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.
Levitt and Dubner are scheduled to appear on the Charlie Rose show tonight, talking about the importance of applying economics to “trivial” subjects; how Levitt learned to stop fearing death; and about SuperFreakonomics in general. The show airs on PBS at 11 p.m. in most cities, but check your local listings.
One of the heroes of SuperFreakonomics is Ignatz Semmelweis — who crunched numbers in the 1840’s to champion the benefits of doctors washing their hands.
There’s at least one unexpected benefit of rising unemployment. More people are staying home during working hours, and going out less often at night. That means there’s less chance they’ll be burglarized.
When does transit fare policy treat people unequally? When it treats them exactly the same.
Why?
At the risk of overgeneralization, there are two major constituencies for mass transit. First are wealthier workers who commute to jobs in city centers where parking is expensive. The other group consists of the very poor. Unlike the “choice riders,” who could drive if necessary, low-income “captive” riders often have no other option.
We’ve blogged several times about Roland Fryer’s research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem Children’s Zone (which was chronicled in Paul Tough’s excellent book Whatever It Takes), with hopeful results.
Because we are so short of faculty, I have a section of 30 honors students in my lecture class along with the 500 regular students. Although the 30 also have a recitation with some additional assignments, five-sixths of their grade is based on the same tests, quizzes, and short essay as the other students.
Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in and photographing the slums of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Bendiksen’s photos of family homes portray a reality that clashes with popular perception.
In Seattle recently, I met a pulmonologist who said that the H1N1 virus has him busier than he’s ever been, his hospital beds full of flu patients. The uptick hit particularly hard about 10 days ago, he said.
How has the flu been playing out across the country?
A while back, we blogged about a site called Strange Maps, which features all sorts of strange, fascinating, and even influential maps. (Maps in general have since come up on this blog quite a few times.)
Frank Jacobs, the London-based journalist and creator of Strange Maps, has now published a book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities.
He has agreed to answer a few of our questions about maps and why he finds them so compelling.
I’m currently back home in Australia for a couple of weeks, and just want to give a heads-up to the locals that I’ll be giving a talk at ANU this Wednesday.
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to motorists.
In SuperFreakonomics, we tell the story of how Robert Strange McNamara, an outsider at the Ford Motor Co., led the charge the put seat belts in automobiles at Ford. It was not a popular decision within the company nor with the public; pushing for a safety device in a car did a bit too good of a job of reminding people that cars could be quite unsafe. But McNamara got his way. Over time (a long time, it turned out), the seat belt won widespread adoption, saving roughly 250,000 lives in the U.S. alone since 1975.
People worry that disasters have become more frequent and more damaging since the close of the 20th century. But the 19th century’s natural disasters were plenty devastating; but there weren’t nearly as many of us around to suffer the consequences (nor as much media to record it).
Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred solicits your nominations for most notable quote of 2009.
Who gets bumped to the front of UCLA medical center’s liver-transplant line? The godfather of the Japanese mafia, according to this 60 Minutes video…
Each year I receive about 10 introductory economics textbooks from publishers. The purpose is to induce me to adopt the book in my 500-student principles class…
Making fun of earmarked Congressional spending is easy, feel-good entertainment. But is it a distraction from the bigger problem?
Our first guest was University of Chicago economist Emily Oster, whose research, co-authored with Robert Jensen, formed the basis of the section where we discuss how the introduction of television turned out to be an unlikely boon for rural Indian women. (I should have also mentioned that we cite Emily’s fascinating research on how women were regularly put to death for centuries on charges of witchcraft.)
Just announced: Levitt and Dubner’s sold-out lecture at London’s Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) will be webcast live on Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at 13:00 GMT (that’s 8 a.m. Eastern — or use this handy calculator to find the time where you live). One day earlier, they are also speaking at the London School of Economics; negotiations are still underway to temporarily rename it LSF.
A while back, I wondered why flight attendants don’t get tipped. Here’s a nice response from a reader named Barb, who retired after 36 years as a flight attendant with US Airways. Her suggestion sounds pretty perfect to me. I particularly liked her “schmuck” observation:
Lately, the lot of the New York cabbie has improved a bit. But there are still some major systemic obstacles that keep drivers and their passengers from getting the conditions and service they deserve. One crucial issue is that the system for licensing cabs seems less a product of American capitalism and more like something straight out of a Soviet Five Year Plan.
What can polygamy on the outskirts of Russia tell us about the effects of the financial crisis in less remote locales?
We’ve blogged about proposals to save ailing print newspapers. Despite shrinking circulation and falling ad revenue, Daniel Gross doesn’t think print news is doing so badly.
There’s been a brouhaha over whether we “misrepresented” the research and views of the climate scientist Ken Caldeira, whom we write about in the global-warming chapter of SuperFreakonomics. We’ve been in constant touch with him over the past few weeks, since we wanted to amend future printings of our book if indeed there were misrepresentations. If you want to know the end of this story, just skip ahead to the bottom of this post. Otherwise, here’s the background:
The closest guess to be submitted before the deadline was from Dave Benner, commenter No. 93, who guessed 666,666. Apparently the devil really is in the details. Congratulations to Dave; he’s got some schwag coming his way.
If nothing else, getting an economics Ph.D. should teach someone how to complicate and obfuscate the issue so that it isn’t so obvious to outsiders that the argument makes no sense.
We know polling results are sensitive to the wording of questions. The delivery of those questions could be a factor, too. We’ll know for sure when we see the first health care push-poll featuring sniffling, sneezing pollsters.
As noted earlier, Congress today is holding its first-ever hearings on geoengineering as a potential means to fight global warming.
I’ve written a fair amount about organ transplantation in the past (for example, here and here). But it was only in reading SuperFreakonomics that I learned that “the Iranian government [pays] people to give up a kidney, roughly $1,200, with an additional sum paid by the kidney recipient.” The book also tells the story of our own country’s brief flirtation with donor compensation:
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
