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.
In his book Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow quotes a letter that speaks to the hoary economic historians’ debate about the profitability of slavery. Washington noted that in his time Virginia estates were forever doomed to lapse into debt, “as Negroes [sic] must be clothed and fed and taxes paid…whether anything is made or not.” Even if slavery were on average profitable, Washington noted that slaves represented a fixed cost of production.
A new working paper (ungated version here) by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian may have interesting implications for U.S. policy on humanitarian aid. We’ve blogged before about the “crowding out” effect of food aid, but this research points to another alarming effect:
[A]n increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts.
The Super Bowl has by now become such an institution – it’s practically a second New Year’s Day – that just about everyone feels compelled to watch it, even if they don’t care one bit about football. One consequence of this fact is that the broadcast of the game (on NBC this year; it rotates annually among NBC, CBS, and Fox) has turned into an another event entirely: the most massive real-time advertising opportunity in history.
This has had a few linked effects: the price of the ads has risen ever higher; advertisers spend more time and effort making better ads; and the ads have gotten so good that a lot of people time their kitchen or bathroom breaks to the game action in order to not miss the ads.
A reader named Mark Weitzman calls our attention to a Yomiuri Shimbun article with a provocative claim:
Quake efforts blamed for rise in snow mishaps
This winter’s heavier snowfall has seen more than 500 people across seven prefectures die or become injured in snow-related accidents, including cases in which they had been trying to remove snow, it has been learned.
People are trying to remove snow themselves using shovels and other tools because of delays in municipal-led snow removal. The delays have been caused by a shortage of dump trucks–many of which are being used in areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake for reconstruction work–to transport snow.
According to data compiled by the Akita, Aomori, Ishikawa, Nagano, Niigata, Toyama and Yamagata prefectural governments, the death toll from such snow-related accidents had reached 31 as of Wednesday, while 479 people had sustained injuries.
With the upcoming Super Bowl this Sunday pitting the Giants against the Patriots again (they last faced off in 2008), who could forget the most infamous play in Super Bowl history? And in case you did forget, the image of David Tyree reaching back until he was nearly parallel to the field and snatching the ball with one hand and pinning it to his helmet has been either shown or referred to at least 150 times on ESPN and the NFL Network in the last week — and we’re still a week away from the game!
The play was extraordinary, no doubt about it, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of that play was something rather ordinary that happened well before Tyree made his remarkable grab (it was the last catch of his career by the way—one hell of curtain call!), something that is much more likely to be a factor in the upcoming game.
I have probably seen and listened to more opera than the median American, but that’s not saying much. In other words, I am not very knowledgeable about opera itself, or its history and mores, etc. If I were, what I’m about to tell you probably wouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Not long ago, in an airport far from home, I met a nice fellow who turned out to be a Spanish-born tenor now living in the States, named Alvaro Rodriguez. We kept in touch and he let me know that he’d be performing with the New York Lyric Opera, playing Don Jose in Carmen. So I bought my tickets and decided to read up on Carmen since: a) I didn’t know the story all that well; and b) my French is spotty at best; and c) this would be a scaled-down production, with no subtitles, etc.
In our latest podcast, “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?” we talked about America’s financial literacy problem, a topic we’ve written about before. In the podcast, two Council of Economic Advisers chairmen discuss the role of financial illiteracy in the recession. And economist Annamaria Lusardi and legal scholar Lauren Willis offer their solutions to the problem.
Two designers, Tristan Cook and Thomas Nelson of Humans in Design, also have a pitch.
More evidence of the relationship between the housing market and the overall economy:
Construction makes up less than 5 percent of employment but accounts for more than 40 percent of the large swings in the job-filling rate during and after the Great Recession.
That’s from “Recruiting Intensity During and After the Great Recession,” by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John C. Haltiwanger (abstract; PDF).
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Playing the Nerd Card.”
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
It’s about the rise in basketball players (and other athletes) showing up at press conferences wearing the kind of eyeglasses usually associated with Steve Urkel and Buddy Holly. Among the practitioners: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, and Robert Griffin III.
What’s going on here? Has the rate of myopia exploded, even among premier athletes?
We talk to Susan Vitale, a research epidemiologist with the NIH’s National Eye Institute, who worked on a large study on myopia in the U.S. There has indeed been a huge spike in recent decades, and it’s especially pronounced among blacks.
