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.
If all goes as planned, I will be appearing on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., 8/8 — lucky in China!) at about 8:30 a.m. EDT to talk about this very blog, and to announce a fairly significant change. Hope to see you there. As one result of this change, comments on the blog will be temporarily suspended today, starting in . . .
On August 7, 1987, Lynne Cox swam the Bering Strait; no word on whether she was then asked to submit a urine test.
We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008. Q: Do you think the HBO series . . .
A few months ago, I attended yet another boring Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. This time, at least something good came of it. I met a guy named Weber Hsu, one of two young Merrill Lynch employees who left finance to start a yo-yo company, Yo-Yo Nation. Weber asked if we wanted them to create a special promotional Freakonomics . . .
I grew up just a few miles from the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. We were a family that was terrified of heights. At least once a month, my father would mention how he thought a bridge over the Mississippi was going to collapse. We would be calling him Nostradamus today, except that his doomsday prediction was about a different . . .
On August 6th, 1941, the U.S. government imposed a nightly curfew on gas stations to reduce fuel use in anticipation of entering World War II. By the way, oil sold at the time for an inflation-adjusted $12.75 a barrel.
Who will give up Barry Bonds’s 756th home run? The first person who correctly identifies the pitcher who winds up surrendering Bonds’s record-breaker will get a signed copy of Freakonomics. One guess per comment, please. And a related question: for all the talk about not wanting to be the pitcher who gives up Bonds’s 756th, would it really be such . . .
Organ donation is heading from a bogus reality show to the big screen: An A.P. article reports that Paris Hilton has landed a role in the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, a so-called “horror rock” musical that’s “set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco.” Hilton will play . . .
Not long ago, we took our kids to Hershey Park in Hershey, Pa. We stayed at the Hershey Lodge, which is an official Hershey Park hotel. My 5-year-old daughter, Anya, had heard from a schoolmate that Hershey Lodge gave away free Hershey bars — big ones — whenever you wanted and as many as you wanted. My wife and I . . .
Yesterday I wrote a nondescript post on books that knock God. It got more than 100 comments in a day — about as many as we have ever gotten on any post where we weren’t giving something away. Now I know who buys these books: the same people who read this blog.
A few days ago, we solicited your questions for hedge fund manager Neil Barsky. As always, your questions were terrific, and so are Barsky’s answers, below. One thing that surprised me, however, is that nobody asked Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, what he thinks about Rupert Murdoch‘s purchase of the Journal (and the rest of Dow Jones). This . . .
On August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell succeeded in making the world’s first coherent telephone call. Little did he know that, less than 150 years later, more than a billion people worldwide would be surfing the Internet on phone lines and broadband.
Via the Chicago Sun-Times: A University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital survey of 1,260 doctors found that those who considered themselves atheist or agnostic were just as likely to provide care for patients with little or no health insurance than those who were religious — a departure from studies finding that religious people are more charitable towards the poor. . . .
A little more than a year ago I blogged about how every third book had the word “bullshit” in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with “bullshit” in the title. Now, it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do. Daniel Dennett started the . . .
Tyler Cowen is giving away 15 copies of his new book, with a clever twist: you have to write in to Tyler on his Marginal Revolution blog and explain why you want his book, and why you want it for free. Hurry! As I type this, Tyler already has 55 comments in one hour. While he is a generous man, . . .
There’s a new news aggregator in town, called Newser.com, and from the quick look I gave it this morning, it immediately looks like one of the best I’ve seen. It summarizes the major news stories in a good paragraph or two, then provides prominent links to the major newspapers and wire services that did the original reporting, which makes the . . .
The legendary Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died on Monday (which happened to be the same day that the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman died). In its Antonioni obituary that ran yesterday, the New York Times noted that Antonioni “attended the University of Bologna, where he was a tennis champion and earned a degree in economics and commerce in 1935.” . . .
August 2 marks the 70th anniversary of the passage of the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937, which, while not explicitly banning the drug, did effectively render it illegal by assigning a tax to “[e]very person who imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers, or gives away marihuana.” While the tax itself ($1 a year) wasn’t bad, . . .
This morning, my six-year-old son Solomon was having breakfast and watching his favorite TV show, Really Wild Animals. (It’s a great show, National Geographic cinematography with quippy narration by — I kid you not — Dudley Moore.) Apparently the same commercials come on the show every morning, because I heard Solomon reciting along with one commercial as it played: “Whether . . .
Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .
While it may be true that we have no fans at the National Association of Realtors, at least there is someone in the real estate industry — a commercial leaser in Memphis — that likes us. Enough, at least, to rip us off. I have to say, I really like the subtle shadowing they did on the book title; it’s . . .
August 1 is the 26th anniversary of MTV, which launched in 1981 with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Appropriately enough, during the 2006 MTV Video Awards the Raconteurs performed a parody of that song, called “Internet Killed the Video Star.”
Discover magazine examines the attempts by physicists to break down the Planck scale, “a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down.” So far, all tries have been unsuccessful, leading more than one physicist to conclude that, “at the most fundamental level of physical reality,” time may not . . .
In today’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer writes about California farmers whose irrigation systems are being stripped of their copper wiring, presumably by methamphetamine addicts who sell the metal in the recycling market: Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper . . .
Here’s even more reason to take a deep breath and let anger slide: The American Psychological Association Journal has published a study led by Smith College psychologist Benita Jackson testing whether a relationship exists between levels of hostility and lung function — the reduction of which can lead to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, one of the leading causes of death . . .
I have a friend named Neil Barsky who used to be a journalist and now runs a hedge fund. This is not a typical progression in the journalism field. But that’s the fact. He did most of his journalism for the Wall Street Journal, principally covering real estate, and then he worked as a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, where . . .
Most of our blog readers couldn’t care less about refereeing in academic publishing. And they should be thankful. For a tenure-track economist, getting published is a brutal process. You spend a year or two coming up with an idea, try to think over every aspect of the problem, collect and analyze data, and finally produce a 30-page paper summarizing all . . .
On July 31, 1914, officials shut down the New York Stock Exchange following news that Germany had declared Kriegsgefahrzustand (defined as an “imminent-danger-of-war situation“) while Austria and Turkey were already mobilizing.
Here’s a unique solution to the problem of incentivizing organ donations: ABC News reports that a chain of kidney transplants has been started by a 28-year-old father of four, who donated his kidney to a stranger he found online. His generosity led the recipient’s husband to donate to another stranger, whose mother is now donating, and so on. Miguel Helft . . .
Last week, we offered several different views on ideas to save the African rhino. Ray Fisman, one of the participants, has followed up with another take: Pretty much any policy prescription that an economist will propose will have incentives at its core. In rhino conservation, economists’ mania for incentives would translate most directly into policy through programs that reward communities . . .
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