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 Chicago Tribune asked me to describe my most memorable summer camp experience. Are you kidding? There was no way in the world that I ever would have gone away to summer camp as a kid. The closest I could come up with was the following story, which my Aunt Liz will appreciate because she just taught my six year . . .
They are all speakers at the TED conference which is being held this week in Monterey, California. As I have written before, TED is perhaps the single most interesting way that a smart and curious person could spend a week. This is the first time Emily Oster, who is a Becker Fellow here at U of C, will be on . . .
The executives at American Airlines must be crazy. I heard a rumor — and I believe it is true — that they have made the decision to replace plastic knives with honest-to-God metal table knives in the first class cabin. Are they crazy? Metal table knives were banned after 9-11 for good reason! Those things are dangerous. They could poke . . .
I believe that my daughter Anya, who just turned five, may turn out to be a philosopher. (I know, there isn’t much money in philosophy, but the thought does warm my heart.) I base this suspicion on something she said the other night while she, I, and her six-year-old brother Solomon were setting up for a massive Playmobil battle. She . . .
A reader named Kevin Cornwell, who has his own blog here, wrote us the other day about the forthcoming book The Baseball Economist. It’s by J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University who writes the baseball blog Sabernomics. (I love that a baseball economist teaches at a university named for the same Georgia mountain for whom the first baseball . . .
I used to have a problem, but a friend of mine helped me with it. He didn’t know he was helping me; in fact, he wasn’t even my friend when this problem first cropped up. So, to clarify: he’s a new friend who helped me solve an old problem. My problem was this: I often record interviews on an Olympus . . .
In the U.K., there are plans afoot to charge a higher fee to park a larger car, even in your own driveway. Remember Swivel, the data mashup site we blogged about? Here’s another new data visualization site, called ManyEyes, run by IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. And here’s a thoughtful review of ManyEyes vs. Swivel. Standardized test scores in Illinois are . . .
A reader named Pete Dignan has noted that we tend to write pretty often about how people are afraid of things. In fact, that was the very theme of a recent 20/20 special to which I contributed. So he sent a link to this song, “Afraid,” by the band Waking Rothko. “The song says pretty much what you do,” Dignan . . .
There is a new TV show that pits adults against 5th graders. The adults don’t fare so well. But the adults chosen to go on the show are not randomly selected, and the 5th graders are even far less random. Illinois gives a state exam to all 7th graders. Some of the questions are on astronomy. The 7th graders didn’t . . .
A study just published in JAMA put four groups of overweight, premenopausal women on four different diets: Atkins, Ornish, Zone, and LEARN. The winner? Atkins, by a mile — in terms of weight loss as well as risk factors.
We are very fortunate to get some incredibly interesting and perceptive mail from readers. Occasionally, we share these queries (like here and here). We also get some hardcore snark, and we sometimes share those too (like this recent one). An e-mail that showed up the other day was so interesting that I wrote back to ask if I could simply . . .
I blogged recently about a Def Poetry Jam piece by Tommy Bottoms called “Basic Economics.” Below, thanks to the transcription diligence of Nicole (remember her? she wrote this very good blog post about predictive-text errors), are the lyrics of “Basic Economics.” There were a few phrases she couldn’t make out, each of which are marked with a “TK.” That’s journalism . . .
New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s new book, Positively American, isn’t selling very well. As of this writing, it is ranked #3,869 on Amazon.com, which probably translates into 2 or 3 books sold a day. It must be a little disappointing for someone as ambitious as Schumer to see his fellow Democratic senator Barack Obama selling that many books every second. . . .
Last weekend, I went to New York Comic Con with my 14-year-old nephew. As someone who’s never been heavily into superheroes, manga, anime, or gaming, I found it utterly fascinating. Gary Coleman was there, signing autographs (huh?), and I ran into a guy I knew from grad school, Roland Kelts, who has just published a book called Japanamerica: How Japanese . . .