I am fascinated by the Stanford online courses in machine learning and artificial intelligence. My first inkling of them came when quite a few of my students started taking the artificial-intelligence class. Olin is very small, only about 400 students, so I realized that these online courses must be large. But I almost fell over when I saw that enrollment varied from 66,000, at the low-end, to 160,000.
Sebastian Thrun, who co-taught the artificial-intelligence course to 160,000 students, is now leaving Stanford teaching in order to teach courses to 500,000 students for free. What an inspiring goal!
Jon Bois at SB Nation writes about the disappearance of Bobs in sports:
Across the histories of Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and NCAA football and basketball, there have been a total of 1,884 athletes who primarily went by the name Bob. Not Robert, or Bobby, but Bob.
Of those 1,884 Bobs, Sanders [of the San Diego Chargers] is the only one still playing.
We’ve written regularly about names and how some just go out of fashion. The fact is that “Robert” is still holding its own.
As someone in a mixed marriage — that is, in our home we read on Kindles
Hi guys, read your 1st book and I’m on my way to finish SuperFreakonomics, today it happened something that I thought you would be interested. First a little introduction:
Two months ago I purchased a Nook simple touch e-book reader, these gizmos aren’t that popular here in Argentina compared to USA, so my wife’s 1st reaction was, why you spent money on that thing? So I loaded it with some books, she likes and not a day passed then she said: this Nook is mine, you should get a new one for yourself. Strategic error on my side, I should had purchased two to start with.
1. President Obama is reading The World America Made
2. Austan Goolsbee is on Twitter, and has lots to say. (This will surprise no one who read this.)
3. If you have a Godfather-obsessed kid, as I do, you may want to read The Godfather Effect.
4. “Is economic repugnance closely related to biological disgust?” Yes, this is from our friend Al Roth. More here on disgust and food.
Have any of you seen Sleep No More? And if so, did your experience as an audience member make you think (as it did me) of the social experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo (though without the sadism)? And — bonus question — is anyone actually working on a social-science research project involving Sleep No More?
The other day, we woke up to realize that we were about hit our 400,000th follower on Twitter. So we put out the following tweet, offering some swag.
Innocent enough, no?
But we had walked right into an incentive trap.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Olympian Economics,” with Tess Vigeland sitting in for Kai Ryssdal this week.
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
With the 2012 Summer Olympic Games getting underway this week in London, we ask a simple question: do host cities really get the benefits their boosters promise, or are they just engaging in some fiscal gymnastics?
If you’ve read what we’ve posted in the past about the Olympics, you may already have a glimmer of a hint of a possibility of the answer to that question.
I have long been interested in the effects — psychological, economic, and otherwise — of jealousy (and, relatedly, disgust and repugnance). Even using the word “jealousy” is probably loaded. (Maybe “resentment” is better? Doubtful.) In any case: somewhere between the 99% movement and the Mitt Romney-as-private-equity-bloodsucker meme lies a discussion that includes a lot of legitimate questions about fairness and a lot of less-legitimate emotional reaction that gets turned into political and intellectual fodder.
The Austin City Council is about to outlaw the paper and plastic bags you get at the grocery store. Retailers don’t like the ban. One particularly clever argument by liquor retailers is that it will encourage people to buy less — not a good thing, so they argue, when unemployment is high.
This is a bad argument for so many reasons: 1) Booze demand and bag provision are at most only a tiny bit complementary — one can always carry the six-pack out by hand; 2) To argue that high unemployment is a reason for anything other than macro stimuli is totally self-serving. I think all universities should hire more economists to reduce unemployment (although others may differ). The best argument against the ban is that it is not efficient—the environmental improvements don’t justify the extra resource cost of schlepping reusable bags into stores. I don’t find even that argument to be very persuasive.
(HT to TC).
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast covers the upcoming Super Bowl between the New York Giants and New England Patriots. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
We figured that of the 100 million-plus people who “watch” the game each year, a lot of them aren’t what you’d call rabid football fans. Does that describe you? If so, this episode is a handy cheat sheet that’ll let you converse knowingly with your football-crazed friends, and maybe even one-up them.
Mark Cuban is known for a lot of things: the well-timed sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, which made him rich; his high-profile ownership of the Dallas Mavericks (and co-ownership of the media company 2929 Entertainment); his cameos on Entourage, and much more. (FWIW, Forbes pegs Cuban’s net worth at $2.3 billion.)
