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.
The city of College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, will be marketing a section of its cemetery for A&M graduates. Although other schools have them, this is the first university-related cemetery in Texas.
In the third and final installment of articles comparing today’s economic situation to the Great Depression, economic historian Price Fishback implores policy makers to avoid the mistakes that were made in the Great Depression. His two prior posts in
the series are here and here.
Here is the latest installment of Craig Damrauer‘s “New Math.” Earlier posts can be found here, and his own site here.
Violent crime in New York has decreased steadily even as the recession has deepened, further disproving the conventional notion that crime increases in recessions.
In the first installment of a three-part series, economic historian Price Fishback showed just how different the basic macroeconomic facts are in the current financial situation versus during the Great Depression.
In the second of three blog posts, Fishback turns to a discussion of the recent financial meltdown compared to the one that accompanied the Great Depression. For everyone still scratching their heads about what happened to the financial sector this fall, Fishback offers one of the clearest descriptions I’ve seen yet. He then discusses the similarities and differences of the financial collapse that began in 1929.
In 2001 Portugal, facing one of the most serious drug problems in Europe, decided to decriminalize drug possession, including marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. People caught with small quantities of drugs were no longer sent to prison; they were sent to rehab. Since then, drug use in the country has plummeted, along with the HIV infection rate from addicts sharing dirty needles.
We love taking our kids to the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, which were made famous by the late, great Leonard Bernstein.
The four programs this year were each devoted to a different “capital of music”: Mozart‘s Vienna, Ravel‘s Paris, Mussorgsky‘s St. Petersberg, and Bernstein’s New York.
The OECD has released its Society at a Glance survey, which reveals some interesting social trends in OECD member countries. Floyd Norris points out that countries with fast eaters, including all of North America, have higher economic growth rates than slow-eating countries like France.
In my last post, I challenged you to find at least five examples of inequity, ineffectiveness, or inefficiency in a formula that is governing the allocation of transportation stimulus funds to the states: 25 percent based on total lane miles of federal-aid highways, 40 percent based on vehicle miles traveled in lanes on federal-aid highways, and 35 percent based on . . .
Photographer Anna Skladmann‘s “Little Adults” portraits feature children of Russia’s Nouveau-Riche who have “been raised to become ‘Elite’ and behave like little adults.” But as Very Short List wonders, with a financial crisis underway, will Russia’s rich kids start behaving more like kids? (Related: Russia moves ahead of De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer — and immediately starts . . .
Few people in the world know more about the Great Depression than economic historian Price Fishback, which is why whenever he offers an opinion on the subject, I always listen carefully. Back in the fall, Fishback wrote two outstanding posts here at the Freakonomics blog, one on what the New Deal tells us about the likely success of the stimulus . . .
I played Life with some grandkids today, a much revised game from what we played with our kids. The paychecks you receive as you move along the board are taxed at a constant marginal tax rate of 50 percent, with an exemption of $10,000 of income.
Long before swine flu hit, Timothy Geithner testified to Congress about the danger of a strange new epidemic. “Contagion spreads,” he warned in 2008, “transmitting waves of distress to other markets.” The contagion was loan defaults, and Bear Stearns was patient zero. The Fed’s bailout of Bear, he hoped, would slow or stop the spread of defaults across the financial . . .
Feedback is such an elemental ingredient of nearly any human activity — consider the importance of coaching and teaching in particular, but also think about the creative arts — and yet there is huge variance on how much feedback a given person may get, or choose to accept. The web is probably the grandest (or at least the noisiest) feedback . . .
An important new working paper by Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, and Francisco Rodríguez examines whether Hugo Chavez opposition voters in Venezuela paid a price for their opposition. Between late 2002 and August 2004, more than 4.7 million Venezuelans signed petitions in favor of a recall election for Chavez despite widespread threats that signers would be punished. After Chavez’s . . .
A blog reader named Lee emailed us a photo he took on Highway 86 in Imperial, California. “It made me wonder if [the economy] is really that bad that even dead people will lose their resting places,” he writes. “What will they do? Evict the dead?” Photo: Lee We called Victor Carrillo, the supervisor for Imperial County listed on the . . .
Nate Silver, a Freakonomics favorite, wonders if the American car culture is finally coming to an end. Silver points out that Americans drove much less this January than last January, even less than expected in a bad economy with high unemployment. Part of the decrease may be explained by a delayed response to last summer’s high gas prices, but Silver . . .
New Zealand native Phil Keoghan is best known as the host of CBS’s reality show The Amazing Race, each episode ending with Phil at some exotic international finish line, solemnly informing each team where it has placed in the day’s contest.
Despite a friendly Congress and a pending labor bill, unions are under fire these days in Detroit and elsewhere — perhaps with good reason. A working paper by David Lee and Alexandre Mas finds that a successful unionization vote significantly decreases the market value of the company even absent changes in organizational performance. Lee and Mas run a policy simulation . . .
Conor Hunt, an I.T. consultant in Chicago, writes with a dilemma that, while common, seems to be always unsatisfactorily solved. Two friends — a merchandising analyst and a law student — and I are attempting to split up rent of a three-bedroom apartment with two common bathrooms. All rooms have their pros and cons, with the major differentiators being closet . . .
Akhil Amar and I just published an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times suggesting that President Obama might nominate two justices for the Supreme Court: Souter‘s formal letter to Obama indicates that he will step down at the end of this term — presumably late June. But nothing prevents the president from nominating now and the Senate from confirming . . .
We blogged a while back about some research suggesting Facebook use was correlated with low grades. Well, one Facebook-using professor named Eszter Hargittai thought the data looked fishy. So did Josh Pasek, a graduate student who got in touch with Hargittai — through Facebook, of course — and asked if she’d like to work on a paper with him challenging . . .
The iconic libertarian Milton Friedman once said “The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” Michael Strong, founder of innovative charter schools, and John Mackey, C.E.O. of Whole Foods, agree with Friedman, and have their own libertarian vision. They believe that entrepreneurs and “conscious . . .
Here’s an article from the Chicago Tribune in which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is quoted as saying “there is no favoritism” involved in the disbursement of the transportation stimulus funding to the states. The reason given was that the disbursements are “based on a long-standing formula for allocating highway funds to the states.” Using their system eliminates some forms of . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Who Punished Good Deeds? Who Said Data Kills? Who Worried About Events? Sixteen 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 . . .
I like hunting for silver linings as much as the next guy. But there is one group of people who are so good at finding them that I can only dream of matching their prowess. I am talking, of course, about C.E.O.’s. It is earnings season and we are of course in the grip of a recession, so you would . . .
A German court recently upheld a ban on surnames that are hyphenated three or more times, claiming long names could cause “intolerable administrative difficulties” for German officials. As Time reports, local German authorities must also approve first names, which have to match the child’s gender and “must not expose the child to ridicule or discrimination.” (Germany is hardly the first . . .
Texas raises most of its tax revenue from the sales tax. We are one of only seven states without a personal income tax. Even with the exclusion of groceries from the sales tax, it is likely that the tax is regressive. Our legislators (who fortunately only convene for four months every two years) are now proposing that state-supported universities be . . .
Anu Garg, who runs the wonderful site Wordsmith.org, sends a weekly e-mail describing the theme of the words that will be featured in his word-a-day e-mails. This week’s theme is interesting for writers of every sort. (I would particularly like to see professional economists impose a few constraints.) Negativeland is the title of a slim novel I came across recently . . .
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