We’ve written in the past about the discomfort (or worse) that people feel when it comes to paying donors for organs, even though doing so would likely be an enormous boon for those suffering right now on organ donation waiting lists. From CNN.com, here is an article discussing a proposal to pay women who donate eggs for stem cell research. . . .
The most interesting article in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, in my opinion, was a fascinating window into race in America on the back page of the magazine called “Pick One” written by David Matthews. My friend and co-author Roland Fryer continues to think hard about these issues also.
Robert Dodge has written a biography of Thomas Schelling, which is available now. I just found out about it and ordered it, so I have not read it yet. I have read the delightful preface written by Richard Zeckhauser, a long-time colleague of Schelling at Harvard, which exactly captures my interactions with Schelling. Schelling is a Nobel prize winner in . . .
Yesterday, Dubner was part of a Google event entitled “Un-bound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World.” Rebecca Lieb provides a fascinating write-up of the day’s events. I was particularly struck by the comment made by Cory Doctorow, “Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it?” In a world in which illegal downloading of music is endemic, copyright . . .
A while back Dubner blogged about how Consumer Reports had demanded a recall of a number of rear-facing child seats because they performed so poorly in their tests. Now Consumer Reports has a recall of their own. Apparently they may have done some of the tests wrong. We will have to wait and see what their revised study finds. A . . .
When I was a child and didn’t eat my dinner, my mother (like all mothers of her generation) would remind me that there were starving children in Africa. However, she never would take me up on my generous offer to ship the leftover food to those starving children in lieu of my having to eat it. My friend Jill Youse . . .
The New York Times has an article about the most promising young economists. I was glad to see so many of my friends on the list.
When I was a graduate student, my mentor Jim Poterba told me more than once that my research should “always be about the economy and never about economists.” I took those words to heart and consistently resisted the temptation to do self-referential research about the economics profession. I finally violated Poterba’s rule at this year’s American Economic Association meetings. Doubly . . .
My colleague and co-author John List is one of the most prolific and influential economists around. He’s got a new working paper with Michael Margolis and Daniel Osgood that makes the surprising claim that the Endangered Species Act — which is designed to help endangered species — may actually harm them. Why? The key intuition is that after a species . . .
The American Economic Association annual meetings are going on right now. Once a year about 10,000 economists all descend on a city (never Las Vegas because not enough economists gamble), give seminars to one another, and interview the newest crop of Ph.D. students to determine who will get jobs where. The events at these meetings are not generally very newsworthy. . . .
I got an interesting email from blog reader William F. Barkley the other day. I reproduce a condensed version of it below: This time each year I find myself mired in a College Football Bowl Pool with five college friends (we’re all around your age) from Babson College. We try to pick the winner (against the spread) for each of . . .
A few years back I wrote an academic paper that set out to resolve a paradox in sports betting: how could it be the case that bookies systematically got the spread wrong in NFL football? In particular, home underdogs win far more games than they should against the spread. Despite the fact that bookies take a healthy cut of every . . .
My wife Jeannette outdid herself on our holiday card this year: I cannot say enough good things about the photographer who took these pictures. Check out her website winkforkids.com. We have tried endlessly to get good pictures of all four kids together, rarely with any success at all. She swooped in and in a few hours got dozens of pictures . . .
Adoption of Chinese orphans by Americans has skyrocketed in popularity over the last two decades. I’m part of that trend, with two daughters adopted from China. Although by most calculations there is no shortage of baby girls in orphanages in China, in the last few years the Chinese government agency that is responsible for matching American applicants to Chinese babies . . .
Carmelo Anthony, the young star of the Denver Nuggets, was severely punished for throwing a punch in a brawl at the end of a recent Knicks-Nuggets game. His 15 game suspension will cost him $640,000 in salary. (I’d link to the brawl, but the NBA demanded that youtube.com remove all clips of the incident.) With Anthony having already been punished . . .
