Thomas Goetz, the executive editor of Wired, has written a new book that he hopes will give people some tools in this effort. Goetz has agreed to answer some of our questions about his book.
Kyle Whelliston describes the secondary market for Olympics tickets in Vancouver.
In wake of some of the latest chatter about The Wine Trials 2010 (this one from Joe Briand, wine buyer for New Orleans’s excellent Link Restaurant Group, e.g. Cochon, Herbsaint, with a response from Wine Spectator executive editor Thomas Matthews), I thought it was time for a quick clarification of first principles here.
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Here is the latest round.
Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal, answers questions from the BBC.
Via the Wall Street Journal, here’s further evidence that companies “tweak” quarterly earnings numbers. Joseph Grundfest and Nadya Malenko analyzed almost half a million earnings reports from 1980-2006. They discovered that when companies want to appear more successful than they are, they often massage their per-share earnings numbers upward by a tenth of one cent.
Why do men do most of the driving? Recently I’ve posted articles showing that when men and women ride together the man is much more likely to be behind the wheel (see this link and this link). What do you, the readers, think about this?
It may be the most emotionally powerful photograph to come out of the Great Depression: the well-dressed, unemployed business man hawking apples for a nickel on a city street corner. It’s a poignant image-the stoic gentleman attempting to preserve a vestige of dignity for himself and his family. But is it an accurate reflection of the era?
My fourteen-year-old grandson tells me that he got the iPhone app GraphCalc for free a few months ago. When he looked recently, he noticed that Apple is now charging $0.99 for this now very popular app.
Economists love to make predictions about the Summer Olympics, but the Winter Games generally attract less attention. One economist, however, does have some predictions for this year’s Games.
Yale’s business school just published an interesting interview with Betsey Stevenson-my favorite economist.
A new paper by Michael Sivak, Brandon Schoettle, and Jonathan Rupp takes a look at what keeps people alive in fatal traffic accidents.
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Here is the latest round.
My colleagues laughed at me today when I mentioned I was doing my taxes. They argued that, given the price of my time – my wage rate – I should hire a professional.
Here is part two of the WSHU “Better Biz” series, in which Barry Nalebuff and I react to the challenges of specific businesses. In this segment, we talk about the super-cool travel site Kayak.
BBC News reports that British cat owners are better educated than dog owners.
As snow continues to blanket much of the East Coast, a critical debate rages on: if you clear a parking spot, do you own it?
When I tell people about my parents, they never believe me. But the truth is, my father really is the world’s foremost medical expert on intestinal gas, and my mom really is a psychic.
In the SuperFreakonomics Virtual Book Club, we invite readers to ask questions of some of the researchers and other characters in our book. Last week we opened up the questioning for Allie, a high-end escort whose entrepreneurial skills and understanding of economics made her a financial success.
My Wharton colleagues Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman have an intriguing new paper out that analyzes what it takes for an article to make the New York Times’s most emailed list.
You may have read about the standoff between Amazon.com and the Macmillan publishing company. Macmillan had objected to Amazon’s pricing, particularly its loss-leader $9.99 e-book price for new books. In turn, Amazon.com temporarily halted the sale of all Macmillan books.
We tend to think of recent technological change as a complex process involving huge amounts of capital and labor (large numbers of researchers and developers). Yet the Winter Olympics should remind us that it is still possible to improve output with a little thought, luck and experimentation.
In the past, I’ve written on matters of high import for the future of our republic, and on literal questions of life and death. But clearly, nothing excites the Freakonomics readership more than the issue of why men tend to do the driving when a couple is in the car. The Times’s server nearly melted down as more than 400 of you posted responses to my article on the subject.
The U.S. has spent more than $5 billion on military and anti-narcotics aid for Colombia in recent years. In a new article for Slate, Ray Fisman points to a new paper that analyzes conflict and coca production in areas with and without Army bases to determine the impact of all that aid.
WSHU, a public radio station in Connecticut, is running a six-part “Better Biz” series, where Barry Nalebuff and I react to the challenges of specific businesses.
Football great Emmitt Smith was just inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had the great pleasure of playing golf with Emmitt a few years back. It is a round I will never forget.
Food packaging seems like a straightforward problem with a straightforward solution: there’s too much of it; it piles up in landfill; we should reduce it. These opinions are standard among environmentalists, many of whom have undertaken impassioned campaigns to shroud consumer goods-including food-in less and less plastic, cardboard, and aluminum.