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.
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is back, but this time he answers your quotation blegs. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here. Last week I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try . . .
I can’t help but wonder how many urban planners were inspired to enter the profession by computer games like SimCity or Railroad Tycoon. I can’t help but admit to spending a few hours (O.K., more than a few) blasting virtual tunnels through the Rockies and rebuilding Tokyo after those annoying SimCity Godzilla attacks.
Last night Jay Leno joked that only 500,000 people attended Bush‘s second inauguration, while 2 million were at Obama‘s. The reason, so he claimed, is that we now have so many more unemployed people. Good joke, but is it correct? How do unemployed people spend their time? How does unemployment affect time use in the entire economy? What is the . . .
A reader named Abhishek Rawat writes in to describe, and then solve, a puzzle he has noticed in his native India:
In India all major cities have public transport vehicles called autorickshaws. They are mounted on three wheels, operate on very low horsepower, and have a center of gravity that allows them to swivel in impossible twists around the traffic. In short, they’re the perfect transportation vehicle for people who do not have a personal transport and do not wish to take the bus.
The Powerball lottery jackpot, which now stands at $20 million, is tough to win — and sometimes, nobody wins it. It’s incredibly hard to match all six numbers drawn for the game. To get an idea of just how long the odds are, software engineer Andrew Arrow built a clever little program that randomly generates six lottery numbers (including, naturally, . . .
My kids’ schools never stopped class to listen to President Bush‘s inauguration speech; but my sense in Connecticut is that many public and private schools stopped normally scheduled classes to listen to Obama‘s inauguration speech. News articles suggested that many schools considered his inauguration address a teachable moment. The empiricist in me wonders whether this phenomenon is more pronounced in . . .
It may be a gag, but from the looks of this eBay page, someone just sold the naming rights for her unborn baby — and two pairs of Nike Air baby booties — for $4,050. She doesn’t care what name the buyer chooses, but hopes it’s not one that will get her child’s “butt kicked.” The seller writes she did . . .
With the Super Bowl coming up in less than two weeks — and yes, thanks, my team made it — it’s worth considering what sort of end-zone demonstrations will be allowed and which will not. Here’s Mike Pereira, the N.F.L.’s outgoing head of officials, with an explanation from earlier this year: If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s . . .
The one question I ask most often about the internet is the following: why do people make such great stuff and then give it away for free? The website Poptropica is a perfect example. Poptropica is a virtual online world in which children take part in adventures that require creativity, persistence, logic, and coordination to solve. If you have kids . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Keith Hennessey, the outgoing White House chief economic adviser and director of the National Economic Council.
In his answers below, Hennessey explains (among other things) what he thinks are some of the “most absurd economic assumptions” by Washington politicians; where, exactly, the first few hundred billion dollars of the TARP money has gone; and why he had “the coolest job ever.” Thanks to all of you for the good questions and to Hennessey for his candid and thorough answers.
As much as we love aptonyms on this blog, we also appreciate a cleverly named store (not, however, all those horrible names for hair salons — Hair Port, Shear Elegance, etc.). Our readers in Toronto, for instance, may have stopped in for lunch today at the Hindenburger (the patties are flame-broiled, naturally), after picking up a new racket at The . . .
From a reader named Raymond DeCampo comes this interesting, poignant bleg. (Read up on blegs here; send your own blegs here; and see some other new Freakonomics-coined words here.) My wife and I recently undertook the task of securing our son’s future in the event we would not be there to secure it for him. In the process I realized . . .
A friend at another university tells me that his school is banning the sale of bottled water on campus, as the university administration is bothered by the pollution produced by plastic water bottles.
Presumably, they figure that bottled-water consumers will switch to tap water, as tap water is bottled water’s closest substitute. I wonder — aren’t bottled soft drinks a closer substitute? Don’t people want the convenience of a container at their desk rather than an occasional drink at the water cooler (or a cup to be filled at the water cooler)?
The Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.) has quietly ended its campaign to sue illicit digital music sharing into oblivion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
I came home this evening and found five magazines waiting in the mailbox: Time, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Columbia (a university alumni magazine) and Natural History (from the Museum of Natural History). Four of the five magazines had the same guy on the cover. Yeah, that one, a.k.a. Barack Obama. I have read a lot of interesting things by and about . . .
A few weeks back, I upset many people when I posed the question “How are prostitutes and rice alike?” You’ll have to read that old post to understand why I would ask that particular question.
Sometimes the e-mail in-box captures a pitch that’s just too good to not share. It is probably not the best time to be casting a reality show about fun-loving flight attendants, but show biz waits for no one:
Back in 2006, I blogged about a bunch of nonsense that they do on commercial airline flights, including the idiocy of schooling passengers on what to do in the “unlikely event of a water landing.” My friend Peter Thompson‘s research found that there had been more than 150 million commercial flights since 1970 without a single water landing. How rude . . .
In the last few years, institutions have been issuing more apologies, according to an Economist article. And lately there have been calls for quite a few more (from institutions and individuals), including Wall Street to American citizens and Bernard Madoff to the people he allegedly swindled (rather than just his co-op neighbors). But aside from emotional reparations, what’s the point . . .
Because a new year has begun, it seems a good time to unveil some of the aptonyms that we’ve been accumulating. (Earlier aptonym posts can be found here.) 1. During a recent N.F.L. game between the Bears and the Vikings, played on a frigid Monday night in Chicago, I learned that the city has a prominent meteorologist named Amy Freeze. . . .
We keep reading that someone has done the maths and found the third Monday in January to be the most depressing day of the calendar year.
So which day is the happiest?
A column by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times reports on the dating service Ashley Madison, which matches up married women and men who wish to have a quick fling. The service is a market intermediary for extramarital affairs. Its founder claims that, by lowering search costs for affairs, he enables people in unhappy marriages to stay married. Daum . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here. Reader Jeff Ritter poses the following question: So I have been using this quote that supposedly came from Alexander Fraser . . .
A regular blog reader, Mitch Kosowski, sent along an interesting question: “Is ignorance truly bliss? Are people with lower intelligence happier than those with higher intelligence?” Let’s start with a quick literature review. Here are the findings reported by Simpson, L. (2001): Lisa Simpson: “As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make lots of . . .
Perhaps not surprisingly, a crime trends survey of 52 U.S. retailers conducted by the Retail Industry Leaders Association found that 84 percent of them experienced an increase in “amateur/opportunistic” shoplifting last fall compared to the same period a year earlier. In this Gothamist interview, a self-proclaimed shoplifter, his/her identity obscured, details how he/she efficiently steals from Whole Foods on a . . .
The television show Manswers on the TV channel Spike has to be one of the dumbest shows on the air. The purpose of the show is to provide answers to the sorts of questions that might arise just as the keg at the frat party starts to run low. For instance, “How do you untrap your pud from a zipper?” . . .
Blog reader Paul Gorbould emailed us this photo from a parking lot at the Joggins Fossil Cliffs on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada: Photo: Paul Gorbould Gorbould understands the good intent of the spots: The site was recently declared a Unesco World Heritage Site, and it appears to have taken the designation to heart. I’ve never seen . . .
Keith Hennessey Keith Hennessey is the outgoing chief economic adviser to President Bush and director of the National Economic Council. When Obama takes office, Lawrence Summers will take his place. “Our assumptions are that the economy will begin to recover early in the next president’s term,” Hennessey recently told CNBC, “but it’s too early to say exactly when.” (I can . . .
When does a press pass cost $27 billion? When you’re a local reporter in Zimbabwe working for a foreign news outlet. Foreign Policy‘s Passport Blog reports that the government in Zimbabwe will begin assessing local journalists a fee of between $1,000 and $3,000 U.S. for the right to send news out of the country. Considering the country’s 231 million percent . . .
I was absolutely amazed when I stumbled onto a list of the bestselling books in America a few weeks ago and discovered that one author occupied the top four spots. I am guessing that this has never happened previously in United States book history, or at least not in a long, long time. Image from StephenieMeyer.com I’m guessing that these . . .
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