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.
Scientists have long been aware of the “uncanny valley” phenomenon, which describes “that disquieting feeling that occurs when viewers look at representations designed to be as human-like as possible — whether computer animations or androids — but somehow fall short.” This might explain why people loved The Incredibles but were disturbed by the too-real characters in the film version of The Polar Express.
Yesterday, HuffingtonPost ran this cast of characters you can expect to hear about in SuperFreakonomics. It was accompanied by a video preview in which Dubner’s juggling practice pays off and Levitt wonders why college students, if they’re so altruistic in the lab, never give him money in the subway:
Fascinating article in today’s Washington Post by Emily Wax about how Indian brides-to-be are holding out for one particular convenience before committing to marriage: an indoor toilet.
But wait, you may say: women in India don’t have the leverage to make such demands, do they?
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.
One morning in 1992, a Chicago radio reporter looked into the river and, stunned, told listeners he saw “swirling water that looks like a giant drain … I think someone should wake up the mayor!”
We have a chapter in SuperFreakonomics about global warming and it too will likely produce a lot of shouting, name-calling, and accusations ranging from idiocy to venality. It is curious that the global-warming arena is so rife with shrillness and ridicule. Where does this shrillness come from? Some say that left-leaning activists have merely borrowed their right-leaning competitors from years past. A reasonable conjecture?
Sustainably produced local food is not accessible by all. In general, only the elite few with the time and material resources to capitalize on such environmental munificence have the time and money to benefit from transparently sustainable farms. As a result, the preconditions are inadvertently established for something that generally tends not to bind diverse communities into a cozy whole, but to fragment them: exclusivity.
One of the things I’ve learned from Levitt is that you need a thick skin if you are going to write about controversial topics. And since Betsey Stevenson and I wrote about “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” we’ve been called everything from left-wing fools to right-wing tools. But it can be a real kick in the guts when you learn that someone you thought you admired turns out to be simply dishonest. And that’s how I felt when I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “takedown” of our research in today’s LA Times.
The announcement that Barack Obama will receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize only 10 months into his presidency surprised many, including us. Even more surprising, Obama was nominated for the award only 12 days after he took office. Now F.P. Passport has taken a look at what Obama did in those 12 days to attract the attention of the Committee.
This season the University of Texas at Austin’s football team is scheduled or has already played against such athletic powerhouses as the University of Louisiana-Monroe (59-20), the University of Texas-El Paso (64-7), and the University of Central Florida (on November 7). Most other top-flight teams are also scheduled against Division I schools that they are likely to wallop. Why? Very simple–a team must win 6 games to qualify for a post-season game; and scheduling a few teams that are nearly certain to be beaten makes the post-season minimum requirement easily attainable.
In both sports, it’s expected that someone or something “almost always get[s] hurt,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in this New Yorker article, where he goes over the sports’ similarities — including the reason why, despite their brutality, both will likely stick around for a long time.
In Stockholm’s Odenplan subway station, the staircase has been retrofitted to resemble giant piano keys, which produce real sound, to encourage commuters to climb the stairs rather than ride the escalator. According to this video — which seems to be part of a Volkswagen marketing initiative, though it’s unclear — it’s been a raging success.
Envy the lucky travelers of London. As you may know, in 2003 the city imposed a congestion toll of £5 (later raised to £8) on all vehicles entering the central district. In 2007, Transport for London, a government agency, did a cost-benefit analysis of the impacts (find the full report here).
It found the following about costs per year to travelers in the central district:
* Individuals and business travelers pay about £236 million in tolls.
* Some trips to the area are canceled, costing would-have-been drivers the equivalent of about £31 million.
* It costs motorists and firms £19 million to comply with the system.
* Total burden on travelers: £286 million.
What’s more dangerous: a playground jungle gym or your office chair? As it happens, one in every 3,759 fatal accidental falls starts from a piece of playground equipment. You’re 85 times more likely, meanwhile, to fall to your death from a chair. That’s one of the many odd pairings waiting to be discovered in The Book of Odds, an online statistical encyclopedia launching tomorrow.
