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.
That is the argument of Sebastien Roche, a French political scientist. In writing about the French riots last year, Roche has challenged the conventional wisdom that sports provide a good outlet for young men and perhaps keeps them out of trouble. To the contrary, Roche contends, “the practice of sport never reduces the number of crimes” and, furthermore, sports can . . .
At least in Canada, that is. According to this CBC News report, clerks who sell lottery tickets are either really, really, really lucky or they steal winning tickets from their elderly customers. Who had the very clever thought of measuring the winning rate of lottery clerks? That would be Jeffrey Rosenthal, a statistician at the University of Toronto. I’ve read . . .
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 . . .
There is no Nobel Prize in criminology, so two years ago criminologists decided to do the next best thing — create a Stockholm Prize in Criminology. I was delighted to see that two friends have won this year’s award: Alfred Blumstein and Terrie Moffitt. Al Blumstein has done pathbreaking work for decades, including a lot of work on the link . . .
I love a good quotation as much if not more than the next guy. But whenever I dig deeply into who really said what, a lot of the quotations are either made up entirely or misattributed. (Was it really Stella Adler, for instance, who upon entering a theater had a younger, prettier woman open the door for her and say . . .
Jane Pauley was interviewed by a person who, according to this lawsuit, claimed to be a N.Y. Times reporter. The interview concerned Pauley’s history with mental illness, and as she understood it, was meant for an article that would appear in the N.Y. Times Magazine. But in fact the article appeared in an advertising supplement of the Times Magazine. To . . .
Who doesn’t love a good prediction market? The Economist does and so does Wired — and we certainly do too, as evidenced here and here. Here is a new blog about prediction markets and here is the famous Iowa Electronic Market, which will be a very busy place as the upcoming elections unfold. And who doesn’t love a good poker . . .
I’ve always wished that the show would use a comma, as I did above, but I guess commas don’t play on TV. Anyway … I am scheduled to go on GMA tomorrow (Thursday) to talk about a couple of Freakonomics matters. I must say, I really enjoy doing these GMA segments, mostly because it means sitting down for a few . . .
The William Wrigley Jr. Co., which sells mostly chewing gum, named a new CEO yesterday, and in at least one significant way he is different from every CEO that Wrigley has ever had: he is not a Wrigley. The new CEO is William D. Perez, who has also run S.C. Johnson & Co. (another family company) and, for a short . . .
A few months back, I wrote a blog post called Is America Ready for an Organ Donor Market?, and my answer was “probably not.” (The post was inspired by a pair of OpEds, one by Sally Satel in the N.Y. Times and one by Richard Epstein in the Wall Street Journal.) We subsequently wrote a N.Y. Times column of our . . .
The Rockford Registar Star has a “Big Fish” feature: The Rockford Register Star launched the Big Fish list in 1982. Any person who catches a fish in freshwater on a hook and line – no nets – in the Register Star’s readership area can report the fish to the Register Star and receive a Big Fish button. Local residents who . . .
My mother has a weekly ritual that involves getting the Sunday New York Times and seeing where our book is in the rankings. She will be disappointed this week. No Freakonomics on the list for the first time since the book came out.
I once bought a house from a man named Michael Levine, a musician who scores movies, TV shows, etc. Afterward, we became e-mail pals. Last year, when Freakonomics was first published, he wrote to say that Levitt’s research reminded him a good bit of his father’s research. His father, Solomon B. Levine, was also an economist: My dad (now 84) . . .
Freakonomics was originally published in April, 2005, with high hopes but low expectations. Now, roughly 2 million U.S. copies and many foreign editions later, we have just published a Revised and Expanded version (here it is on Amazon). I blogged earlier about the differences between the original version and the new one, which includes about 90 pages of new material, . . .
An article in Slate yesterday argued that TV watching causes autism. The Slate article is based on research done by Cornell economists Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov. You can download the academic working paper here. The paper gives some theories why TV and autism might be linked, but the more interesting part of the paper is the data . . .
