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 . . .
A few months ago Netflix offered a million dollar prize to anyone who could improve their prediction algorithm 10%. Judging from the progress made so far (a 5% improvement and 743 different teams submitting bids so far), this is likely to be one of the best $1 million Netflix ever spent.
In the last quiz we had on the blog, we offered a signed copy of Freakonomics to the first person to correctly identify the person who was identified at a charity event as the “the most trusted man in America.” It turned out to be way too easy (Walter Cronkite), generating a lot of complaints from blog readers. So here . . .
A while back we wrote a New York Times column on organ donation: why there is so little of it, and why we don’t pay people for organs. One of the central themes in that column was Harvard economist Al Roth‘s idea that repugnance constrains markets. For those of you with a slightly more academic bent, Roth has just released . . .
My wife and I spent a night last week learning about Smile Train, a non-profit that provides free cleft surgery to poor children throughout the world. We’ve made donations to them in the past (including this one), but we never really knew much about them. All we knew was that a $250 donation could pay for an operation that would . . .
I think I will have disappointed many blog readers. The question about who was the most trusted man in America was not meant to be a trick one. I was just struck at the charity event, in the 10 seconds between when they said they had a clip from the most trusted man in America and when the clip started, . . .
From today’s Chicago Tribune: COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. – One of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders admitted Friday that he visited a male prostitute for a massage and bought methamphetamine for personal use – though he said he threw the drugs away without using them. The Rev. Ted Haggard denied the prostitute’s allegation that the two men met for sex . . .
I was at a charity event the other night (more on that event when I have the time to do it justice). The charity group had a clip from someone they touted as “the most trusted man in America.” Who do you think they were referring to? I tried to think of who it might be before they showed the . . .
Here’s a nice article on my friend and colleague at University of Chicago Kevin Murphy. He doesn’t look the part, but he is the smartest human I have ever met. You can also see my past blogs on him when he won the MacArthur Genius award and when he got some other nice magazine profiles.
Where I was a kid, there was some expectation that (a) you would wear a costume when trick-or-treating, and (b) if you were old enough to drive, then you would not go trick-or-treating. When did that change and why?
Everybody and their brother is sending me links to Steven Landsburg’s most recent Slate column that reports on studies by economists that suggest internet porn reduces rape and the release of blockbuster violent movies reduces violence. While the idea might strike non-economists as crazy, the theory makes sense. When you lower the price of a good that is a substitute . . .
The U.S. Congress recently passed a law cracking down on internet gambling. I have no doubt that time will demonstrate how incredibly stupid this law is. Tens of millions of Americans gamble recreationally. Past experience tells us that attempts to ban activities that most people consider harmless always fail. By missing the opportunity to legalize internet gambling and allow American-owned . . .
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