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 . . .
An amazing website that the guys at Marginal Revolution blogged about. It is called www.scipionus.com. It is a map-based wiki where regular people can insert information geographically about the effects of the storm. There are thousands and thousands of entries. Surfing around, the devastation doesn’t seem as bad on the wiki as it does on TV. Houses a block or . . .
A while back, Dubner blogged about this website, which tracks moods of the populace. It has some updated information on how Hurricane Katrina made people feel. Wouldn’t it make sense for companies to build something like this into their internal networks? It would allow top managers to have up-to-the-minute information on the state of the employees’ mindset. Done anonymously, people . . .
Although it may sometimes seem that Dubner and I are attached at the hip, indeed we do have separate lives. And, in his non-Freakonomics existence, Dubner was recently honored by having a piece he wrote for the New Yorker reprinted in a book entitled “The Best American Crime Writing 2005.” The book comes out next week. Just by chance, it . . .
The readers of this blog seem to collectively know the answer to just about any question we can think to pose. So here are some questions: 1) How much of the damage/human toll is because of the hurricane per se versus the levees breaking? If we had perfect foresight, would 1,000 well-placed national guardsmen and some heavy machinery have been . . .
This e-mail reprinted below, which is circulating incredibly widely, may represent a new low in economic thinking. It declares September 1st “No Gas Day.” I got three copies today. Still, I wasn’t going to blog about it, until I went on the web-search engine technorati and saw that all sorts of bloggers seem to be embracing the concept. So here . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
John Tierney wrote a great New York Times column in response to the Maass article on Peak Oil in the Sunday NY Times Magazine that I criticized. Tierney and Matthew Simmons, who is the point man for the Peak Oil team, made a $10,000 bet as to whether in 2010 oil would be above or below $200 a barrel (adjusted . . .
I got this e-mail from a fan yesterday:I read Freakonomics and was — to say the least — floored. You are a brilliant thinker and honestly, you remind me of me.
The cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine written by Peter Maass is about “Peak Oil.” The idea behind “peak oil” is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices . . .
On the surface, not much. The Kansas City Royals have lost 19 straight games and are threatening to break the all-time record for futility in major league baseball. My iPod, on the other hand, has quickly become one of my most beloved material possessions. So what do they have in common? They both can teach us a lesson about randomness. . . .
If you believe a recent study, a good guess is 25%. At least that is the estimate for American adults overall. And over a lifetime, an estimated 46% of Americans will suffer from mental illness. There is an interesting post on the “Done as a Society” blog that applies Freakonomics-type thinking to this result. Some thoughts: 1) When I entered . . .
I wasn’t trying to be pejorative in my last post when I said that in China/Hong Kong there are five people doing the job one American would typically do. I didn’t mean that the five Chinese workers necessarily did no better than the one American worker, it was more a statement about how workers are allocated. At our hotel in . . .
At the Hong Kong airport, you are required to pass through an area that uses some sort of technology to detect body temperature. If you have a very high fever, they pounce on you and presumably quarantine you because of fear of SARS. I adopted my daughter Sophie from China. She had two defining traits when we first adopted her. . . .
I’ve long felt like a flu epidemic is one of the biggest external threats to the U.S. right now when measured in expected lives lost over the next ten years. Reading John Barry’s book “The Great Influenza” is very sobering, but worthwhile. It sounds crazy, but on the long list of things I’d like to do that I never get . . .
We received this e-mail message today, from Klan buster Stetson Kennedy’s assistant: Thought you’d be proud to know that Stetson is reading your book every night as he soaks in the tub. Not all books he reads have the honor of being a “tub read.” Stetson turns 89 in early October. His website, well worth a visit, can be found . . .
First, let me start by saying that we know we have been remiss about posting on the blog. Tomorrow, there will be a blow-by-blow account of our California trip. Until then, let me just throw out a little something. I was shocked to hear that Atkins Nutritionals, Inc. declared bankruptcy. Not because I’m surprised that the number of people on . . .
I’ve flown first class exactly twice in the last five years. The first time was right after 9/11. At the time I was struck by how ludicrous it is that they provided metal forks and spoons, but plastic knives. The idea was that terrorists would take over the plane using metal table knives (perhaps in combination with the nail clippers . . .
Thomas Bzik sent us this interesting letter, which he also submitted to NY Times magazine, but they did not publish. We have no idea about the accuracy of the factual claims made in his letter, but I see no reason why he would make them up: ——– Subject: Child Safety Seats FYI, My first professional job as a statistician was . . .
In response to our last post, a reader named “A” pointed us towards an interesting article about Newt Gingrich’s second career as an amazon reviewer. Gingrich cracked the coveted “top 500 reviewer” rank in 2004, but has now slipped to #599. Gingrich abruptly stopped reviewing in December 2004. I guess we will never get to know his opinion on Freakonomics. . . .
I can understand why little-known authors and their friends post reviews of their own books at amazon. Judy Chevalier has a paper that finds that good online reviews sell a surprising number of books. (A bad review suppresses sales even more than a good review boosts sales, which also makes sense.) More puzzling to me is why everyday people post . . .
Dubner went solo on the Today Show this morning. Levitt, who still can’t quite get his head around flying halfway across the country to do a four minute interview, was off at a water park in Wisconsin with his wife and kids, which luckily was a good enough excuse to miss the interview. If you weren’t on the East Coast, . . .
To all the Billy Beane fans I offended earlier this season: I have noticed that the A’s are now three games above .500. I’m too busy with other stuff to even try to say something intelligent about baseball right now. Plus my fragile psyche can’t take anymore of the kind of abuse that baseball fans hand out.
I arrived at the West Palm Beach airport yesterday, trying to make my way back to Chicago, only to see my flight time listed on the departure board as simply “DELAYED.” They weren’t even pretending it was leaving in the foreseeable future. With a little detective work, I found another flight that could get me home on a different airlines, . . .
I appeared on the 700 Club this morning with Pat Robertson, in an interview that a blogger anticipated would be the “must-Tivo event of the summer.” Conventional wisdom suggested this would be a bloodbath – that the Freakonomics perspective on the abortion question would enrage Robertson and a shouting match would ensue. (Indeed, my publicist was planning on turning down . . .
In Freakonomics, we talk about how some of the most powerful incentives are social, not financial. One example we give is posting the pictures of people caught soliciting prostitutes on the web. How appropriate that the following story appeared recently in the Chicago Tribune: (It was long, so I edited out parts. You can see the whole article here at . . .
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