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.
Not because higher gas prices will spur people to walk or ride bicycles instead of driving. No, I’m thinking it might work like this: — Notwithstanding the recent drop, high oil prices have driven a demand for ethanol made from corn. — Accordingly, the price of corn is rising fast, with July contracts at $4/bushel, about 60 percent higher than . . .
Plainly, a lot of people these days are interested in happiness — how to get happy, why some people are happier than others, etc. For example, there’s Dan Gilbert’s best-seller Stumbling on Happiness and, currently at No. 1 on the N.Y. Times‘s list of most e-mailed articles, a piece by Dan Max about university happiness studies. Among the most intriguing . . .
When I was a graduate student, my mentor Jim Poterba told me more than once that my research should “always be about the economy and never about economists.” I took those words to heart and consistently resisted the temptation to do self-referential research about the economics profession. I finally violated Poterba’s rule at this year’s American Economic Association meetings. Doubly . . .
A publicist at U.C.L.A. has alerted us that the university is offering an online course called “The Economic Secrets to Everything.” It will be taught by Meric Keskinel of Loyola Marymount University. Here is how the course is described: At its heart, economics is the study of society. The goal of this course is to demonstrate the usefulness of economics . . .
I blogged recently about a small controversy over the film Happy Feet. It was about whether the tap dancer Savion Glover (whose website has the best possible opening-title sequence) should have gotten more credit for doing the actual dancing that Mumble, the animated penguin, performs in the film. My wife and I took our kids to see the film for . . .
We’ve written before on what is generally called “talent,” which most people seem to define as some sort of innate skill that, if properly trained, can result in excellence. But in our article, which relied heavily on the research of Anders Ericsson, we presented a slightly different definition of talent. Here’s one key paragraph: “I think the most general claim . . .
In their Jan. 7, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt ask the question we’ve all been asking: What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills, and a holiday gift card have in common? This blog post supplies additional research material.
What do a gym membership, a bottle of prescription pills, and a holiday gift card have in common? You’ll have to read our New York Times Magazine column to find out. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this site. You’re welcome to leave comments on this post. And thanks to Rory O’Connell, who . . .
There’s a fascinating article in today’s N.Y. Times about Blue Nile, an online diamond merchant that seems to be smoking its brick-and-mortar competitors. Five years ago, this would have seemed most unlikely. As the article’s author, Gary Rivlin, puts it: “People might be willing to buy a book online, or a CD, and maybe a toaster … but a $3,000 . . .
My colleague and co-author John List is one of the most prolific and influential economists around. He’s got a new working paper with Michael Margolis and Daniel Osgood that makes the surprising claim that the Endangered Species Act — which is designed to help endangered species — may actually harm them. Why? The key intuition is that after a species . . .
The American Economic Association annual meetings are going on right now. Once a year about 10,000 economists all descend on a city (never Las Vegas because not enough economists gamble), give seminars to one another, and interview the newest crop of Ph.D. students to determine who will get jobs where. The events at these meetings are not generally very newsworthy. . . .
… you should probably reconsider, based on this abject failure.
There is a very disturbing report in the new Consumer Reports about child car seats. Here’s an excerpt: You’d think that in a car crash, infants in their cozy car seats would be the most protected passengers of all. But you’d be wrong, our tests reveal. Cars and car seats can’t be sold unless they can withstand a 30-mph frontal . . .
A dear friend of mine, Leon Morris, is a rabbi who runs a Jewish-studies institute in New York. He has just moved to Israel for a six-month study sabbatical, and noted a fascinating cultural difference. Here is what he wrote about being in Jerusalem when Teddy Kollek, longtime former mayor of that city, died: I just saw the death notice . . .
A few weeks ago, I posted here about James Altucher’s new website Stockpickr.com, a sort of stock-picking wiki. Jim Cramer, the mad genius behind Mad Money and TheStreet.com, where Altucher is a columnist, also likes Stockpickr — enough to take a piece of Stockpickr’s action. Congrats to James. (Hat tip: Matt Hertz)
Classes started up yesterday at the University of Chicago. I’m teaching two classes this term, one to undergraduates and one to Ph.D. students. As I stood in front of the room looking over my notes as the last few students filed into class, one of the students approached me and pulled me aside, looking quite serious. Usually this means the . . .
