Chris Anderson from the TED conference passes along this link to an interesting slide show of Edward Burtynsky‘s photographs. Burtynsky was a 2005 TED prize winner. Warning to Canadians: you will not like how many of the images are from Canada.
Back in September I blogged about my admiration for Kevin Murphy after he won a MacArthur Genius grant. Here are links to two interviews with Murphy that give you a real flavor of what he is like. The first interview is in the Chicago GSB magazine. Note the size of the truck he drives (it is in the background of . . .
Walter Park, an associate professor at American University in Washington, DC sends along the following story: I’m using your book as a required reading in my principles microeconomics class (of 300 students). The students enjoy the book and are better appreciating the course as a result. Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discrimination”, using an example of the . . .
A blog reader named Mark Winburn pointed me to a remarkable website called www.zillow.com. You type in an address and it gives you a satellite view of your home with a dollar value on top of it, as well as on all of the neighboring houses. Unfortunately, I don’t think you want to put too much stock in the house . . .
The answer is at least one. This morning I saw Barack Obama dropping off his child at nursery school. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois who exploded onto the national political scene with a fantastic speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Long before that, he wrote a really outstanding memoir about growing up as a mixed-race child, his struggle . . .
The Chicago Graduate School of Business student newspaper has an interview — they call it a smackdown and I have no idea what that means so I must be getting old — with Gary Becker, probably the world’s greatest economist alive. It very much gives you the flavor of how Gary thinks.
I spent three years in something called the “Society of Fellows” at Harvard. They paid me a stipend and let me do whatever research I wanted. My only obligation was to go to a fancy dinner every Monday night and eat with some of the most erudite people you could ever imagine. It was always hit or miss, depending on . . .
Yesterday Frey “admitted” that his girlfriend Lily did not hang herself in Chicago as he had written, but rather, slit her wrists. There is no record in the mortality detail files of any young women committing suicide by slitting their wrists in Chicago around this time period that even remotely fits his description. Maybe it was just a paper cut.
I’ve always loved Oprah. So I was very disapointed when she called into the Larry King show and defended James Frey when thesmokinggun allegations first arose against him. She more than redeemed herself on her show today with James Frey as her guest. Unlike Larry King, who tossed softball after softball to Frey, she repeatedly asked the hard questions. And . . .
There are many sterotypes associated with undergraduates at the University of Chicago. They are typically thought to be really smart, very overworked, and a bit odd. Two U of C undergrads, using a data-driven approach worthy of the Freakonomics imprimatur, set out to test one of these stereotypes: that the co-eds are not so attractive. A write-up of their approach . . .
A friend of mine, Patrick McCusker, recently received an email from Amazon.com that read as follows: Dear Amazon.com Customer, We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt also purchased books by Tom Evslin. For this reason, you might like to know that Tom Evslin’s hackoff.com: An . . .
Two funny parodies: The first one is in The Onion. The second is an op-ed written by Tim Carvell, a writer for the Daily Show: January 11, 2006, New York Times Op-Ed Contributor A Million Little Corrections By TIM CARVELL IT is with great sorrow, and no small amount of embarrassment, that I must confess to some inadvertent errors, omissions . . .
A reader of this blog, Frank Paul Venis, was kind enough to send along this email, highlighting yet another set of inconsistencies in “A Million Little Pieces.” Frank has his own blog, called spiderstumbled.com Frank writes: I read the book in December, on my sister’s recomendation. As soon as I finished the book I was extremely dubious about many things. . . .
I blogged last month about the Foote and Goetz criticism of the work I did with John Donohue on abortion. While embarrassing because it pointed out that the wrong numbers got into one of our tables, it doesn’t offer a fundamental challenge to our original findings. When you measure abortion more carefully — in ways that we showed back in . . .
I still love the book “A Million Little Pieces,” but having carefully read the outstanding investigative reporting done by thesmokinggun.com, I’m pretty disgusted that someone would try to pass this book off as non-fiction when it is mostly fiction. I just watched Frey on Larry King Live tonight. His defense was not impressive. He argued that only 18 of 452 . . .
