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.
From a reader named Eric Robinson comes this interesting bleg. (Click here for blegging information, and send your own requests here.) Photo: Uriba When I’m at a party and get asked what I do (I am an architect), I always hear one of the same five responses: + What kind of architecture do you do? + Hey, you can design . . .
More and more people are calling for the government to create a Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) modeled after the New Deal version that went by the same name. The first person I heard suggesting this was economist Alan Blinder in a startlingly prescient New York Times Op-Ed piece back in February of this year. More recently, Hillary Clinton has . . .
In my last post, I focused on what we still don’t know about the causes of the subprime crisis. But here I’ll tell you about six solutions proposed by Robert Shiller in his book The Subprime Solution. (He has also recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post and an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.) Shiller separates the short-term . . .
Photo: sporkist My former Ph.D. student and frequent co-author Erik Snowberg sends along an interesting question: Why do discount clothing stores (like Nordstrom Rack — and clothing sales in general) have an excess of really small and really large sizes? I have to admit, I’ve always wondered. Erik continues: The typical answer seems to be that there are more medium . . .
Photo from the University of Washington. If you’re reading this post on a laptop computer, rest easy. Your computer may have just become far less appealing to thieves. The University of Washington has released a free program that will track your laptop if it’s stolen. If the program is installed on a computer with a built-in camera, it will . . .
Last year on this blog, Ian Ayres wondered why, to truly keep their opponents guessing, football teams don’t pick plays at random. Two California high school football coaches have taken the thought one step further and randomized the plays themselves — by scrapping the traditional starting formation and making every player a potential receiver (normally, only five players can receive . . .
My friend who reviews New York City cafes came across this at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center: Photo: Ana Dane According to Bouchon’s website: “Some people wish for their pets to take as much pleasure in food as they themselves do.” But are excesses like this actually selling right now? A recent survey by American Express Publishing and . . .
The 8th installment in Bob Dylan‘s “bootleg” series is a two-disc set called Tell Tale Signs, and it is set to be released next Tuesday (October 7). But until then, you can listen to it for free on National Public Radio, here. Yep, free. But as I understand it, this only lasts until the official release next week. I just . . .
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. Photo: foundphotoslj Recently, after a Wall Street Journal article named The Yale Book of Quotations as the second-most-essential reference book . . .
So the bailout proposal before Congress seems to have been rejected because legislators were worried that voters back home saw it as a bailout of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Is such a fear rational? It may be that voters simply don’t understand or believe that a broader Wall Street failure could quickly trickle down and harm . . .
Photo: freeparking Paul Kimelman lives in Alamo, Calif., and is C.T.O. of the Texas-based microcontroller company Luminary Micro. He is the sort of blog reader we are very fortunate to have. He writes to us now and again with such interesting queries that they’re worth putting up on the blog in their entirety. Here’s his latest: I was speaking with . . .
A revised bailout plan has been announced, and President Bush has thrown his weight behind it. To my eye, the rewriting of Paulson‘s plan this past week has been worthwhile; and the final plan, while imperfect, is a useful step forward, and a clear improvement on the original plan in terms of likely effectiveness, cost to the taxpayers, accountability, fairness, . . .
I’ve known several doctors who refused to read e-mail from patients. They said it was simply a bad use of their time. I also used to have a doctor who hated it whenever you came in and asked questions about some article you’d read in The Times about Lyme disease or some such. He’d get a pained look on his . . .
The financial crisis is getting all the headlines and, so it is claimed, occupying all the attention of at least one presidential candidate. Yet a bigger economic issue is hardly being addressed: the exploding costs of health care in the U.S., where we spend a far greater share of our incomes on health than people in other rich countries. How . . .
Wall Street has always been a legendary joke generator — with a specialty in gallows humor. So I ask our readers: in this very unfunny time, what are the Wall Street jokes of the moment? To prime the pump, I offer up something a wise gentleman told me the other night, prescribed to make all Americans feel a bit better: . . .
