Economist Alan Krueger‘s excellent work on terrorism — which we’ve discussed before — comes to the conclusion that suicide bombers tend to be surprisingly well-educated. They are not generally the poorest of the poor; in fact, they are more likely to be middle class members of society. Now it turns out that further support for Krueger’s assertions is coming from . . .
I spent the morning in the White House, attending the ceremony recognizing this year’s winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gary Becker was one of the honorees, and he was kind enough to let me tag along as a member of his entourage. Becker became only the second person to win both the Nobel Prize in economics and the . . .
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on “acting white,” i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers. Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase “acting white.” The kids laughed at him and said, . . .
Evidence that any publicity can be good publicity: Reading this story about an E. coli outbreak in the pepperoni on Totino’s pizzas reminded me of my 20-year love affair with Totino’s. Why haven’t I been eating them lately? I will have to get some immediately. Maybe I’ll start with the sausage pizza, though.
Upon hearing the news that Gary Becker had won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I went to the official Medal of Freedom Web site to find out more about the award. I learned that it was created by Harry Truman to recognize outstanding service by civilians during World War II, and was then revived by John F. Kennedy. There have . . .
An interesting article written by Jeremy Hsu on Scienceline.org does further damage to the Spinning Dancer’s already damaged reputation.
The major news media (see for instance here and here) have been reporting recently on the hypothesis that banning lead from gasoline caused a reduction in crime. This follows a similar article in the Washington Post a few months ago, which I blogged about at the time. Since a lot of people have written to us lately asking for comment . . .
I saw some “organic beef jerky” at the grocery store today. Are there actually people who eat beef jerky who care whether it is organic? Next up we’ll have organic chewing tobacco and organic Pringles.
I made a quick visit to Los Angeles last week, in an attempt to jump start my languishing acting career. (I’ll let you figure out whether I’m joking. If you aren’t sure, ask someone who knows me.) Here’s how I always know I am in L.A., and not at the University of Chicago: 1. Everyone is constantly telling everyone else . . .
You might not think that mosquitoes would be a great topic for economists, but two recent papers prove otherwise. I grew up in Minnesota. The state motto is “The Land of 10,000 Lakes,” which meant that there was never a shortage of mosquitoes. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go in the backyard in the summer because . . .
I caught a lot of flak a few months back when I speculated about why terrorists don’t carry out a wide array of simple but devastating terrorist plots. (For fear of another flood of hate mail, I don’t dare link to those earlier posts, but if you are interested you can easily find them.) I’m pretty sure that forest fires . . .
My friend Laura Beth Nielsen, who is a researcher at the American Bar Foundation and a sociologist at Northwestern, is speaking today about hate crimes on Chicago Public Radio’s Eight Forty-Eight show, which broadcasts at 9:00 a.m. Central time. You can hear it live by clicking the “Listen Now” button near the top of the Eight Forty-Eight Web page.
Last week I linked to an intriguing visual of a spinning dancer. It is intriguing because some people see her spinning clockwise, whereas others see her spinning counter-clockwise. Moreover, some people are able to make the direction of her spin switch. The article asserts that the direction she spins is an indicator of whether your thinking is dominated by the . . .
Here is a nice article from The Economist with a description of what the recent Nobel Prize in Economics is all about, as well as interesting personal facts about the winners (e.g., Eric Maskin lives in Albert Einstein‘s old house and dresses up as Einstein for Halloween).
Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites. If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic question. Roland Fryer and . . .
[Addendum appended.] A few weeks back I blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn’t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated. A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by . . .
At a Nobel press conference yesterday, a reporter asked Roger Myerson to name the next important thing he had on his agenda. Myerson responded that he had to give a speech for Gary Becker‘s workshop the next day — i.e., today. The paper he is presenting is not your typical economics paper, especially for someone who just won the Nobel . . .
Courtesy of Marginal Revolution, take a look at this dancer. Is she spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? For me there is no question: the answer is clockwise. For my wife, the image is without question spinning counter-clockwise. Our babysitter, April, sometimes sees her clockwise and sometimes the opposite. This little dancer offers a powerful lesson regarding how things we conceive as . . .
I was delighted to wake up this morning and discover that I have yet another Nobel Laureate as a colleague. Congratulations to Roger Myerson! (And also to Eric Maskin and Leo Hurwicz, who shared the prize.) The prize was “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory.” Mechanism design formalizes ways of thinking about how a social planner, manager, . . .
By the time you read this, the Nobel Prize in economics will likely have been awarded, though as I write this, the winners have yet to be announced. A few random thoughts: 1) I guarantee you that the economist(s) who win it will be much better sports than Doris Lessing, who seemed put off that the award had disturbed her . . .
Back in August, we blogged about allegations of match rigging at Wimbledon. According to a new report by SI.com, that may have been only the tip of the iceberg; now, 150 matches are being investigated by tennis officials. My hunch, having seen no data and only read this article, is that the number of rigged tennis matches will ultimately turn . . .
The following story is currently making the rounds on the Internet. The events probably didn’t happen exactly as described, but for my purposes it doesn’t really matter. Supposedly, a woman posted the following personal ad on Craigslist: What am I doing wrong? Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old girl. I’m articulate and . . .
Crime rates have a large influence on the choices people make about where to live. The amazing declines in crime over the last fifteen years have been especially strong in big cities, a factor that helped fuel an urban renaissance. Ironically, however, some of the lowest murder rates are found in places where one might suspect just the opposite to . . .
Tamara Audi and Adam Thompson write in the Wall Street Journal about how the Las Vegas casinos helped authorities catch point-shaving football players at the University of Toledo. It is no surprise that the sportsbooks take an active role in this endeavor: when cheating happens, the sportsbook is the party from which money gets stolen. (If the bookies balanced the . . .
There is no policy economists love more than school choice. Milton Friedman was an early proponent. The idea certainly makes sense: if parents have the ability to choose the best schools for their children, outcomes should improve through both the better matching of kids to specific schools and the resulting competition that would force schools to develop their programs. The . . .
I blogged a few days back about the interesting new paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers analyzing trends in happiness by gender, and finding statistically significant reductions in how happy women are relative to men. Elsewhere on the Internet, the paper has drawn the ire of a number of bloggers. Stevenson and Wolfers have fired back on Marginal Revolution, . . .
In Freakonomics, we wrote about Paul Feldman, an economist turned bagel delivery man who began charging his customers based on the honor system. From the experiment, he found that, all in all, people were pretty honest. Now the band Radiohead is borrowing a page from Feldman’s playbook, but on a much grander scale. One of the most popular bands in . . .
I saw Justin Wolfers a few weeks back, and I joked with him that it had been months since I’d seen his research in the headlines. It didn’t take him long to fix that — he and his partner in life and economics, Betsey Stevenson, made the news twice last week. The first time was in the form of an . . .
I played in my first golf tournament just after I turned thirteen years old. I emphasize the “just after” part because I have the worst golf birthday in the world: late May. I was always the youngest kid playing in my age bracket, as well as the smallest one. As Dubner and I have discussed in the past, the work . . .
The following are headlines from this week’s major newspapers following the release of official 2006 crime statistics: From the Washington Post: Violent Crime, a Sticky Issue for White House, Shows Steeper Rise From the Los Angeles Times: Violent Crime Rises Again From the Philadelphia Inquirer: Rise in Violent Crimes is Higher than Expected It is official. The next crime wave . . .
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