This is an obviously important question on many fronts, especially since SSRI’s are among the most heavily prescribed drugs in the world, and because their safety and efficacy have lately been seriously questioned. So it would be helpful to know if, at the very least, anti-depressants decrease the probability of suicide. In this new working paper, Jens Ludwig, Dave E. . . .
They would both like to see the new Federal ban on Internet gambling overturned. At least D’Amato is getting paid to do something about it. Am I the only one surprised at how easily Congress enacted the ban? One day it seemed as though Internet gambling was a quasi-legal, hugely profitable, generally accepted practice. Then, all of a sudden, Congress . . .
In his New York Times column the other day (gated), David Brooks wonders aloud, and compellingly, if perhaps New Mexico governor Bill Richardson might somehow rise above the glamorously noisy H. Clinton/B. Obama fray and become the Democratic candidate for President. Here’s what Brooks likes about Richardson: He’s down to earth, accessible, funny, and smart. He is “the most experienced . . .
In the recent dustup over a Wikipedia administrator dubbed Essjay who lied about his academic credentials in a New Yorker profile, here’s how Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responded when The New Yorker recently ran a correction: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really . . .
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers. What does tenure do? It distorts people’s effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career . . .
This one is pretty top-notch. It’s a lecture/performance by Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s first-and-only stand-up economist. (Hat tip: Roberto Ruiz)
Tim Harford, author of “The Undercover Economist” has written a thoughtful article on my friend and co-author Roland Fryer’s research into the gap between Blacks and Whites .
After Slate wrote about an economics paper alleging a link between TV and autism, I blogged my skepticism regarding the claim. I haven’t seen or heard anything since that time to change my opinion. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal revisited that paper on autism, but also embedded the discussion into a larger question of whether economists and economic techniques should . . .
Here’s an interesting new working paper by T. Clifton Green, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, and Yue Tang, all of Emory University, who looked at nearly 8,000 sell-side Wall Street equity analysts in order to assess gender and job performance. In terms of sheer representation, they found that women actually lost ground from 1995 to 2005, from 16% to 13% of analyst positions; . . .
Yesterday I blogged about Al Gore blaming the media for inaction on global warming. Some of you asserted, albeit quite politely, that I am an idiot for disagreeing with Gore. I may well be an idiot, but let me clarify a bit. I acknowledge that I should have put a finer point on my objection to what Gore said. And . . .
The rosters of teams in the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Baseball have all become quite international by now. Not so the National Football League. This isn’t very surprising, since American football is barely played outside of the U.S. and Canada, while the other sports are. But the N.F.L., which dreams of expansion the way . . .
Here’s what he had to say. I would argue that he is, um, wrong. Anyone who can say with a straight face that the mainstream media’s portrayal of global warming has been overly skeptical deserves — well, an Oscar. P.S.: David Remnick wrote a very interesting essay on Gore in this week’s New Yorker (and his long Gore profile from . . .
The other night, I got to give a lecture at California State University, Fresno. I particularly like college lectures because of the audience blend: students (young), faculty/staff (usually medium age), and members of the community (typically older). It made me realize how seldom these different age cohorts assemble naturally. Too bad: the folks at Fresno were a great audience, and . . .
For the record, I do not hate Wikipedia, as I tried to make clear here. As a showcase of communal knowledge, it is astonishingly interesting and useful. But it is also, alas, a showcase of communal knowledge, which can lead to complications. There are other issues too. Back in July, Stacy Shiff published a really interesting piece about Wikipedia in . . .
This morning’s quiz was almost aggressively simple: name the new non-fiction book that was so mesmerizing that I nearly missed my lunch date. Your answers were, as always, pretty sensible: The Audacity of Hope, Infidel, Wikinomics, Survival of the Sickest, Blind Side, Pistol, The Race Beat, US Guys, Oil on the Brain, Size Matters, Stumbling on Happiness. What really surprised . . .
Redfin is a discount real estate brokerage in Seattle that has put together some interesting data analysis from their first year in business. Their numbers suggest that clients who use their discount brokerage firm pay a lower percent of the list price than the typical home buyer in Seattle (99.329% of the listing price with Redfin vs. 100.233% with other . . .
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