Let me explain. First, here are the top ten Yahoo! search queries last year in Canada and in the U.S.: Yahoo! Canada 1. NHL 2. FIFA World Cup 3. American Idol 4. Rock Star Supernova 5. WWE 6. Neopets 7. Revenue Canada 8. Days of Our Lives 9. Environment Canada 10. Jessica Simpson Yahoo! U.S. 1. Britney Spears 2. WWE . . .
I would imagine that writers the world over, especially non-fiction writers, look back at their published work and think about what got left out. In my experience, there are two categories of omissions, and they are generally particular to their medium. The first category is in book writing. When writing a book, you aren’t all that limited by space. Even . . .
Yesterday’s blog quiz invited you to guess which TV show I’ll soon be appearing on. The clues were pretty sparse. It was a show “that, if you think about it, fits pretty nicely with Freakonomics. … The show is in prime time and it’s taped, not live.” And yet just 35 minutes after the blog posting, the tenth commenter, “CakeEating,” . . .
If you are a professional or college athlete, one of the worst things you can do is lose your playbook. This is also a really bad idea if you work for someone who’s trying to be president of the United States. But that’s what happened to Rudy Giuliani: someone left behind his master plan, and someone from a rival’s camp . . .
For those of you who like to play our quizzes (see here and here and here and here), here’s a new one. But there are a couple of caveats/rule changes. First I’ll give the quiz, and then I’ll explain the rules. The quiz: I will soon be appearing on a TV show that, if you think about it, fits pretty . . .
There’s an interesting news brief in today’s N.Y. Times about a report just issued by the Food Marketing Institute about shoplifting in supermarkets. In previous years, health and beauty products were the most frequently shoplifted items, making up 23% of all stolen items in 2000. But last year, the percentage of health and beauty products had fallen to 14% of . . .
The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a guest OpEd columnist in the N.Y. Times, has an interesting piece today (subscription required) about W.E.B. DuBois’s famous prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line. The prediction, Patterson writes, had two components to it: “One side was the near complete exclusion of African-Americans and other minorities from the . . .
I got an interesting email from blog reader William F. Barkley the other day. I reproduce a condensed version of it below: This time each year I find myself mired in a College Football Bowl Pool with five college friends (we’re all around your age) from Babson College. We try to pick the winner (against the spread) for each of . . .
John Rockwell wrote an impassioned essay in the N.Y. Times about how the tap-dancing master Savion Glover is the unsung hero of Happy Feet. It was Glover who wore a motion-capture bodysuit and performed all the dancing that was then turned into the animated dancing of Mumble, the film’s penguin star. While conceding that the film’s director, George Miller, has . . .
A few years back I wrote an academic paper that set out to resolve a paradox in sports betting: how could it be the case that bookies systematically got the spread wrong in NFL football? In particular, home underdogs win far more games than they should against the spread. Despite the fact that bookies take a healthy cut of every . . .
A few months back, we wrote about one hospital’s very creative effort to get its medical staff to do a better job of washing their hands. Because so many people die in hospitals each year from bacterial infections they acquire while being treated for something else, the Institute of Medicine had sounded a loud alarm, urging all hospitals to do . . .
As James Altucher reports on his daily blog watch on TheStreet.com, the sale of domain names remains a very big business. This year, Diamonds.com went for $7.5 million, Vodka.com for $3 million, and Cameras.com for $1.5 million. According to DNJournal‘s list of the top sales in 2006, the 23rd biggest sale, going for $242,400, was Mortage.com. Not Mortgage.com, mind you, . . .
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has just released its annual list of the most popular dog names. I will list them below and, just for kicks, I’ll put in parentheses each name’s rank among the most popular boy or girl baby names in the U.S. If a dog name doesn’t have a number next to . . .
Has anyone else noticed that the print edition of the Wall Street Journal is kind of funky these last days of 2006? The front pages of each section are printed on the regular newsprint we’re accustomed to, but the inside pages are on a different paper stock — whiter and stiffer and just plain strange. If I had to guess . . .
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