Some other probabilistic tidbits I found digging through the site:
Implicitly, Alex was arguing, “If you are an independent, then you have a mind of your own.”
From which she concludes, “Conversely, if you are not an independent,” then you do not have a mind of your own.
Alex, I think, is making both a mistake in English usage and a mistake in logic.
Her mistake in usage is that she should have said “inversely” instead of “conversely.” The converse of “If p, then q” is “If q, then p.” But the last frame concerns an inverse: “If not p, then not q.” An interesting empirical study would look to see how often newspapers or academics misuse these adverbs (I’m sure I have).
For a few years now, this blog has included a link whereby readers could sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Many of you did so but for whatever reason we never actually sent out anything. If we had something to say, we’d just say it here on the blog. But now with a new book finally about to be published here and in the U.K. (and other English-speaking nations), we have fired up the e-mail list. The first missive went out last week. If you wanted it and got it, do nothing. If you got it and didn’t want it, you may unsubscribe and our feelings won’t be hurt. If you didn’t get it and want it, sign up here.
A quick visit to the U.K. confirms that environmental and global-warming concerns are, on the surface at least, acutely more pronounced here than in the U.S. Reminders and nudges seem to be everywhere, many of them seemingly intended to make you feel guilty for every breath you draw and every bite you swallow. A bottle of Belu water arrives at the table: “All Profits to Clean Water Projects,” it says. “The U.K.’s First Carbon-Neutral Bottled Water.”
A very common ailment in Korean summers and falls is pinkeye (conjunctivitis), and the problem had been getting much worse in the past two years. My Korean co-author tells me, however, that the H1N1 virus has created a positive externality in Korea.
In celebration of its 150th issue, The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest has asked some of the world’s foremost psychologists to share one nagging thing they still don’t understand about themselves. Their responses are varied and fascinating.
Just landed in the U.K. for a quick bout of pre-release publicity for SuperFreakonomics.
Checked in at the hotel, turned on the TV to unpack, flipped through the channels, and came to CNN. I was expecting to see a familiar face, and I did. But not Wolf, not Campbell, not Larry: instead, it’s Jon Stewart.
The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test. I had to look her up on Wikipedia, and even after reading the entry, I have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing her name mentioned by an economist.
The charity auction for the first copy off the presses of SuperFreakonomics will wrap up later today.
The recent proposal by the Fed to regulate bankers’ compensation practices is understandable given the events of the past two years, but setting caps on salaries and bonuses misses the fundamental problem of compensation on Wall Street. Despite the public resentment surrounding finance-industry payouts, the fact is that no one objects to paying for performance. We just want to make sure we’re not getting fleeced or paying for pure dumb luck, and this is where the problem lies.
Architect Carolyn Steel’s TED talk, posted this week, discusses how ancient food routes shaped the cities we live in today and the future of food in our world. Steel believes we can “use food as a really powerful tool, a conceptual tool, a design tool to shape the world differently.”
Maybe it was because I saw the headline early this morning not on the N.Y. Times’s website or the Wall Street Journal’s, but rather on Google News. I instantly assumed that the Onion had successfully landed a story on the home page of that fine aggregator. “Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize,” the headline said. I chuckled, silently congratulated the Onion on its clever idea, and clicked the link.
Some time ago, we wondered if New York City’s new law requiring certain restaurants to post calorie counts might provide good material for academic researchers who careabout obesity.
The answer: yes!
We’ve posted several times about interesting odd pairs and strange promotional gimmicks. Now hotels, facing persistently low occupancy rates, are getting in on the act. The Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach now offers a package with a new tattoo and a bottle of tequila (to numb the pain).
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.
Alex asked:
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Who said it, and why are all these people skinning cats?
The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner’s book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show “how skiing changed the Alps” during the last few decades.
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