Now Cuban has published an eBook, How to Win at the Sport of Business
In our latest podcast “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?,” we revisited a topic we wrote about a few years back: how one hospital (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles) has tried to increase the rate of hand hygiene among its doctors. In the podcast, chief medical officer Michael Langberg regretfully reported that his doctors, like many doctors, routinely failed to wash their hands. Cedars-Sinai came up with a series of computer screensavers and posters that, along with some other creative measures, significantly jacked up the hand-hygiene rate.
1.How to embezzle. (HT: Van Brenner)
2. Tennis data freaks rejoice: 39 million data points, from all four Grand Slam tournaments, are being released. (HT: Anthony)
3. The economics of Communion wafers. (HT: mlimber)
4. A “rational expectations signaling model of lovemaking.”
Close your eyes. Imagine what it would feel like to run a marathon. Now imagine that you’ve run not just one marathon, but two marathons in a single day. Seems crazy. Now imagine you’ve run two marathons in a day, every day, for 10 months straight without a day off!
Meet Pat Farmer. He’s an ultramarathoner from Australia who is in the process of running from the North Pole to the South Pole. He covers 50 miles a day, except when he is using snow shoes near the poles. He only manages 16 miles a day in snow shoes.
I have to admit that it counts as one of the more bizarre requests of my scholarly life. After all, I’m just a straight-laced economist. But in light of the Gingrich affair — (which one? the one involving his wife’s accusation that he asked for an open marriage) — the New York Times Room for Debate section asked Betsey Stevenson and me to give an economist’s perspective on open marriage.
Adriano Dutra Teixeira, a Brazilian economist, sent us this photo from a restaurant. As he translates:
“Social Responsibility: 50% discount on meal for clients over 70 or bariatric surgery (stomach reduction).”
He adds:
I thought it was hilarious! So I wrote a blog post with a microeconomic approach to the promotion, using price discrimination.
I had to chuckle, in part because we’re finishing up a podcast about commitment devices, in which Levitt offers some bizarre alternatives to bariatric surgery (which we wrote about here), since it is such a drastic commitment.
A blog reader sent a message to her congressman, Tim Walz, complaining about SOPA, the bill that aims to protect intellectual property rights online that has sent many internet folks into a tizzy.
Here is the response she got from Congressman Walz:
…SOPA approaches the problem as a criminal matter when in fact, study upon study shows that online piracy is best dealt with as an economic matter. Instead of using the Justice department as a sledgehammer amongst the delicate weeds of the internet, corporations must embrace the free market and adapt their business models to compete in a new reality. The ability to adapt and compete is the cornerstone of capitalism, we should promote this rather than rushing to insert ourselves in the market in ways that could severe disrupt internet commerce and progress.
Now, I don’t 100 percent agree with this answer, but I love the spirit of it – especially coming from a Democrat! That last sentence sounds like the argument you would get over faculty lunch in the University of Chicago department of economics.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Patent Gap.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
It centers around a new working paper called “Why Don’t Women Patent?” and we talk to one of its authors, the Rutgers economist Jennifer Hunt. (We recently previewed this research on the blog, and some of Hunt’s earlier research too.)
1. Who is more in need of a witness-protection program today: Billy Cundiff or Kyle Williams? (I’d pick Cundiff even though Williams is guiltier.)
2. Looks like defense really doesn’t win championships. Here’s the regular-season defensive ranking (yards per game) of the four teams who played yesterday: Ravens (3rd); 49ers (4th); Giants (27th); Patriots (31st). Giants will play Patriots in the Super Bowl.
3. At least the Harbaugh parents won’t spend Feb. 5 in a Sophie’s Choice situation — but I’m guessing they would have preferred to.
There are a lot of things that need to go right for any given person to succeed in the NFL. We know all the stories about bad breaks, freak injuries, and mismatched coaches. On the flipside, we know how much hard work, discipline, and even luck go into a successful career.
In this installment of Football Freakonomics, we take a step back to ask the most basic question: are great players born or are they made? In other words, how much does raw talent matter?
French diet guru Pierre Dukan is urging his government to give extra marks in school for a healthy BMI. The Telegraph reports:
“Obesity is a real public health problem that is rarely – if at all – taken into account by politicians,” Mr Dukan told newspaper Le Parisien ahead of the book’s launch.
Mr Dukan said his education plan would be “a good way to sensitise teenagers to the need for a balanced diet.”
He denied it would punish overweight children, saying: “There is nothing wrong with educating children about nutrition. This will not change anything for those who do not need to lose weight. For the others, it will motivate them.”
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