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 . . .
Two weeks ago, I blogged about my inability to recognize how new technologies would change my life for the better. I typically wait years to adopt things, then do so grudgingly, only to find within days that I don’t know how I ever lived without them. I asked our readers to offer suggestions about my next life-changing technology. The enticement: . . .
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman kicked off his new blog a couple days ago with a long entry on inequality. While economists are well aware of the patterns in inequality, there is less agreement concerning the reasons for its ups and downs. Krugman believes that the primary factor driving inequality is politics. I suspect that most economists would disagree. . . .
Let’s say you discover an old lamp and rub it, and out comes a genie offering to grant you a wish. You are greedy and devious, so you wish for the ability, whenever you play online poker, to see all the cards that the other players are holding. The genie grants your wish. What would you do next? If you . . .
I received the following e-mail today. If you read this, apply, and make the show, we’ll give you a month’s supply of Freakonomics T-shirts and yo-yos, as long as you agree to wear them on the show: Hi, My name is Laina Rose, I’m currently casting a new reality show. You are being contacted because our research team thinks you . . .
That is the title of my latest academic working paper, written with Roland Fryer. It details the rise and fall of the Klan in the 1920s. Incredibly, the Klan had millions of members at that time, and most of them were reasonably well-educated. Based on a variety of data sources, we argue that, despite its size and education levels, the . . .
Alan Greenspan has a new book out. I haven’t seen it yet, since I am in London for a few days and it isn’t available here. Economist Brad DeLong talks about the book (among other things) in this podcast. Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen offers a set of links as well. So here is my economic forecast for the book: . . .
One of the most important political questions of the day is whether the troop surge in Baghdad is working. If you ask politicians, the answer you get to that question is very predictable. Republicans say yes, Democrats say no. What do the data have to say about this question? Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. professor, good friend, and one of the . . .
From research by economists J.J. Prescott and Jonah Rockoff, here are a few current statistics on sex offenses reported to the police: 1) 25 percent of victims are 10-14 years old; 23 percent are nine or younger. 2) 22.5 percent of the offenders are family members. Only 8 percent are strangers. 3) 25 percent of sex offenses reported to the . . .
Shortly after Brian Jacob and I did our research on teachers who cheat, we thought about starting a company that would provide cheating detection services to schools systems. What I quickly discovered, however, was that there were few things in the world that school systems wanted less than to catch teachers who cheat — suffice it to say that school . . .
I’m a notoriously late adopter of technologies. It is not a conscious decision, and I don’t take any pride in it. I just do not have enough imagination to figure out ahead of time how much I will like things once I actually have them. E-mail is a good example. I couldn’t see how e-mail would be of much use . . .
If you ask an economist how to price a new product that is just being introduced, the response you will get is that you should charge a very high price at first and then steadily reduce that price over time. There are two reasons for doing this. First, it generally gets cheaper to produce things over time, so it makes . . .
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