Thanks to articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, a working paper by Chris Foote and Chris Goetz that is sharply critical of John Donohue and me has gotten an enormous amount of attention. In that working paper Foote and Goetz criticized the analysis underlying one of the tables in our original article that suggested a link between . . .
Michael Lewis writes in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine about Mike Leach, the innovative coach of the Texas Tech football team. As Lewis describes it, Leach takes a totally different view of football and is on the cusp of revolutionizing the game. It is a very interesting article, and beautifully written. As usual with Michael Lewis, there is a . . .
The Ebay charity auction of the first signed copy of Freakonomics ends around 1 pm eastern time today. Please don’t bid any higher, because I have pledged a matching donation for whatever the price of the book. 🙂
Patri Friedman, who is among other things a high-stakes poker player and a relative of Milton Friedman (I think), has an interesting interview with Tim Harford at the blog catallarchy. Patri’s webpage is pretty amusing as well.
Or at least that is the impression you might get if you read this article in today’s Wall Street Journal. I will post a longer blog entry once I have had time to fully digest the working paper by Foote and Goetz which is the basis for the article. For now, I will say just a few things: 1) It . . .
While it is true that Dubner and I sometimes feel that we are held hostage by our blog (in the sense that the constant need to provide new content weighs on us), it has never been our intention to hold reader comments hostage. We had no idea that if a reader comment contained one of hundreds of suspect words (automatically . . .
Tim Harford has generously chosen to donate to charity the proceeds from the Ebay auction of the first copy of Freakonomics I ever signed. He was even kind enough to let me pick the charity, SmileTrain. I don’t think he ever dreamed it would go for what the current bid is on Ebay. My best guess would have been one . . .
Just before Freakonomics hit the bookshelves, a reporter from the Financial Times named Tim Harford flew out to Chicago to write a profile about me, which you can read here. At the end of the interview, he asked me to autograph his book. I was surprised because no one had ever asked me to sign anything ever before. But I . . .
Csaba Toth, a blog reader from Hungary, sent me the link to an article that claims that fresh fruits, whole-grain bread, and a salad bar are the real way to fight crime. The most compelling part of the article reads as follows: Bernard Gesch, physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal clues in the most thorough . . .
I checked Freakonomics books for sale on Ebay for the first time since the book was published. 38 copies currently up for auction. None of them signed. Does anyone know what premium a signed copy goes for? The part I liked best was that 4 copies of the book were categorized under “Fiction.” I guess those sellers were not so . . .
I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved close to where I work. So whenever I do, the incivility on the roads leaps out at me. People do things in cars they would never do in other settings. Honking. Swearing. Cutting to the front of the line. And that is just my wife. The other drivers are far meaner. One . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh, the amazing sociologist who was my co-author on the gangs research that we write about in Freakonomics, has a great new documentary. It will be showing on WTTW, Chicago’s PBS affiliate at Thursday, Nov. 17th, 9pm Friday, Nov. 18th, 10pm. If you don’t live in Chicago, you are out of luck, at least for now. I have seen . . .
Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America on Monday morning, between 8:00 and 8:30 am. I guess he has suddenly turned shy and decided not to publicize it.
The winner of the New York Marathon last Sunday was Paul Tergat of Kenya. He ran a time of 2:09:30. The second place finisher, Hendrik Ramaala of South Africa finished 1 second behind in a time of 2:09:31. Over 26 miles and they were one stride apart. But that is not even the most amazing fact to me. It turns . . .
I met one of (the elder) Richard Daley’s grandsons yesterday. Great guy. At the risk of poisoning a possible friendship, I just had to ask him whether his grandfather really stole the election for Kennedy in 1960 through vote fraud in Chicago. He said no. And I believe him. I once had a research assistant spend a month going through . . .
After I got my Ph.D. in economics, I had the incredible luck to get to spend three years at something called the Harvard Society of Fellows. It is an interdisciplinary academic club which draws top young scholars from across a wide array of disciplines whose only obligation is to do great research and drink expensive wine. One of the people . . .
Everywhere I go, people are asking me what I think of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. I know Bernanke pretty well because he was Chairman of the Princeton Economics department at a time when I was very seriously thinking of moving there, but ended up turning down offers on multiple occasions (which rightfully aggravated Bernanke to . . .
My son Andrew died six years ago today. He had just turned one. He was born just as the leaves were turning. He died just as the leaves were turning. We played a song from the musical Rent at his memorial service. It always makes us think of him. It goes, in part, like this. 525,600 minutes. 525,600 moments so . . .
I’ve changed addresses 10 times since I graduated from college. And each time I’ve moved, I’ve looked at the battered old box of college notebooks and debated whether it was time to throw the box out. After all, it has been more than 15 years and the box has never once been opened. Thomas Schelling winning the Nobel prize in . . .
There is something called the TED conference, held annually in Monterey, California, which brings together a very high-powered audience of technology big shots and an amazingly diverse set of speakers. When I spoke there a few years ago, the guy best known for being the voice of Roger Rabbit was the speaker who followed me. (Let me just say that . . .
Bill Bennett, apparently. Or was it Good Morning America? Or World News Tonight? Or an ad in USA Today? Causality is not always easy to identify. The following chart, kindly supplied by Bill Tancer from www.hitwise.com, documents Freakonomics’ share of the web traffic from the millions of internet users that Hitwise tracks (and for fun, Bill Bennett’s too): Last week . . .
To all who enjoy this blog, I apologize for the onslaught of comments from Steve Sailer and the various pseudonyms he operates under. Apparently he believes that if he says the same thing over and over it will turn into the truth, or at least direct some traffic to his website. As far as I can tell he is still . . .
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker is interesting as always. It is about Ivy League admissions. I particularly like this quote (especially the last sentence): The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for . . .
In yesterday’s New York Times, Mike McIntyre writes about the reasons crime has fallen in New York City. Most of the article is about how Mayor Bloomberg claims credit for his police department. The article then goes on to say: Academic experts cite several plausible contributors to the nationwide trend, including an aging population (young men are responsible for most . . .
I found this list of what is supposed to be the future winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics on a blackboard at the U of C, for what it is worth. Who knows whether the people who made the list know what they are talking about. There are about 40 people on the list, and about 2 people get . . .
A host of commenters on my Bill Bennett post get very agitated over the question of “crimes” vs. “the crime rate.” The term “crime rate” implies a denominator, typically “per 100,000 residents.” So the number of crimes can fall, but the crime rate can rise if the population shrinks. Bill Bennett said, “But I do know that it’s true that . . .
Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We’ve both written about crime (his “superpredator” theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original “drug czar” and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it . . .
Emergency rooms serve as the front lines in the world of medicine. Many (most?) visits to ERs are not emergencies at all, but rather, routine visits by people with limited access to health care. As a consequence, waiting for hours to be seen is not uncommon. Forced to take all patients, the ER raises the “price” by making you wait. . . .
For a long time, the pro-life movement has had a keen sense of how people respond to incentives. Protesters outside of clinics proved to be a very effective strategy for raising the social and moral costs of seeking an abortion. Now a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia has come up with a very clever strategy for fighting back, called “Pledge-a-Picket:” . . .
Read what Chris Lightfoot has to say about this question here. The origin of the idea for the analysis appears to be in this marginalrevolution post. The idea is that large differences in prices for one-way trips from Detroit to Las Vegas compared to one-way trips the other direction reflects differential migration. The answers aren’t so surprising: the flow tends . . .
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
