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 never set out to be anti-penny, but somehow it happened, and I have gone on the record more than a few times arguing that the penny should be eliminated.
While I stand by my belief that the penny is lousy as currency, someone has finally come up with a use for pennies that has made me reconsider my extinction argument: make a floor out of them!
Camp Quest is like a regular summer camp — campers canoe and swim — except that one of the main activities is trying to prove unicorns do not exist in order to win a ?10 note signed by Richard Dawkins.
Rather than create a “global village,” the Internet may have actually “shrunk people’s horizons,” reports an Economist article about a new study by Hebrew University researchers Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy. They used a common Freakonomics topic — baby names — to study how far ideas have spread since the advent of the Internet.
On his website Fancy Fast Food, designer and writer Erik Trinidad revamps fast-food meals to look like plates you’d see at a five-star restaurant.
His tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look.”
We’ve blogged before about the efforts of the international aid community to increase fertilizer use among small farmers in Africa. Many economists, however, believe that the subsidies often used to deliver the input are “distortionary, regressive, environmentally unsound, and … result in politicized, inefficient distribution of fertilizer supply.” A new working paper by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson examines the fertilizer-buying patterns of farmers in Western Kenya.
In two previous posts, we examined laws exempting family members from prosecution for harboring fugitives and laws either granting or permitting sentencing discounts on account of one’s family status, ties, or responsibilities. These are two of the benefits defendants receive on account of their family status in the criminal justice system.
A family in Saudi Arabia is suing a genie for theft and harassment. The family accuses the genie of “leaving them threatening voicemails, stealing their cell phones, and hurling rocks at them when they leave the house.”
Virginia Postrel examines the kidney donation system in the United States, where 11 people die every day waiting for a kidney transplant. Exchanging organs for payment is illegal in the U.S. although recent developments in organ exchanges, including donation chains, have been successful. These innovations alone, however, won’t solve the problem, and Postrel advocates a new system that includes both financial incentives and measures to protect donors.
An unidentified computer glitch has led Visa to overcharge several of its cardholders for routine purchases at drug stores, gas stations, and restaurants, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 each. These charges, as far as we can tell, exceed the sum total of wealth accumulated in human history.
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.
Javy asked:
Scientists (professors, physicians) will know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing, or will know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.
The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams. [%comments]
After bad weather foiled several launch attempts, the Space Shuttle Endeavor finally took off last night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. With stormy weather so typical there, why does NASA continue to use it as a launch site?
Just because a technology has been superseded doesn’t make it completely irrelevant.
North Korea has come out with its first beer commercial for Taedong River Beer, “the pride of Pyongyang,” which shows both Western businessmen and a sweaty worker in uniform enjoying a cold one.
Should Parents Who Offend Receive Sentencing Discounts?
A Guest Post
By Jennifer Collins, Ethan J. Leib, and Dan Markel
Many states expressly tell judges to calibrate a sentence based, in part, on one’s family ties and responsibilities in sentencing offenders.
Raise your hand if you have a drawer filled with old cell phones just waiting to be responsibly recycled. Keep your hand up if most of those phones have been in the drawer for over a year. Of the 160 million cell phones discarded annually, 75 percent of them end up in drawers or trash cans. A new company, Cycled Cells, takes in old cell phones, sometimes paying for them, and either recycles the phones or, if they can be rehabilitated, distributes them to phone-needy people around the world. They even pay for postage.
Mason d’Envie, a brothel in Berlin, offers discounts to customers who arrive by bike or public transportation.
I love to collect examples of bizarre pairs of goods that sellers or buyers apparently believe are complements or substitutes.
If you care about baseball, you should care about Buster Olney. He is the ESPN baseball reporter who seems to know everything about everything, on the field and in the general managers’ offices, and presents it with a calm authority.
Coal and nuclear power provide the vast majority of our electricity. Coal brings environmental and health hazards with it every step of the way, from mine to smoke stack. Nuclear energy, with all of its benefits, comes with its own risks (as ill-perceived as they may be). So which is the least bad solution? Seed magazine asked a panel of experts and came up with this interesting quorum.
A long-standing pet peeve of mine is that so much academic research is funded by public tax dollars and yet the public is rarely given access to the findings of that research.
In a short Times piece today, I found a hero: Michael Tuts, a particle physicist at Columbia who, among other things, is doing work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research:
What’s the best way to pay teachers based on performance? One Planet Money listener suggests tying teacher pay to their students’ future earnings, turning the students into “investments.” The scheme is reminiscent of Monetizing Emma, a play that recently ran in New York, about a future when Wall Street traders invest in smart schoolkids in return for a substantial share of their future earnings.
Following up on our earlier introductory post about our book on criminal justice and the family, we thought we’d start here with an examination of the same topic that initially sparked our interest in the intersection of criminal justice and the family — namely, how the law treats persons who refuse to cooperate (or actively interfere) with law enforcement on account of trying to protect a family member.
My sister Linda is the one who came up with the title Freakonomics for our first book. Probably because of that, ever since she has been obsessed with trying to, in marketing lingo, “extend the Freakonomics brand.” Her first idea was the Freakonomics t-shirt. “Everybody will want one of these,” she said. Somehow, even though millions of people were willing . . .
The 21st century could represent the end of war as we know it, writes political scientist John Mueller in a new paper for Political Science Quarterly. He notes that there have been no wars between developed nations since 1945, and that other international wars that fit the classic definition — the violent resolution of a dispute between two or more . . .
I’ve been struck recently that as I talk to most economists, they think that the case for a further fiscal stimulus is pretty solid. At least that’s what I hear in the hallways and seminar rooms. But that’s not what I hear in the media; for some reason the most outspoken economists are the anti-stimulus folks. And so I did a short piece for Public Radio’s Marketplace yesterday on the need for more fiscal stimulus.
I thought it worth taking a closer look at the main arguments against the stimulus:
Naked self-promotion: the third edition of my book, Economics Is Everywhere (Worth Publishers), has just appeared. It contains little articles like those I have included on this blog (and, no doubt, some of the posts from this blog will be included in the fourth edition). I love many of the stories, but my all-time favorite from among the 700 that have been in the book’s various editions combines several basic economic ideas:
I’m alone in Europe, living in an apartment and cooking for myself. I bought a bottle of decent red wine for the remarkably low price of $2.99 and am consuming about one-fourth of it with each dinner (instead of the one-fifth or one-sixth of a bottle I would drink with each dinner at home).
Have I substituted toward wine, moving down the demand curve because the price is lower than at home? Or am I drinking more because I am alone and miss my wife? has my demand curve for wine merely shifted out due to my solitary lifestyle?
Conor Clarke suggests removing polls from the American political process. Not only are poll results frequently wrong, he argues, but polling “uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy.”
Barry Nalebuff and I have a new column in Forbes (“A Market Test for Credit Cards”) which criticizes some aspects of the recent credit-card legislation as being too anti-market.
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