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.
While 2005 is an off year for Presidential and Congressional elections, Tuesday is still Election Day, and in its honor, we got to wondering: why the heck do people bother to vote? That is the subject of our latest Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine. As always, we’ve posted a page elsewhere on this website with ancillary information. . . .
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 . . .
I have no idea what this means, but now a bunch of kind readers have sent me a link to the following website which purports to tell you what your blog is worth. The answer for the Freakonomics Blog, at least when I looked, was $996,413.10. Hmmm. That seems just a bit high. I talked to Dubner and we agreed . . .
A few days ago, we blogged about a college kid who got kicked out of class for citing Freakonomics. Now comes even worse news — from a reader who claims that he was asked to leave the premises of a job for simply owning the book. I’m somewhat skeptical of the verity of this story; judge for yourselves: Mr. Levitt . . .
I guess there won’t be a sequel to Moneyball written about Paul DePodesta and the Los Angeles Dodgers. After a 71-91 season, DePodesta was abruptly fired this week. Diehard readers of this blog know that I have been a longtime skeptic of the stories in Moneyball (see, for example, here, here, and here). There is, however, a new academic paper . . .
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 . . .
J. Eric Oliver has a new book called Fat Politics. I had lunch with the author (he is a professor in the Political Science department at the University of Chicago) about six months ago and was thoroughly entertained by the stories he told from this book. He let me read an early draft of the book, and I really liked . . .
In the chapter of Freakonomics called “What Makes a Perfect Parent?”, we analyze the data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and argue that many things that modern parents do to make their kids “smarter” (i.e. culture cramming), doesn’t have any effect on early childhood test scores. Apparently we’re not the only ones who think this . . .
Three of the current top non-fiction books in the U.S. are written by men who were born and/or raised in the Twin Cities: Tom Friedman, Al Franken, and our own Steve Levitt. My guess is that these were the only three guys who didn’t spend their entire childhoods playing hockey. The area’s most famous author is probably F. Scott Fitzgerald . . .
Someone asked to see the rest of the Levitt clan. (Click the photo for a larger version.) From left to right: Sophie (1), Nicholas (2), Olivia (5), and Amanda (5). Sophie’s name, for the record, was taken from the list of Freakonomics-approved names in Chapter 6 of the book.
This week, Paul Greenberg wrote in the New York Times Magazine about how worldwide demand for Chilean sea bass (the fish formerly known as the Patagonian toothfish) has created huge supply pressures. If you care about such things, you might want to take a look at this brief BBC article about a study that uses historical menu pricing data to . . .
A few days ago, we asked whether blogging is perhaps dangerous to professors seeking tenure. Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full — minus the young man’s name and college, for obvious reasons. Dr. Levitt: I was . . .
Hello Freakonomics freaks! Allow me to formally introduce myself. I am “the mysterious Rachel,” the Rachel formerly known as “the excellent Rachel,” and the Freakonomics assistant currently fielding your bookplate requests. I’m just writing to let you know that they are a-comin’. You responded to the Steph/vens offer with a fervor we never could have imagined, and I’ve now amassed . . .
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 . . .
The playwright August Wilson died a few weeks ago. He was a powerful and unique writer, and a powerfully unique man. Five years ago, I had the chance to interview him for a book I was writing, Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper. I was interested in Wilson because Confessions was about my childhood infatuation with Franco Harris, a football player with . . .
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in the first Quill Book Awards. As promised, the oh-so-glamorous Oscars of the book world will be broadcast on select NBC stations on Saturday, October 22nd. The show is on at 7pm in all locations, and is only an hour, so it’s hard to know if the awarding of Best Business . . .
A recent story on the AP wire: OKLAHOMA CITY — A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to because of Larry Bird. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooting with an intent to kill and robbery. But Eric James Torpy wanted his prison . . .
We have changed platforms for our blog, so if you have this page bookmarked — and have been wondering where the heck we’ve been — you should change your bookmark to this page. We haven’t been writing much there, either; but we’re getting caught up, and eventually we’ll move the archives there as well. One difference: you need to register . . .
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 . . .
Thomas Sowell wrote this about us recently: “Economist Steven Levitt’s best-selling book “Freakonomics” is not really about economics. It is about applying systematic reasoning to all sorts of social problems. Systematic reasoning is needed even more than economics.” I think it is supposed to be a compliment, but I’m not sure.
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 . . .
Maybe, maybe not. But here’s the story of how Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor in political science at the University of Chicago (and an active blogger) was just denied tenure.
In recent weeks, we asked you to consider voting for Freakonomics as Best Business Book in the inaugural Quill Awards. (We know, we know: it’s not a business book, but it apparently didn’t fit any other category.) Well, the event was held a couple of nights ago and … we won. So to all of you who voted, or who . . .
Between the switch in blogging software, teaching, traveling, attending awards ceremonies, and so on, we have found ourselves incredibly busy over the last week. An avalanche of blogging activity is on the horizon. We promise.
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 . . .
Welcome to the new Freakonomics blog. We have changed content management systems. The old blog can still be found at www.freakonomics.com/blog.php. If you have subscribed using FeedBurner, then your feeds should stay the same. http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlog Also, you now have the option of subscribing to the comments at http://feeds.feedburner.com/FreakonomicsBlogComments
Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem . . .
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 . . .
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