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 answer: in prisons, where CDs are routinely banned because they can be shattered and the shards refined into shivs. MP3 players are unavailable in most prisons, as are, one imagines, turntables. California-based entrepreneur Bob Paris got the idea five years ago to sell cassettes by mail to the 2.3 million people locked up in federal, state, or local prisons . . .
On one level, quantifying racism doesn’t make much sense. From the standpoint of individual experience, two people who suffer discrimination based on their ethnic status might feel equally violated even if the incident differs. Who can say one experienced “more racism” if both feel hurt? But let’s consider the question at the macro level. Specifically, what is the most racist . . .
Let’s begin with two questions: 1. Do you consider yourself financially literate? 2. If so, how did you get that way? And now, a third question: 3. How important is widespread financial literacy to the health of a modern society? Before you answer the first question, take this little quiz, borrowed from the website of Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of . . .
This is our third and final guest post from the very polymathic Nathan Myhrvold. The first two were Icelandic travelogues; this one takes us to Greenland. It includes some of the most stunning photographs we have ever seen. Iceland is a modern technological society which retains a frontier attitude. Greenland, on the other hand, really is a frontier — in . . .
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, send it along here. Enough with 21st-century movie lines. Let me now move on to 21st-century popular song lyrics. Here we face the same issues of qualitative decline as with movie lines, I believe. . . .
We’ve tackled the future of music distribution and we’ve taken on the War on Terror. But what happens when the two intersect? Apparently, guards at Guantanamo Bay have been playing David Gray‘s “Babylon” at all hours of the day and night, to distress detainees and soften them up for interrogation. Since this arguably constitutes a public performance of Gray’s song . . .
I spent three years at Harvard in the Society of Fellows. I had no obligations there except to spend my Monday nights eating fancy meals in the company of some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers: Nobel Prize-winning scientist Amartya Sen, philosopher Robert Nozick, etc. Dinner was always accompanied by expensive wine from the society’s wine cellar. Photo: Rhett Redelings . . .
Driving a car can be depersonalizing. That’s why drivers use bumper stickers, bobble-heads, fish brake lights, racing stripes, etc. to show others on the road their personalities, explains Tom Vanderbilt in his book, Traffic. A recent study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number — but not content — of personalized . . .
I recently blogged about whether we form our opinions more from information than experience. The starting point was a passage in David McCullough‘s book The Great Bridge, and he was comparing modern Americans with our 19th-century counterparts. I was interested not just as a historical comparison but because the information/experience question is compelling in its own right. Consider a doctor, . . .
Last week, I learned two important things. They both happened as the result of a post I wrote about various errors, typographical and otherwise. I noted that the excellent Economist magazine dropped an “r” from the word “pastries,” inadvertently rendering it “pasties.” Well, The Economist was not wrong but I sure was. Many readers informed me that a pasty (pl.: . . .
A recent study found that most amateur singers can carry a tune just as accurately as trained professionals, suggesting that singing may be as universal a human trait as talking. But good pitch doesn’t always mean good music — Bob Dylan, for example, seems to have gotten along just fine without perfect pitch. So what makes a singer “good?” (HT: . . .
It doesn’t seem fair that one person can be so good at so many things. Nathan Myhrvold is one such person. He is probably still best known as the former chief technology officer of Microsoft. These days, he runs an invention company and spends his free time digging up dinosaur bones, experimenting with old and new cooking methods, and taking . . .
Newspapers trumpeted a landmark event last week: a computer program beating professional poker players head-to-head at Limit Hold-Em. Parallels have been drawn to Big Blue‘s victory over Gary Kasparov roughly a decade ago. Those parallels are not very meaningful. First, heads-up Limit Hold-Em is a very simple version of poker — exactly the kind of game that a computer should . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings Yes, it’s because of climbing gas prices. And yes, it’s because of environmental concerns. And yes, maybe I’m just noticing these things because gas prices and environmental concerns have primed us to notice such things. (This is called confirmation bias, and it probably afflicts us all.) But doesn’t it seem as if some U.S. cities are starting . . .