I have a good friend named Tim Groseclose. Loyal blog readers may remember Tim as the political science professor who lost a bet to me because he was certain that his CD player knew which songs were his favorites and overplayed them when he set it to random. I made him commit to a set of songs he considered his . . .
I don’t care what Dubner, or The Smoking Gun website say (see the blog post below), I am a huge fan of James Frey’s book anyway. I saw the book “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey at a bookstore the other day. I had never heard of it, except that it is the Oprah Book Club pick. I figured . . .
Jeff Bailey reports in the The New York Times today about how an internet site that cuts out real estate agents has grabbed 20% of the market in Madison, Wisconsin. (I think you may need a NY Times password to read the article.) For $150, this site lists your home. The article suggests that real estate agents have missed out . . .
Big poker tournaments are a zero-sum game. The competitors pay to enter and those entry fees are returned as prize money. It is common practice for a player to be sponsored by someone else, i.e. a third party pays a player’s entry fee in return for a share of the profits earned. This is true in professional golf as well. . . .
According to this story on ESPN.com, Pat Riley is thinking about bringing in some sumo wrestlers to help improve his game. Riley’s hope is that the battering they give him will better prepare Shaq for game conditions. Let’s hope the sumo wrestlers don’t introduce Shaq to the fine art of cheating to lose. As poorly as Shaq shoots free throws, . . .
Being a contestant on this show requires no talent whatsoever. You pick suitcases. You decide whether you prefer a riskless offer of money to a risky one. Then you go home with a bunch of money. Along the way, the crowd and your chosen friends scream and cheer like there is great skill in choosing among ex ante identical suitcases. . . .
I blogged yesterday about a new game show called “Deal or No Deal” and how it was an obvious candidate for economists to study risk aversion. So obvious, in fact, that Jennifer List (who is not even an economist, only married to one of my colleagues here at University of Chicago), yelled up to her husband that she had his . . .
Or at least somebody should be taping this new game show Deal or No Deal so they can write a paper about it. On the show, contestants get a suitcase with some amount of money in it and they get to keep the contents or take a certain offer that some “banker” on the phone is offering. A good chance . . .
This season’s show “Apprentice” with Donald Trump ended with Trump asking the winner whether the runner-up, Rebecca Jarvis, should also be hired. The winner said, “The show is called ‘The Apprentice,’ not ‘The Apprenti.’ ” Not particularly important, but first let’s just note that if the plural of apprentice is “apprenti,” then by the same token our book should be . . .
Last week’s issue of The Economist gleefully (and a bit prematurely, I might add) reported that everything in Freakonomics was wrong. This weeks edition finds Freakonomics occupying a highly coveted spot as one of The Economist’s “books of the year.” We’re crossing our fingers regarding what next week’s issue will bring.
Our latest Freakonomics column described a recent academic paper by Andy Francis. I asked him to respond to the comments that have been raised on our blog (see here). He was kind enough to oblige. Here is what Andy has to say: Thank you for all your comments. They were insightful, and I enjoyed reading them. Let me take a . . .
Our latest New York Times column asks whether sexuality responds to prices. Not just sexual behavior, but even sexual orientation. What Andy Francis (the author of the study our column is primarily based on) finds may surprise you, unless you are an economist. Read more about our column here.
Steven Landsburg has an interesting column on the impact that delaying having a family has on a woman’s lifetime income. It is based on a study by Amalia Miller who is an economist at the University of Virginia. The column is less about the specifics of the problem Miller solves than about her approach: cobbling together four of five different . . .
I first met Preston McAfee in Barcelona about 10 years ago. I was giving my paper on Lojack, which I had given way too many times because it was the paper I used on the job market. I had stopped getting new and interesting comments from the audience at least 5 seminars earlier. But in Barcelona, the next-to-last time I . . .
And, actually, it isn’t Freakonomics either. It is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. My good friend Jimmy Golen, a sportswriter for the AP, forwarded me this interview with Joe Maddon, the new manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays Q: Are you doodling lineups, doodling rotations — JOE MADDON: You know what? No, not yet. We’re talking about that on the way . . .
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