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.
Celebrity endorsements have been popular for a long time, but fashion experts are repotedly now practicing a new marketing strategy loosely known as “unbranding”: “Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors’ bags!”
Lego has been christened the most popular toy ever made, despite — or maybe because of — its bias toward males over females in its Minifigures. But Lego has at least one other bias: the company produces a full line of Star Wars sets, but not a single set for Star Trek fans.
A couple weeks ago, Ian Ayres became briefly fascinated and somewhat appalled by the appearance of a new Internet business that offered a sort of insurance against speeding tickets. In return for an annual fee of $169, ticketfree.org promised to reimburse you for the costs of up to $500 in moving violations. Then, the site suddenly disappeared. Why?
A group of 40 American billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, has publicly vowed to donate at least half of their wealth to philanthropic causes. Gates and Buffett, through their project The Giving Pledge, hope to persuade the 400 richest Americans to join them. If successful, the duo could generate an unprecedented $600 billion for charity (Americans as a whole donate about $300 billion a year). A laudable example of pure altruism, right? German shipping tycoon Peter Krämer thinks not
Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future. The decline in such optimism during the past couple of decades is understandable, but highly regrettable. The best way to restore this optimism is to promote faster economic growth. That is feasible with the right policies, but will not happen automatically. Even America has no destiny to be optimistic about the future without important redirection of various public priorities.”
Vice President Joe Biden says he’s willing to place a bet that Democrats will retain their majorities in the House and Senate. But is that a smart idea?
People are significantly fatter in countries, states, and cities where car use is more common. Mass transit use, on the other hand, is correlated with lower obesity. But there has been scant evidence that public transportation actually causes widespread weight loss — until now.
The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson presents information on disability payments to injured World War I veterans: 16 shillings per week (80 pence to those unfamiliar with older British money) for the loss of a right arm, 15 shillings for the loss of a left arm. Since about 90 percent of people are right-handed, this is more equitable than the reverse. But why not equality?
We recently solicited your questions for Bill Barnwell, a Football Outsider and one of the many authors of the new Football Outsiders Almanac. Here are his replies, which cover everything from miracle turnarounds to the role of injuries to his own background.
All things — including wealth — being equal, earthquakes kill more people in dictatorships than in democracies, write NYU political scientists Alastair Smith and Alejandro Quiroz Flores. They reason that democratically elected leaders prepare their countries for disaster better because they fear they’ll be voted out of office if their governments are caught unprepared.
Levitt’s skepticism notwithstanding, it seems there may be a good reason for some people to get tattoos. David B. Wiseman, a psychologist, showed 128 undergraduate students photographs of tattooed and non-tattooed female models, described as “college instructors.” He found that college students prefer tattoos.
Imagine a world where Hollywood producers could predict, with scientific precision, the box office revenue a movie will generate just by reading the screenplay. A new forecasting model devised by a trio of marketing professors from Wharton and NYU promises to deliver something like that.
The Book of Odds takes a look at a question that flashes through the minds of many people the moment they board an airplane: what are your odds of surviving a plane crash? They found that “[t]he general survival rate for a casualty-inducing airline incident is about 38% or, in our parlance: your odds of survival are about 1 in 2.63.”
A few months ago, Dubner snapped some iPhone pictures of the Arctic from an airplane. If you’re hankering for some professional photos, check out FP’s photoessay “The Ice Kingdom.”
When given strong data to work with, computers can do a good job of beating humans in predicting what the masses will embrace. BusinessWeek has an interesting recap of successful machine-made future-gazing.
A new study from sociologists Constance Gager and Scott Yabiku shows that household labor and sexual frequency are not inversely related — a welcome contradiction to the common “more work = less sex” equation. Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, the authors show that certain types of couples have superior time-organization skills across all their major time commitments: the workplace, at home and in bed.
Planet Money interviews Nassim Taleb for its Deep Read series. Taleb compares the developed world’s dependence on debt to drug addiction.
Two Hong Kong architects believe that as we pollute the air, our skyscrapers can help clean up the mess. Frederick Givens and Benny Chow’s “Indigo Tower” features a “nano-coating of titanium dioxide,” designed to neutralize pollution when it hits the building.
I’m starting to think about my annual list, run by the Associated Press, of the top 10 most notable quotations of the year (I know it’s only August, but it’s good to start gathering quotes before the early-in-the-year ones become forgotten). By “notable” I mean “important” or “famous” or “particularly revealing of the spirit of our times” rather than necessarily being eloquent or admirable. An obvious candidate for this year is Tony Hayward’s “I’d like my life back.”
Last month, roughly two years into a global financial maelstrom, the U.S. Congress passed a financial-reform bill. It was more than 2,300 pages long, addressing everything from derivatives to consumer financial products to oversized banks. We asked a few clever people a simple question.
How’s this for working overtime? Forbes estimates that hip-hop artist Lil’ Wayne will make more money behind bars this year than he did last year.
A few days ago, I appeared on NPR Morning Edition talking about Monopoly (the game, not the market form). Until then I hadn’t thought much about the economics of the game (which I played very often as a child, with our sons and for the past five years with our grandchildren).
What’s the most embarrassing thing about human decision-making? It’s not that we make cognitive mistakes, says Yale cognitive psychologist Laurie Santos, in this recent TED talk. It’s that we seem doomed by our biology to make the same predictable mistakes over and over.
A new paper by Feng Chi and Nathan Yang asks a seemingly simple question: “Is there actually a link between (subjective) social status and wealth?”
Few figures polarize the planning profession like Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. As far as I know, O’Toole has never attempted to steal Christmas and was nowhere near the grassy knoll, but nevertheless if you’re going to bring up his name at a gathering of transportation planners you’d better have a defibrillator handy. In part, the outrage O’Toole provokes is due to his sometimes colorful mode of self-expression, but basically it comes from the fact that he is one of a handful of planners (or, as he calls them, “antiplanners”) who take issue with the prevailing orthodoxy in the field.
New research shows that, in addition to being man’s best friend, dogs improve productivity in the office.
How much does school choice matter? Probably less than you think, as Levitt has previously argued. Now, in an analysis of seven years of test-score data from 6,000 Los Angeles teachers, the L.A. Times and the Rand Corp. have found teacher effectiveness to be three times more influential than school attendance on student performance.
As widely reported in the press recently, analysis done by the online dating site OKCupid finds that iPhone users are more sexually active than those who have Blackberrys or Androids.
This week we’re offering up “Ian Horsley.” By day, he is employed in the anti-fraud department of a large British bank; but in his every spare moment for the past few years he has been working hard in collaboration with Steve Levitt to build an algorithm that can identify potential terrorists by their retail banking data.
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
