New Math: Humans Getting in the Way of Themselves
Here is the latest installment of Craig Damrauer‘s “New Math.” Earlier posts can be found here, and his own site here.
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.
Here is the latest installment of Craig Damrauer‘s “New Math.” Earlier posts can be found here, and his own site here.
Bram Stoker‘s Dracula is the story of a vampire’s reign of terror in Victorian England, told through letters and diary entries. This blog will post each entry on the day it appears in the book, so readers can experience the story “in real time.” Dracula started on May 3 and ends November 6. Think of it as a new series . . .
If this Detroit News article is indicative of behavior around the country, then the recession is turning out to be a good time to be:
I was reading John Steinbeck‘s Cannery Row last night, and I was really struck by how the following passage speaks to the forces behind our current economic predicament: “It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men — kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling — are the concomitants of failure in our . . .
In what Wired calls a botnet “explosion,” botnets have taken control of about 12 million new IP addresses since the beginning of the year. (That’s according to a report by the anti-virus firm McAfee.) The number of zombie computers — those overtaken by a hacker, trojan horse, etc. — have increased 50 percent since last year. What spurred the increase? . . .
The Bonn-based Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) has just announced that this year’s winner of its annual prize in labor economics is happiness researcher Richard Easterlin. This is a wonderful prize. Dick was the first economist to start taking subjective well-being data seriously. While this sort of research is now pretty mainstream, I have to imagine that it . . .
What made swine flu so worrisome was the high death toll it wrought in Mexico. Most of us assumed that the virus would be at least as lethal wherever it spread. It wasn’t. With the virus temporarily in retreat, current estimates show all but one of the swine flu deaths were confined to Mexico, and all but a few of . . .
A hidden side of Freakonomics is the extraordinary mesh of collaboration that has grown up around the movement. There is no better example of this collaboration than my colleague and good friend John Donohue, who has coauthored with Levitt (on abortion), Ayres (on guns), and Wolfers (on the death penalty). There is simply no finer quantitative empiricist in the legal . . .
A reader named Tomas asks an interesting question: If electric cars became the dominant form of urban transport, would houses on main roads jump in value due to a decrease in noise? Of course Tomas’s scenario may never come to pass, since quiet electric cars pose a danger to blind pedestrians. That’s what the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 . . .
As if you needed another reason to avoid the bookstore, you can now buy your book from an Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds (albeit without flashy cover imagery, photos, etc.) your book of choice in just a few minutes. There are about five of them in the U.S., reports Publishers Weekly, and they were recently launched in the . . .
Some first-grade classrooms perform “Acknowledgments,” wherein children sit in a circle and take turns publicly praising a classmate for some good or wise act. Bloggers can do this too. Here is the first of three Acknowledgments you’ll read on this blog today. It is with great pride that I report that my good friend Roland Fryer was honored by Time . . .
In much of America, conspicuous conservation is the new conspicuous consumption. Those of you itching for a fix of boom-time nostalgia can visit the Most Expensive Journal, your guide to the priciest items available. A $50,000 Go-Kart? Sure. A jewel-encrusted, $2.4 million iPhone? Why not? It’s SkyMall for plutocrats. [%comments]
We recently posted a noisy song, “The Final Day,” by an unnamed artist, and ran a contest asking you to identify the performer. It sounded like it might be the latest in our series of recession songs, or maybe an outright apocalyptic number: Click Below to Listen The singer was me. Yeah, it was a song from my old band, . . .
Freedom House has released its 2009 Freedom of the Press Survey. For the seventh consecutive year, it notes, global press freedom has declined, with declines occurring across all regions for the first time. Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong were downgraded from “Free” to “Partly Free.” (Is it time for someone to study the correlation between economic meltdowns and press freedom?) . . .
Thankfully, no one pays attention to my annual Kentucky Derby picks, because if they did, they would have read this prediction that I made Friday: If I had to pick a last-place finisher (a bet they would never actually offer at the track because people involved with horse racing understand better than most that people respond to incentives), it would . . .
Is your pâté consumption wreaking havoc on your pocketbook? A food processor and some Newman’s Own dog food may solve your problem. Economists at The American Association of Wine Economists conducted double-blind taste tests of five unlabeled blended meat products, including dog food. Subjects were unable to identify the dog food. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
There are three TV shows I have come to love even though I’ve never watched them on TV. Or on DVD. Or via iTunes. They are: Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Rescue Me. And they are all available — the complete catalog, whenever you want, in high-quality video, with a beautiful user interface — on my computer, for free, thanks to Hulu.com.
We need a prize for the most self-serving proposal. A lawyer with large student loans has assembled a large group of friends on Facebook with the proposal “Cancel Student Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” Ignoring the fact that this might reduce rather than increase the fiscal stimulus, it would reduce the burden on people who, if they attended public universities, . . .
Martin Walker of the Woodrow Wilson Center describes some surprising demographic trends. Contrary to popular belief, birth rates have risen in northern Europe and the United States in recent years and fallen across much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. In fact, the fertility rate in the United States is at its highest level since 1971. In contrast, . . .
Kacie Kinzer’s robots have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
A technical change can raise well-being yet lower G.D.P. I realized this when I spent time watching and re-watching the Saturday Night Live take-off on the recording session of “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” For some reason I find this Will Ferrell/Christopher Walken spoof hilarious; and I’ve also “wasted” time watching some of the Mastercard “Priceless” spoofs and other such nonsense . . .
Feeling a little feverish? Throat a little scratchy? You may be relieved to know that the last time a great swine flu epidemic was predicted it didn’t materialize. In 1976, the U.S. government predicted that 1 million Americans would die from a swine flu epidemic — but only one did. Meanwhile, this post at Foreign Policy points out that while . . .
I’m not sure why, since I don’t think anyone should or does care, but every year I indulge myself by posting Kentucky Derby picks. In contrast to the last two years, my computer model has some strong predictions for this year’s Derby. The two horses I like best from a betting perspective (i.e. the ones I think actually have a . . .
Millions of homeowners across the country have gone through the foreclosure process (Michael Jackson just narrowly escaped), and more will likely continue to do so for a while.
Last month, Levitt blogged about how Google Flu Trends, which measures flu queries in real-time, can serve as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks. The catch: it only works if Google’s data analysts are paying attention to the data — which they weren’t last week, when Flu Trends showed a bump in flu-related search terms right before the swine flu . . .
The following is a guest post by Linda Jines — yarn merchant, book titler, and sister of Steve Levitt. Enjoy. The Office-onomics? A Guest Post By Linda Jines The most recent episode of NBC’s hit comedy The Office offered viewers something extra along with its usual half hour of wry observations about life in Dilbertian corporate America. The episode, entitled . . .
A website called African Signals, the brainchild of Eric Hersman, launched this week. Its goal is to aggregate information about mobile phone and internet connections across Africa. Hersman is also affiliated with Ushahidi, “a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.” You can see Hersman’s TED talk on Ushahidi . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Who Said Data Kills? Who Worried About Events? Spelling, Logic, and Frenchmen Fifteen 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 . . .
One of Huan Hsu‘s Chinese coworkers called him “Steve” for months, wondering why Hsu, unlike most other young professionals in mainland China, had yet to pick an English name for himself. Another of Hsu’s friends, who goes by dozens of names depending on the situation, tells him “a name is just a dai hao.” In other words, a code name, . . .
It’s safe to say that macroeconomists haven’t been very popular lately. In fact, many people blame the profession for such sins as failing to predict the housing bubble and encouraging the deregulation of the financial industry. In their new book Animal Spirits, the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller propose a new macroeconomic framework — one that incorporates real human . . .
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