When Freakonomics.com was launched in 2005, it was essentially a blog (c’mon, blogs were a thing then!). The first Freakonomics book had just been published, and Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt wanted to continue their conversation with readers. Over time, the blog grew to have millions of readers, a variety of regular and guest writers, and it was hosted by The New York Times, where Dubner and Levitt also published a monthly “Freakonomics” column. The authors later collected some of the best blog writing in a book called When to Rob a Bank … and 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants. (The publisher rejected their original title: We Were Only Trying to Help. The publisher had also rejected the title Freakonomics at first, so they weren’t surprised.) While the blog has not had any new writing in quite some time, the entire archive is still here for you to read.
Apparently, quite a bit, at least in Detroit. The price of copper has risen 56 percent this year, probably due in large part to construction demand in China. The high price of copper has led to an increase in people breaking into construction sites and even homes to steal copper pipes. In Detroit, someone stole the copper pipes from the . . .
New Scientist magazine, in honor of its 50th anniversary, asked 70 of the world’s foremost scientists to answer that question. Here are their answers.
Several months ago, I noted that a few countries had recently elected an economist as president, and solicited suggestions for which U.S. economist might make a good president. Among the many suggestions (including Gary Becker, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell), one prominent name failed to appear: Jeffrey Sachs. But that hasn’t discouraged a group of Sachs fans. The Sachs for President . . .
If you thought the N.Y. Times business section was critical of Barry Diller’s pay package before, what happens now that he calls the Times “loony”? If you thought that African-Americans didn’t watch Seinfeld before (as we wrote in Freakonomics), what happens now that Jesse Jackson calls for a boycott? And if you thought that books were good for you, you . . .
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 . . .
I am not the kind of person who usually watches Stupid Pet Trick-type videos, and certainly not the kind of person who inflicts said videos on other people, but: In this case, I cannot resist. The bouncing dog in this video is named Moishe and belongs to my cousin Barbara Koltuv, who is the person on the other end of . . .
My friend James Altucher has probably never had to have a resume in his life, but if he did it would include: teen chess whiz, computer-science guy, web filmmaker for HBO, general web wunderkind, poker player, hedge fund guy, financial writer, and author. He’s just launched a new website, Stockpickr.com, that combines almost all of the above. It’s a sort . . .
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 . . .
The L.A. Times ran an article yesterday about the runaway popularity of economics blogs. They are so popular, in fact, that the Times chose to run the piece on Thanksgiving, when the paper is read by approximately 18 people. But here’s the weirdest thing: even in the online version of an article about blogs, there are no links to the . . .
Not long ago, a reader from Portland, Oregon, wrote to us: Hello, Mr. Levitt and Mr. Dubner… I wanted to say thank you for writing your book. It has really changed the way I think about my life and the world. You’ve also saved me money. As an African-American using Match.com and Yahoo personals, I always wondered why it was . . .
With the Summer Olympics coming to Beijing in 2008, all of China is busily buffing itself for the TV cameras and crowds of tourists. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, one element of this charm offensive surrounds the museum trade. From the article, by Mei Fong: Daishan, a fishing community three hours from [Shanghai], is building a museum devoted to . . .
Back in the old days, maybe 10 years ago, most Hollywood and pop-music stars were reluctant to do American TV ads, I guess because it was considered declasse. But everything has its price, including declasse-ness, so now American TV commercials are full of stars like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jay-Z, even Robert DeNiro. So this website, which has been around a good . . .
Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University whose work involves public policy and philanthropy, has written a new book called Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. His boldface conclusion? As summarized in this interesting article, Brooks found that “religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of . . .
Last month, Levitt blogged about how his mother would be disappointed to find that Freakonomics had fallen off the N.Y. Times best-seller list. It’s true, we fell off the list after something like 77 weeks. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Now we’ve climbed back on the list. How’d this happen? Pretty simple, really. There were at least . . .
Your responses to yesterday’s quiz were, as always, vigorous and interesting. And, as with earlier contests like this one and this one, the correct answer came fast. In this case, it came within 10 minutes of my original posting. And the person with the correct answer was so confident that he/she logged on to our comments section with the very . . .
If you believe that … 1. We are in the advice-giving business (which we’re not) and that … 2. The I.R.S. takes the advice of people like us (which it probably doesn’t) … then you maybe argue that the I.R.S. has been taking our advice. For what it’s worth, here’s what we had to say on the subject. Also FWIW, . . .
For readers of this blog, there were at least three articles of interest in this Sunday’s N.Y. Times: 1. A piece by Susan Saulny about the new cradle of American winemaking: Iowa. Not kidding. Saulny writes that farmers across the midwest are eschewing corn and soybeans for grapes. It’s an interesting piece, although it just scrapes the surface as far . . .
The other night, we took our kids to dinner at their favorite restaurant: the Benihana in midtown Manhattan. The food isn’t very good but it’s great spectacle: the chef cooks at your table, the Shirley Temples come with lots of cherries and paper umbrellas, and since the tables are communal, you’re always seated next to some strangers. The people at . . .
Readers of this blog may be aware of the creative research of Emily Oster. She is a young empirical economist at the Becker Center for Chicago Price Theory, which is also Levitt’s primary research home. A good while back, we wrote about Oster’s investigation of the 100 million “missing women” of Asia, in which she argued that Hepatitis B is . . .
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 . . .
How about … publishing the names and addresses of people who don’t vote? Nothing like a little shaming offensive to boost voter turnout, right? Well, in this case it’s complicated by the fact that it was a black newspaper, the Tennessee Tribune, that did the outing, and most of the non-voters they outed were black. You can imagine the uproar . . .
This guy is a fee-only insurance consultant. I love how he explains himself and his business; I so deeply wish that more people, and especially companies, could achieve this level of transparency and information. Check out his Q&A, toward the bottom of the page, for a sample of what I’m talking about. Here is my favorite item: How do I . . .
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 . . .
Barely a week ago, I wrote about a company in Brooklyn that fixes Chinese manufacturing mistakes, and asked for similar examples. Some of you posted your stories (I loved the one about the white polymer resin that got contaminated by small black cylinders that looked like “rat turds”). The Wall Street Journal was good enough to chip in as well. . . .
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 . . .
Here’s a very accessible and nicely written article by Simon Baron-Cohen, the eminent autism researcher at Cambridge University, explaining his “assortive mating” theory of the condition. It doesn’t go deep into the work for which Baron-Cohen is so well regarded, but it’s a good primer. Here, from Wired, is Baron-Cohen’s Autism-Spectrum Quotient test, a 50-question self-administered “AQ” test that is . . .
According to research conducted at Sheffield Hallam University, men flash their cell phones in order to: attract women, look important, and show off to male peers. They needed research to prove this? I have always thought that looking important and/or popular was the single biggest driver of cell phone use. It’s amazing to me how often someone will use a . . .
That was the headline of a sports briefing in my copy of yesterday’s N.Y. Times. The article was about how Tiger Woods finally lost a match. It further stated that Woods’s veal chop was slightly bruised, but his chicken piccata emerged unscathed. There’s only so much that spell-check can do.
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.
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