We recently featured a Q&A with Julie Salamon, author of Hospital, and last week Julie wrote her first guest post for us. Here is her second. It touches on a subject of great interest to me, something we hope to address empirically in future writing: the cost/benefit dilemma of end-of-life medical care. End of Days A Guest Post by Julie . . .
We’ve written before about various “beauty premiums”: the advantages gained in the marketplace by people who are better looking, taller, or have better teeth than the average person. Empiricism and theory have their place, of course, but we decided to ask some real people to discuss how much looks really matter. Here are their answers; feel free to add your . . .
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, send it along here. Thanks to all for the hundreds of responses to the movie lines bleg. I was looking for 21st-century quotes, but there was some confusion on the issue. My sense is . . .
Fascinating new research by my University of Chicago colleague, Jeffrey Grogger, compares the wages of people who “sound black” when they talk to those who do not. His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, . . .
Readers of this blog might recall my earlier posts about Michael, a young man who is expecting to donate about $70 million over the coming decade. In the last six months, Michael has committed himself to understanding both the responsibilities and challenges of philanthropy. There was some interest in his progress among Freakonomics readers, so I thought it might be . . .
The Supreme Court recently struck down the gun ban in Washington, D.C. A similar gun ban in Chicago may be the next to go. The primary rationale for these gun bans is to lower crime. Do they actually work? There is remarkably little academic research that directly answers this question, but there is some indirect evidence. Let’s start with the . . .
Cigarette advertisers generally don’t mention cancer, although Silk Cut seemed to use it (in the form of an alligator) to tell smokers they’re cool for tempting death. Playing up your product’s risk isn’t a new strategy. This whiskey ad from the 1990’s, sent in by Freakonomics reader Douglas Kysar, makes vice look pretty sexy. Photo: Douglas Kysar The ad, from . . .
Folio reports that Time Inc. is starting a new magazine-subscription service called Maghound that sounds a bit like Netflix’s movie model: Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for mix-and-match “subscriptions” where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren’t locked in their memberships . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings An $11 billion seasonal industry has just gotten underway: summer camp. This morning, my wife and I sent our kids off to their first-ever day of camp. They are too young for sleep-away camp, so they’re going to a day camp that’s a short bus ride away. All over the city of New York, the summer-camp rhythm . . .
Wow. We really do live in the midst of a tidal wave of more detailed and interesting data. The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States. . . .
Starbucks, which may hope its new calorie listings will create demand amongst the calorie conscious, should love graphs like this one from HitWise: As you might expect, the chart shows an increase in online searches for “calories” and “diets” the first week in January, when resolutions are fresh. You might think that an April spike in “calories” searches is simply . . .
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 famous quotations — send it along here. Now, before you consider Fred’s latest request below, just ask yourself: Are you having a laugh? Thanks to the . . .
While advertising may try to mislead you, this piece of marketing — which a Freakonomics reader named Matthew Limber found on his milk cap — takes a completely honest (and apparently self-sabotaging) approach. Photo: Matthew Limber So did Listerine’s TV ads from 2005, which claimed that “Listerine’s as effective as floss at fighting plaque and gingivitis,” but cautioned, “There’s no . . .
I’m sure that most academics are used to the following: Occasionally I write a scientific paper, an OpEd, or a blog entry in which I wade into some controversy or another, and in the ensuing few days receive some fairly vitriolic messages in my personal inbox. I’m not objecting — after all, it seems that I’ve had my chance to . . .
The average human being will be substantially richer in 50 years, just as the average American today has a real income three times what it was in 1955. But the average human being will not have much more time in 50 years than today; and life expectancy has increased by only 10 percent in the U.S. since 1955, so for . . .
Health care is an important, huge, and growing piece of our economy. But as a reader named Beth Wieder points out, the design of medical devices isn’t always as user-friendly (or, I would add, as cost-efficient or as practical) as one might like. For instance, we blogged some time back about a very cheap and portable asthma spacer. Here is . . .
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