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.
When it’s paired with a book of photographs by filmmaker David Lynch and an invitation to fill the blank CD with tracks from an illegally downloaded album. That’s the weird new distribution scheme being floated by musicians Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse.
In the delightfully sophomoric movie Clerks 2, Randal tells Dante, “Odds are there’s someone out there who’s a better match for you than the girl you are about to marry.” Even if Dante engaged in the most thorough possible search for a wife (which he certainly didn’t in the movie), Randal’s statement is correct.
The We Are Supervision blog has a collection of business cards used by Chicago street gangs during the 1970’s and 1980’s. They are extremely interesting as well as — depending on where you work — extremely NSFW.
Here is the latest installment of Craig Damrauer‘s “New Math.” Earlier posts can be found here, and his own site here.
A paper by a team of scientists and analysts maps out how fields and subdisciplines emerge in 21st-century science. One of the main findings: much like trendy baby names boom and bust, the most high-influence subdisciplines also tend to be the most short-lived.
In the comments below, please pose some questions that you would like to see answered in the paperback Q&A. They can concern anything you’d like: material in the book, modes of collaboration, the price of tea in China, material in the upcoming SuperFreakonomics, etc. We will probably use 8 or 10 or 15, but the more we have to choose from, the better off we’ll be.
The economist Anne Sibert hypothesizes that gender inequality in the finance industry is partly to blame for the financial crisis. She points to evidence that men are less risk-averse in financial decision-making, more overconfident, and perhaps susceptible to testosterone-fueled feedback loops in asset bubbles.
My former student Emily Feldman informs me now that even Beccaria was a few hundred years too late. Back in 1516, Sir Thomas More already understood the concept of marginal deterrence.
When the Financial Times decided to run its first piece of short fiction, it chose “The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble,” a story of economic intrigue in Africa by Julian Gough. The BBC has just turned the story into a delightful radio play, which can be found (for a limited time only!) here.
Our post last week about shutting down LaGuardia Airport in order to ease New York air congestion filled up the in-box more than usual. The feedback was diverse, with readers calling the idea everything from idiotic to obvious.
Patrick Smith, author of Ask the Pilot, wrote in with some helpful analysis:
In his new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Mahmood Mamdani “attacks the Save Darfur Coalition as ahistorical and dishonest, and argues that the conflict in Darfur is more about land, power, and the environment than it is directly about race.” Guernica magazine interviewed the controversial author about the historical roots of the Darfur conflict, the similarities between Darfur and Iraq, and the proper role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Sudan and elsewhere.
An interesting fact: The faster that a new baby name becomes popular, the faster it will die out. At least that’s the conclusion of a comprehensive study of naming patterns in both France and the U.S. by my Wharton colleague Jonah Berger and co-author Gael Lë Mens.
Each year, a million or so high school students pay $45 for the chance to prove themselves with the College Board’s SAT. A good percentage of those students pay for the College Board’s test prep courses as well. All that testing adds up.
In a new interview with Foreign Policy‘s Elizabeth Dickinson, Tsvangirai discusses his old rival, the frustratingly slow progress of the Zimbabwean unity government, his beef with the international community, and his plans for Zimbabwe’s battered economy.
Cigarettes are some of the most heavily taxed goods around. According to this source, the average state tax per pack of cigarettes is $1.23, plus an additional $1.01 of federal taxes, as well as any local taxes. With an average price per pack in the United States of $4.82, the combined state and federal taxes make up 46 percent of the price. In Chicago, total taxes per pack are a whopping $4.67 per pack! I don’t know the exact price of cigarettes in Chicago, but taxes must be around two thirds of the total cost.
This photo, sent to us by blog reader Mike Martin, shows how some residents of Newtown, Australia, deal with their junk mail. The sign says it’s a science experiment, but we’d imagine that impaling your junk mail on a fence can also be highly therapeutic.
One of the better-known biblical passages, Leviticus 27:1-7, lists the value of pledges of silver to the temple based on the value of a person: 50 shekels for a man between the ages of 20 and 60, 30 shekels for a woman of the same age, 15 shekels for a man over 60, and 10 shekels for a woman over 60. Once we ignore differences in labor-force participation, the earnings ratios today are not that far from what was expected 3,000 years ago.
Listeners of “The Numbers” segment on NPR’s Marketplace, a daily recap of the stock market’s action, thought its upbeat version of “We’re in the Money” as background music is inappropriate for the times.
History is full of half-forgotten tales. That time, for instance, when the British thought Ben Franklin was helping the French build a death ray. Or when everyone in the Netherlands accidentally got high for a year on rye bread tainted by a psychedelic mold. Or how a dentist’s visit to Carlsbad Cavern inspired a doomsday weapon that could have ended World War II, if the atom bomb hadn’t done it first. Nate DiMeo has been collecting these stories, in short, wonderful podcasts, on a site called The Memory Palace.
There is likely no prediction I can make for the Preakness that will generate as much entertainment value as my ill-fated Kentucky Derby picks.
But here goes anyway.
Oregon’s House recently passed the “Honest Pint Act,” which would allow drinking establishments to display state-issued stickers certifying that their pint glasses actually hold 16 ounces, as opposed to the 13- and 14-ounce glasses that some bars try to pass off as pints.
New York Congressman Anthony Weiner takes your questions.
In a new paper, Gavin Kennedy argues that Smith actually had no invisible-hand theory, pointing out that the phrase appears only three times in Smith’s writings. One scholar believes that Smith’s use of the phrase was a “mildly ironic joke.”
During a recent ground delay at LaGuardia, I got to talking with an off-duty pilot for a major airline who was extraordinarily knowledgeable about every single airline question I could think to ask him. (With any luck, he’ll soon be joining us here as a guest blogger.) When I asked for his take on New York air congestion, he said the solution was easy: shut down LaGuardia.
Seventeen weeks ago 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.
Recent studies suggest that exorbitant C.E.O. compensation isn’t primarily produced by greed or even the need to compensate invaluable talent, but rather firms benchmarking C.E.O. pay against other firms’ pay. That’s what Ray Fisman writes in Slate. One prominent C.E.O.’s raise therefore sends ripples of pay hikes through competing companies.
The University of Chicago likes to brag about its Nobel laureates. Well, my son’s kindergarten teacher Christina Hayward pulled off a feat that is far tougher statistically than winning the Nobel prize: she took one of ten Golden Apple awards given annually to the most outstanding Chicago-area teachers.
But now Sean Gourley has derived a formula that not only describes how insurgent groups work, but could predict future attacks.
In a column we wrote a while back about the unintended consequences of well-meaning legislation, we highlighted one of the failures of the Endangered Species Act: in the lag time between when an animal’s habitat is announced to be under consideration for the E.S.A. and the protection actually goes into effect, landowners have incentive to prophylactically destroy the habitat.
We’ve blogged repeatedly in this space about happiness. An essay in The Boston Globe describes some interesting new happiness research with diverse policy implications.
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