Photo: Odalaigh Whenever I travel in other wealthy countries, I am a bit embarrassed about the dollar bill’s insignificance compared to other countries’ smallest bills: a 5-pound note is worth $9; a 5-euro note is worth $7; a 1,000-yen note is worth $9. At the same time, no rich country has a coin as worthless as the U.S. penny. Imagine . . .
Suze Orman Earlier this week, we solicited your questions for Suze Orman. You asked about paying college debt, choosing a good retirement plan, and — especially with a week like this — how safe your money is. In her answers below, Orman also offers a question to ask whenever deciding what to do with your money: Is that normal? And . . .
Photo: procsilas A coalition of college presidents has been pushing states to lower the drinking age as a way to discourage problem drinking on campuses. But here’s one unintended consequence of teaching young people responsible drinking habits: it could make Social Security bankrupt faster. A 2004 study by Frank Sloan and Jan Ostermann at Duke University found that heavy drinkers . . .
Not long ago, I wrote about the sad state of financial literacy in the U.S., and how some people, like Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth, are proposing widespread education to fix the problem. But in a brief Money magazine Q&A, Lauren Willis, who teaches financial-products regulation at Loyola Law School, says that’s a waste of time. Excerpts: Q: What’s so bad . . .
As an economist, I am supposed to have something intelligent to say about the current financial crisis. To be honest, however, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what this all means. So I did what I always do when something related to banking arises: I knocked on the doors of my colleagues Doug Diamond and Anil Kashyap, and asked them . . .
I went to an interesting talk yesterday by a University of Chicago law professor named Lior Strahilevitz. Lior has a radical proposal about the “How’s My Driving?” stickers that we often see affixed to the back bumpers of trucks. There is some initial evidence that these placards are “associated with fleet accident reductions ranging from 20 percent to 53 percent.” . . .
Suze Orman If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a bit of financial literacy, you’ve probably come across something on the subject by Suze Orman. And if you’ve read some of Orman’s books, you may know about her first job as a waitress in Berkeley and how she got swindled out of an early investment, which made her want to . . .
My son Nicholas, age 5, recently discovered the internet. Last week I got him an account at Club Penguin, a website for kids. Since then, he has spent hours at a time on Club Penguin. He refuses to come to meals. He throws tantrums if forced to stop. Even when enticed with activities he used to find enjoyable, like terrorizing . . .
David Zetland David Zetland, the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at U.C. Berkeley, blogged here earlier this week about the economics of water. This is his second of two posts on the subject. Oil and Water By David Zetland A Guest Post Over the past few months, newspapers, blogs, and television screens have been . . .
It is always fun to see language grow. (No, I don’t mean menu language.) One of my favorite rising words is “kindergarchy,” described here by Joseph Epstein as “rule by children,” a condition whereby “children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right . . .
I was reading People magazine the other day, and it got me thinking about the following question: Why would an expectant mother have amniocentesis performed? Far and away, the most important reason for doing amniocentesis must be that knowing there are abnormalities early provides the option to get an abortion. The reason I was thinking about this question is that . . .
It has been argued previously here that John McCain, among others, seems to harbor a pronounced dislike for economists. Well, you don’t even have to be a politician to hate economists. Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, here’s a fascinating bit from an old paper by Robert Frank, Tom Gilovich (best known for his hot-hand refutation, and this fun book), and . . .
I’m moving to New Orleans in a month (and continuing as editor of this blog from there). I’ve gotten mixed opinions about quality of life from people who live there, but they all agree on two things: the food is spectacular; the weather is sweltering — and obviously, at times, extremely threatening. So for readers who live in the Crescent . . .
Dan Glickman We recently solicited your questions for Dan Glickman, C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Association of America. In his answers below, he discusses, among other topics, the source of his piracy figures and why the ratings board isn’t the “morality police.” He also tells us what he thinks of the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which critiqued . . .
Photo: soldiersmediacenter How do we know that parachutes are really a good treatment for preventing serious injury in someone falling from an airplane? That’s the subject of this tongue-in-cheek paper on the limits of evidence-based medicine, written by two physicians and published in the British Medical Journal. After applying to parachutes the guidelines usually used to test new drugs, the . . .
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