Phones But No Food
We’ve blogged before about the growing role of mobile phones in economic development; now the phones will be used to deliver food aid as well.
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.
We’ve blogged before about the growing role of mobile phones in economic development; now the phones will be used to deliver food aid as well.
How is a car like the Internet?
A reader named William Mack writes in with an interesting observation and question. It echoes a conversation I recently had with a friend who had been on the receiving end of some road rage — in a New York City parking garage, of all places. The driver behind her simply couldn’t wait for her to pull in, so he rammed her.
Among these monkeys, grooming is a hot commodity and is viewed by scientists as a form of “payment” for services.
There were many good guesses (Ashcroft, Bork, Corzine, etc.). There were also some really awful guesses, like my colleagues Robert Lucas and Gary Becker, who fit many of the criteria, but obviously I was not meeting for the first time last week.
I watched the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night. It got me wondering what would happen to various economic outcomes if, like Brad Pitt‘s character, henceforth half of all men, but no women, were born and lived their lives backward from old age to infancy.
Welcome to the first installment of the SuperFreakonomics Book Club. We know you’re all busy, and scattered around the globe too. So it wouldn’t be convenient for all of us to regularly gather in someone’s living room and talk about the book while sharing bean dip. So let’s harness this Internet thingy and try something different.
The idea is simple. We’ll start at the beginning of the book and work our way to the end, each week giving you a chance to ask questions or leave comments for some of the researchers and other people we write about in SuperFreakonomics.
Edmunds.com reports that its statistical analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program finds that the program generated only 125,000 extra new vehicle sales, meaning that the cost to the U.S. government was $24,000 for each of those new cars.
The random coin toss must be one of society’s most frequently used decision-making mechanisms. We use the coin toss to choose which movie to see, to determine team positions in major sporting events, to divvy up household chores.
Paul Saffo, an American futurologist, recently told the Telegraph that the ultra-rich may slowly evolve into a separate species thanks to medical advances. Saffo imagines a world of replacement organs, sophisticated robots, self-driving cars, and artificial limbs that are superior to the real thing — all available to only the very wealthy.
We’ve been doing a lot of media interviews for SuperFreakonomics, and once in a while you get asked a really interesting question.
But I don’t think this one will ever be topped. It comes from a journalist in India.
Just about every university has an alumni magazine, and they all follow the same tried-and-true recipe: highly partisan stories touting the wonderful accomplishments of the faculty, students, athletics, and alumni.
I had always thought of my university’s alumni magazine as being cut from the same cloth.
Until I read the most recent issue, that is.
Every newly purchased mobile phone comes with a new charger. Even if you’ve already got a working charger from your last phone, chances are it won’t work with the new one. It’s redundant.
Here’s an e-mail from a reader named Nadaav Zohar of Akron, Ohio. I like the way he thinks.
Every election season, I can usually count on a Freakonomics blog entry or three about voting and why it is pointless. I very much agree with your analysis, and I don’t vote.
The Freakonomics book website has been redesigned and updated to include SuperFreakonomics. We love the new look. (Thanks, Being Wicked, and you too, Sean!) It’s the best place to stay up-to-date on appearances, reviews, and so on. It’s also a great place to sign up for the Freakonomics email list or request an autographed bookplate.
Hopefully, my last post was sadly misinformed. Was it? Allen J. Fromberg, Deputy Commissioner of Public Affairs for the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, was kind enough to respond to some arguments I presented about the difficult circumstances facing New York cab drivers. According to Mr. Fromberg, working conditions have improved greatly since the studies I was using were published:
Most readers of this blog are probably aware of the tit-for-tat between us and some critics of our global-warming chapter in SuperFreakonomics. In the larger scheme of things the dispute is practically meaningless, at best a very distant second to the actual climate issues on the table.
To that end, the best news I’ve heard recently is that Congress will next week hold its first-ever hearing on geoengineering solutions to global warming. I’m grateful to Ken Caldeira for alerting us to this hearing; he will be among the climate scientists to testify.
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Marc Lange asked:
I have seen something like this quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes: “In English law, everything is permissible that is not expressly forbidden. In Prussian law, everything is forbidden that is not expressly permitted.”
He wondered if he was in for a Jim Cramer-type beatdown. But it turns out that Jon Stewart doesn’t appreciate the global-warming fanatics either, and gave SuperFreakonomics a thumping endorsement.
GOOD produced this sharp info-graphic on murder rates worldwide. One interesting trend it doesn’t show: countries with lower murder rates tend to have higher rates of suicide. Take Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates in the world — just 0.5 per 100,000 people. It also has a very high rate of suicide, 23.7 per 100,000. Jamaica, on the other hand, has an unusually high murder rate — 49 per 100,000 — and the unusually low suicide rate of 0.35 per 100,000.
I gave a talk not too long ago on a college campus. The event was sold out, so the administration started a waiting list for seats. The daughter of a good friend found herself on the waiting list. When I heard she still hadn’t gotten a ticket the day before the event, with just a touch of guilt for trying to bend the rules, I emailed a Dean at the college whom I know:
Here’s a behavioral puzzler: Why might it be more efficient for Connecticut to change its sales tax rate from 6 percent to e^2 percent ?
Or more generally, why might using irrational numbers as tax rates be less distortionary than rational tax rates?
A hint comes from a great article of Amy Finkelstein, “E-ZTax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates.” Her simple and powerful idea is that as the salience of tax rates declines, taxes will produce fewer distortions because taxpayers will not pay as much attention to the taxes.
Roughly 15 years ago, before there was such a thing as Baby Einstein, I had a business idea that emerged from a dinner conversation with a linguist. We got to talking about how hard it was for adults learning foreign languages to ever sound like native speakers.
One reason for this is, apparently, is that there are sounds that occur in some languages and not others. If you are raised hearing only English in your first year or two of life, your brain loses some of its ability to discern the sounds that don’t arise in spoken English.
Gizmodo lists eight “Regrettable Tech Inventions” and their inventors’ apologies for them, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s apology for the double-slash in web addresses — “Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //”
The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason to give the publisher as to why I couldn’t do it. I had no choice.
On his blog, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood dismisses my research (see here and here) on car seats.
My favorite quote from the secretary:
“Now, if you want to slice up the data to be provocative, have at it. As a grandfather and as secretary of an agency whose number one mission is safety, I don’t have that luxury.”
Reading the Secretary’s blog post, it strikes me just how differently he is reacting to a challenge than Arne Duncan (now the Secretary of Education) did when I first told him about my work on teacher cheating when Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools.
Here’s a sampling of the latest coverage:
Reviews
* Wall Street Journal: “Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down.”
I ran into someone the other day whom I had never met and who fit the following five criteria:
1. He/she attended the University of Chicago.
2. He/she is still alive.
3. He/she is a whole lot smarter than I am.
4. He/she is a whole lot more famous than I am.
5. He/she is even more controversial/notorious than I am.
Organ donation is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. And yet, Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics spells out, relying on altruism for organ donations has proved to be largely unsuccessful. There are a lot of reasons people give for not signing up as organ donors.
Students apparently consume mass quantities of the performance-enhancing drug Adderall during exam time. Normally the price is $3 for 10 mg., but it rises during exam week to at least $5. One student reports that in his suburban Dallas hometown drug dealers, realizing this price variation, speculated by buying up large supplies of the drug at $3 and dumping them on the market during exam time, hoping to sell at $5.
In the wake of the national publicity that accompanied the beating death of Chicago Public Schools student Derrion Albert, the issue of teen violence has come to the fore.
Violence toward students in the Chicago Public Schools is, however, neither new nor rare.
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