When my sister Linda came up with the idea to make Freakonomics t-shirts, the idea was to get Lindsay Lohan and Pam Anderson to wear them. So far this is the closest a Freakonomics t-shirt has gotten to a celebrity.
A few weeks back I blogged about possible convergence in the viewing habits of blacks and whites. Blog reader Devin Reams has done some further research. Devin writes: I saw the entry on Nielsen’s black and white households and viewers habits. I decided to do some “research” of my own. And by research I mean jumped on Facebook. If you . . .
At least not on airplanes. That’s what Boeing has decided. As someone who has bought wireless internet aboard a Boeing flight (I believe it was on Lufthansa, going to Germany), I recently received this e-mail: Dear Customer, On August 17, 2006, the Boeing Company announced that after a detailed analysis of the Connexion by Boeing business, the company has decided . . .
There have been many discussions on this blog, probably too many, about Realtors. (Click here or here or here, or, if you’re really twisted, just type “Realtor” in this page’s search box.) The gist? The National Association of Realtors has done a great job protecting its members but at the expense of allowing homesellers and buyers to enjoy a truly . . .
A 62-year-old man in Columbus, Ohio, robs a bank and promptly turns in the cash — and himself. Why? According to this CNN article, because he’s jobless and broke, and wants to get sent to jail to get his three square meals. The judge obliged, giving him a three-year sentence. It’s too bad this news didn’t break until he’d already . . .
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the Internet was created for: Floyd Landis, the tainted Tour de France winner, has used his website to post a voluminous defense against doping charges. The material includes: + his attorney’s motion for dismissal + a “complete World Anti-Doping Agency document package, inclusive of the testing information from Landis’s ‘A’and ‘B’ samples” + a . . .
… in the book of Genesis, when the world is created. Can you imagine the loot He could have landed for the naming rights of every animal, mineral, and vegetable? If God was unlucky to toil in the days before corporate sponsorship, at least the Chicago White Sox, thank God, are not so unlucky. They have just announced that for . . .
There’s a really interesting profile of Tavis Smiley in today’s N.Y. Times. (FWIW, Levitt and I were on his talk show back in July.) Smiley is perhaps best known these days for putting together The Covenant With Black America, a collection of essays about education, health care, crime, finance, and so on. The implicit point is that black America still . . .
Netflix is offering a $1 million prize. This sounds like something that a Freakonomics blog reader should try to win: Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: CinematchSM. Its job is to predict whether someone will enjoy a movie based on how much . . .
… you read this headline on the front page of Yahoo! News: “World’s 15th-Largest Rough Diamond Sold.” I guess the owners of the fourteen larger rough diamonds are too busy celebrating Columbus Day to make a deal.
I am one of those people who grew up living, breathing, and playing baseball but who has since become a casual observer at best. That said, since I live in New York it’s hard to not get caught up in the apocalyptic reaction to the Yankees’ elimination (and, though it has far less Shakespearian gravitas, the Mets’ currently lovely position). . . .
I’m often asked who thought up the name “Freakonomics.” The answer is my sister Linda. As soon as we set out to write a book, I knew she would be the one to name it. She is the most creative person I’ve ever met. When she isn’t thinking up book titles, her day job is running www.yarnzilla.com, an online and . . .
This is old news in the poker world (see here and here), but so curious that it seems worthy of mention. At this year’s main event of the World Series of Poker, there were 2 million dollars more in chips at the end of the tournament than there were at the start of the tournament. Where they came from is . . .
I have long heard the argument that one reason for the decline in teacher quality in U.S. schools (if in fact there has been such a decline) was the feminist movement. The argument goes like this: until the mid-1960’s or so, teaching was one of the few career paths wide open to women; as feminism opened up opportunities for women . . .
In the interest of not piling on, I was initially reluctant to mention this working paper, posted on the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies website, about the flaws in the commission structure used by Realtors. Especially since its author, an attorney for the federal government named Mark S. Nadel, cites our book as well as a more recent article . . .
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