Six months ago I blogged about how the media reported the crime statistics released by the FBI at that time. All the headlines screamed that a new crime wave was upon us. The facts were that reported violent crime had increased 2.5% and reported property crime fell 1.6%. But that wasn’t very exciting, I guess. The fact that the most . . .
Add the following study to the long list of ones I don’t believe. The article claims that astrological signs are better predictors of accidents than age or postal code. We’ve reported on bizarre patterns in outcomes related to month of birth before (like overrepresentation of certain birth months in the NHL or World Cup), but those patterns were readily related . . .
The National Academy of Sciences produced a report on women in science a few months back. The basic conclusion of the report is that there is no cognitive, hormonal, or evolutionary explanation for why women are underrepresented in science. Instead, the report suggests that women face discrimination every step along the way towards becoming scientists and engineers. I have no . . .
Academics, myself included, love coming up with counterintuitive arguments that change the way people see the world. The media probably loves to publish such articles even more than the academics like to find them. Sometimes, though, these same academics/media do a big disservice by raising issues that are theoretically possible, but not at all important in reality. A great example . . .
So I survived my interview on the Colbert Report. He asked crazy questions. I smiled and did the best I could. At least I did better than this guy, which was my goal. Not much interesting to report really, except that before the show, Colbert introduced himself and made sure that I understood that in real life he is not . . .
Some of the heavy hitters in economics at the University of Chicago — Gary Becker, Bob Lucas, Gene Fama, and Sam Peltzman — got together to talk about Milton Friedman’s impact. You can watch the webcast. My favorite part is when Gary Becker says that he went back to look at Friedman’s 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom” for the first . . .
The answer to the last quiz was indeed The Colbert Report, as blog reader Risingson astutely guessed 8 minutes after I posted the quiz. Congratulations to him. Having watched Colbert interview others, I have immense respect for his ability to find a person’s absolute weak spot. Hopefully I know my weak spots well enough to do some advance preparation, but . . .
The quizzes we’ve been offering periodically seem to be popular. The answers always turn out to be much easier to guess than we have predicted. So, for a switch, here is a quiz that we know will be answered correctly within 10 minutes: What show is Levitt (against his better judgment) going to be a guest on next week? Same . . .
Economists have long recognized the potential value of artificially restricting one’s choices. Tying your hands can be useful in strategic situations. The old idea of burning bridges behind an army so they can’t retreat is a classic example. Strategic situations usually involve you and some adversary, like an opposing army, a competing bidder, or maybe the goalkeeper when you are . . .
The comments in response to my recent post on Barack Obama’s book led, predictably, to the topic of media bias. Media bias is one of the hottest topics among economists these days. A sampling of some recent academic work on the topic: Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo estimate how left-wing or right-wing media outlets are based on what research by . . .
This is not a political blog. I have no interest in politics. But I have been reading a great book that happens to be written by a politician. The first time I heard of Barack Obama is when I saw his name springing up on those political signs people put in their front yards in election years. I knew nothing . . .
I bet you didn’t know MTV (the cable music and entertainment network) is also in the survey business. I didn’t until I saw this news story reported by Reuters. The story begins: Young people in developing nations are at least twice as likely to feel happy about their lives than their richer counterparts, a survey says. According to an MTV . . .
Two excellent articles about Milton Friedman’s legacy by Brad Delong in Salon.com and my colleague Austan Goolsbee in the New York Times. Friedman published his first academic paper that I am aware of in 1935, the year my own parents were born. His most important academic work was done before I was born, although his popularizing efforts like the PBS . . .
Media reports are saying that Milton Friedman, the great Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner has died at the age of 94. He was truly a revolutionary thinker. People do not realize how revolutionary because so many of his ideas that were thought to be crazy when he suggested them eventually came to be seen as obvious: school choice, a . . .
Blog readers are a lot smarter than I thought. It took less than an hour to get the right answer to my latest quiz. Thinking nobody would be able to figure out that I shook hands with Mickey Mouse, I had plotted out four days of increasingly helpful clues. Not only did someone guess Mickey Mouse almost immediately, but numerous . . .
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