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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.

Survivor Bias on the Gridiron

The concept of survivor bias, if you don’t know it, is well worth being aware of. It’s most often used in finance, where it refers to a “tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies” (thanks, Wikipedia). Think of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which indexes the stock prices of 30 of the largest and most important U.S. companies – until, that is, one of said companies does so poorly that it is booted from the index and is replaced by a company that’s doing better.


Recession Kids

We recently blogged about how recessions might affect the mentality of people growing up in them. American Public Media’s Marketplace recently hosted a “Small Town Hall,” where kids were asked questions like “Should kids be allowed to have credit cards?” and “Has the recession changed your dreams?”


If Everyone Could Trim a Beard …

A headline in our local paper screams: “Barbers, Cosmetologists in Turf War Over Shaving.” The question is where sideburns end and beards begin.


A Predictably Irrational Fashion Week

Dressed in a red silk robe, Dan Ariely commemorates New York’s fashion week by trying on designer sunglasses while answering the eternal question: Does wearing Prada knockoffs make you evil?


A Regression Mystery, Solved

All the economists who read this blog will no doubt be familiar with the popular instrumental variables (IV) regression technique, which is used to estimate the coefficient of endogenous variables. But who established the technique as a solution to the identification problem?


The Economics of Disrespect

Representative Joe Wilson’s much discussed “You Lie” outburst last Wednesday during President Obama’s health care speech has been compared to the 1856 savage caning that Representative Preston Brooks delivered to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (for example, see here and here).


Lucas on the Shortcomings of Modern Macro

And so the debate about the state of modern macroeconomics continues. As the rhetoric escalates, perhaps it’s worth digging through the archives for real insight, instead. Here’s Robert Lucas in his 2003 keynote address to the History of Political Economy conference:


Call Me Bruce

Women in the legal profession with more masculine-sounding names, like Cameron or Kelly, have better odds of becoming judges than women with feminine names, according to a new study by Bentley Coffey and Patrick McLaughlin (gated; abstract here).


Power Is Not Free

Over at The Big Picture, the Boston Globe’s awesome photo blog, there’s a series of pictures showing the aftermath of a catastrophe (probably an explosion) at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in south-central Russia on August 17.


You're Likely to Live!

You’re older than you’ve ever been, as the song goes, and now you’re even older. And for each eight years you age, you double your chances of dying. That’s the Gompertz Law of human mortality, which is actually sunnier than you think.


Father Earth Is Dead

If you had to point to one person who helped the global population surge over the past several decades to nearly 7 billion rather than succumbing to mass famine, as was widely predicted (and, indeed, has been predicted throughout history), a person who well understood the paradox that population growth was both the reward of his life’s work as well as the problem that necessitated it, that person would likely be Norman Borlaug, the most important plant scientist behind the Green Revolution, who has died at the age of 95.


Is the Invisible Hand …

Is the Invisible Hand … one of Adam Smith’s key theories, a “mildly ironic joke,” or “a popular literary 17th- to 18th-century metaphor with no significance”?


Football Injuries: The Metric That Matters

As bad as most prognosticators are about most things, football prognosticators are really bad. Go back and look at just about any group of experts’ predictions for the coming season and you’ll see that their success rate is lower than that of the average monkey with a dartboard.


Vendor Power

The Internets Celebrities (Dallas Penn and Rafi Kammade) appeared on our blog a while back with their video about check-cashing establishments vs. commercial banks. They’re back with another (NSFW) video, “Vend Diagram,” in which they question how the recession has affected New York’s street vendors.


Bad News For Meter-Maids

The parking meter has been almost unchanged since I started driving in 1959: one meter per space; put your money in the slot.
In my driving in Northern Europe I never see parking meters; I buy a piece of paper at a parking automat (typically one per block), put it on my dashboard. Why the difference?


Capitalism Is Thriving

The World Bank’s annual Doing Business report indicates that capitalism has fared better than feared in the recession. For the year ending in May 2009, 131 countries introduced 287 reforms, more than in any year since the survey began in 2004.


Planes, Trains, and PTSD

The first public passenger railroad opened in England in 1825. By the 1860’s, railway accidents had killed, maimed, and otherwise traumatized so many that doctors had to coin a term to describe the shock suffered by rail crash survivors; they called it “railway spine,” and the debate that surrounded it planted the seeds for the study of what we know today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder


Quotes Uncovered: Who Found Proof in the Pudding?

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.


Things That Don't Make Sense

In a follow-up to its earlier article about things that science can’t explain, New Scientist lists 13 More Things That Don’t Make Sense. We wonder: if you were writing a similar list for the field of economics, what would you include?


Watt's Next: Your Thoughts

With a large number of electric vehicles in the pipeline (see this new piece in The Economist), my staff EV expert (my brother Brad) and I asked for your wit and wisdom on their prospects. Some of your thoughts on whether EV’s will “clean up”:


The Recession Mentality

If you’re wondering how the recession is affecting today’s young adults, a new paper (abstract only) by Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo may have the answer.


Why Have Smoking Bans Caught On So Easily?

Henry Farrell at the Crooked Timber blog argues that smoking bans succeed in large part because prevailing societal norms about smoking – e.g. “That Irish people can smoke in pubs to their hearts’ content, and that others will just have to put up with it” – were much weaker than we thought.


Find My Phone

Corporations like Amazon and Sirius won’t help owners recover their lost gadgets, like cell phones or Kindles or the Sirius receiver. The article points out that “iPhone owners have a number of options to search for their handsets, including features that use GPS technology to send out virtual semaphores.”


Cameras or Cops?

The million-plus surveillance cameras that monitor London’s citizens haven’t stopped much crime, the BBC reports. According to a police report, just one crime was solved by every 1,000 cameras, creating “a huge intrusion on privacy, yet … little or no improvement in security.”


Buzz Aldrin Answers Your Questions

Last week, we solicited your questions for former astronaut and second man on the moon Buzz Aldrin, and we asked him a few of our own:


Inside the Seed Vault

The TED blog recently posted Cary Fowler’s fascinating TED talk as well as a Q&A with Fowler, director of the world’s largest seed bank. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, otherwise known as the doomsday vault, is located in a remote area of Norway and was built to protect the world’s crops from disease, climate change, and famine.


Fewer Drugs In America Means More Problems for Mexico

Last week’s horrific killings at the Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center were front-page news in Texas. The murders are partly the result of what happens in a market when restrictions on supply are imposed in a related market.


African Entrepreneurs

The problems facing developing countries, in Africa and elsewhere, are overwhelming in their magnitude and complexity. From HIV/AIDS to widespread corruption and poverty, obstacles to economic development are occupying some of the world’s brightest minds. The three individuals profiled below are tackling Africa’s most trenchant problems in vastly different ways but with a common goal: to create a new development paradigm for the continent.


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