every person in America, and $18,000 for the average . . .
We use our eyes to see, so it seems logical to conjecture that if you didn’t have eyes, you couldn’t see. What I love about science is that these sorts of limiting beliefs routinely get blasted out of the water. A fascinating series of experiments points out that we see with our brains, not our eyes. Consequently, you can substitute . . .
I have blogged repeatedly about the propensity of the media to distort official crime reports to make it appear as if things are getting inexorably worse. (You can see past examples here, here, and here.) Crime has more or less been treading water in the United States over the last few years, although you would never know it from the . . .
A friend of mine went through Naval Officer Candidate School a while back, and I recently stumbled upon an old e-mail he’d sent me that included the following: It has been eight weeks, and my training class is about to become the “senior class on deck,” which means that we are responsible for running the junior classes. It also means . . .
For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in other words, businesses don’t run . . .
Yesterday, I posted a quiz asking what my wife Jeannette’s grandma has in common with Mark Twain. The answer is that she, like Twain, had her obituary published while she was still alive. Jeannette’s grandma is named Anne Hathaway. At age 92, she is still going strong. Just a few years ago, she traveled from Orono, Maine to Slovenia for . . .
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