Perfect Pitch
I recently attended my third Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, where among the normal cornucopia of ideas and fellowship, Sam Horn was incredibly generous in helping me sharpen my elevator pitch for a new project.
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.
I recently attended my third Renaissance Weekend in Charleston, where among the normal cornucopia of ideas and fellowship, Sam Horn was incredibly generous in helping me sharpen my elevator pitch for a new project.
According to sociologist Pepper Schwartz they are — as car passengers. Schwartz reports that even in households that consider themselves feminist, men are far more likely to take the keys when the couple rides together. Does the evidence back her up?
I’ve been working with the American Time Use Survey, a great data set collected by the Department of Labor. The ATUS is chock-full of fun facts; for example, American adults report spending more than two- and-one-third times more time at gambling establishments than at museums.
Unredacted, the National Security Archive’s blog, has posted Lee Harvey Oswald’s request to the Soviet Union for citizenship. “I want citizenship,” Oswald wrote, “because I am a communist and a worker; I have lived in a decadent capitalist society where the workers are slaves.”
Whenever you write a book, it’s interesting to see which parts of it people respond to en masse. With SuperFreakonomics, the global-warming chapter has certainly gotten its fair share of attention, and Levitt noted a lot of feedback about the perils of drunk walking.
Teach for American (TFA) is known for putting recent college graduates in low-income public schools for two-year teaching stints, a mission that has produced a lot of passionate debate. The organization’s founders hope that these young teachers will eventually become education leaders and advocates – and many of them have.
It is no secret that weather affects mood, and even behavior. The Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics, who ran an honor-system business, received lower payments during foul weather. Now along come Donald Redelmeier and Simon D. Baxter from the University of Toronto with an interesting question: do applicants to medical school suffer if they happen to be interviewed on a rainy day?
As the Associated Press reports, the Chinese city of Guangzhou has introduced a strong incentive to discourage spitting in public: residents lose their homes if they get caught spitting seven times within a two-year period.
O.K., this is a pretty crude analysis. But still, this year’s conference suggests to me that the economics profession is healing itself.
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round.
John List had better be careful. His research is very valuable to the philanthropic community; but if this latest paper engenders a public outcry for a “do-not-knock” registry, he might quickly become a pariah.
My siblings, cousins, and I were talking about our paternal grandfather recently. He was very bright, but uneducated (immigrated to the U.S. at age 10). He worked in the garment industry, his best job being as a cutter — figuring out how to waste the least amount of cloth in creating a garment.
Al Jazeera reports on one of the projects driving China’s magical 8 percent GDP growth. Ordos is a modern, luxurious “city of the future” in Inner Mongolia, built entirely over the last five years with government funds. It’s also a ghost town with almost no residents or businesses.
In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, how does China’s dirtiest city stack up against America’s cleanest?
LED traffic lights may be the wave of the future. But do they have some unintended negative consequences?
Charlie Rose interviews Paul Volcker, longtime former chairman of the Federal Reserve and currently the chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Volcker talks bluntly about fixing the broken financial system, compensation on Wall Street, the future of the American economy, and the Obama administration’s performance so far. Volcker is particularly pessimistic about getting things done in Washington: “The American political process is about as broken as the financial system.” [%comments]
It is commonly thought that the nearly-40-year “war on cancer” has largely been a failure, since the age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over that time. But that’s a deceptive metric. Consider this…
A study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog reveals that engineers are “three times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine, or the sciences,” as reported in Slate. So why the career change?
Here is a multiple choice question for you.
Read the following passage, taken from SuperFreakonomics:
If you know someone in southeastern Uganda who is having a baby next year, you should hope with all your heart that the baby isn’t born in May. If so, it will be roughly 20 percent more likely to have visual, hearing, or learning disabilities as an adult.
The front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal tells us that “Economists are cheapskates.” The article by Justin Lahart is hilarious, recounting the foibles of those of us who sometimes take our classroom lessons about economizing a step too far – particularly when it comes to economizing on time.
We recently solicited your questions for Ralph Keeney, a decision analyst at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
In his answers, you’ll find that Keeney discusses how to avoid making the wrong decisions, how to figure out what you really want, and why neither psychologists nor economists have definitively figured out how to make good decisions.
Two articles in Harvard magazine remind me why I am so optimistic about scientific breakthroughs making the world a better place.
On the eve of the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Justin Lahart writes in the Wall Street Journal about how economists are cheapskates.
My recent Marketplace commentary focused on the recent Sarkozy Commission report, which re-examined the usefulness of the usual economic indicators, like Gross Domestic Product (or GDP).
The report raises many of the usual shortcomings of GDP. And I agree with each of their criticisms. Much of this was summarized 40 years ago, in a famous Bobby Kennedy speech:
If there is one topic that I have no natural affinity for, it is checklists. I don’t use checklists. I’m not interested in checklists.
Yet, against all odds, I read Atul Gawande’s new book about checklists, The Checklist Manifesto in one sitting yesterday, which is an amazing tribute to the book that Gawande has crafted. Not only is the book loaded with fascinated stories, but it honestly changed the way I think about the world. It is the best book I’ve read in ages.
There’s really no need to panic over the prospect of EPA dominance. Instead, industry should take the hint that’s it high time to push hard for climate-change legislation. Sure, the move by the EPA to exercise regulatory authority over carbon — a power granted to it by a 2007 Supreme Court ruling — was designed to give President Obama moral leverage in Denmark. But it also serves as a presidential prod to Congress to pass a climate-change law. No matter how you feel about global warming, greenhouse-gas emissions are not going to go unregulated. I suspect Obama ultimately nudged the EPA because he wants the U.S. Congress to do the regulating. Industry should support him on this.
Karen Donovan‘s book V. Goliath: The Trials of David Boies discusses an interesting set of incentives that Boies insisted upon as lead counsel for a class of plaintiffs who were suing manufacturers of vitamins for overcharging.
I’ve been waiting for a news story to come along to give me the excuse to post my favorite economics photo of the year. Now that the year is over, I figure I’ll just post it.
This photo illustrates the two most important forces in my life.
Yes, today is December 31. So get off this site and go find someplace to exercise your altruism, as impure as it may be.
Before you commit to those New Year’s resolutions, you might want to read Jonah Lehrer’s recent article on the limitations of willpower.
A movie theater in Santa Monica, California, advertises that it will give you a free box of popcorn if you donate $2 to charity.
The usual gimmick at movies is that the profits from sale of popcorn and other refreshments go to some charity.
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