I’ve been waiting for a news story to come along to give me the excuse to post my favorite economics photo of the year. Now that the year is over, I figure I’ll just post it.
This photo illustrates the two most important forces in my life.
Yes, today is December 31. So get off this site and go find someplace to exercise your altruism, as impure as it may be.
Before you commit to those New Year’s resolutions, you might want to read Jonah Lehrer’s recent article on the limitations of willpower.
A movie theater in Santa Monica, California, advertises that it will give you a free box of popcorn if you donate $2 to charity.
The usual gimmick at movies is that the profits from sale of popcorn and other refreshments go to some charity.
Typically, I run my stuff past a few test readers to see if it will meet the lofty standards of Freakworthiness. Reactions were mixed on my plan to do a series on gender and travel (see the first installments here). Some thought it was bound to be a bore because, duh, of course men’s and women’s travel patterns are going to be very different. Others thought it was bound to be a bore because, duh, of course in this day and age men’s and women’s travel patterns are going to be very similar. There was widespread sentiment that I’m going to bore you – but who was right about why?
The companies Tiger Woods endorsed – and their shareholders – are feeling the negative effects of his extramarital affairs. A new company called Off the Market, reports CNBC’s Darren Rovell, hopes to take advantage of this development by helping athletes keep their existing relationships “positive and sexy.”
That’s how the Las Vegas Weekly describes economist Pete Leeson’s book The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.
The Invisible Hook is an excellent book by one of the most creative young economists around, Pete Leeson, based off some of his academic papers, including this one that was published in Journal of Political Economy when I was the editor. I have to admit that as an editor I was skeptical when I received a manuscript on pirates from an obscure economist, but the combination of careful research and really interesting insights quickly won me over to Leeson’s work.
We’ve blogged repeatedly about the fascinating capabilities of monkeys and now it seems our primate cousins may beat us to Mars. Russia’s Cosmonautics Academy, which first sent monkeys into orbit in 1983, is in talks with Georgian scientists to prepare monkeys for a simulated Mars mission.
Levitt recently wrote about geoengineering going mainstream – i.e., being featured in the M.I.T. Technology Review. That fine publication may not be as “mainstream” for the rest of us as it is for Levitt. But now NBC Nightly News has weighed in on the topic.
In recent months, the U.S. government has taken on a challenging and controversial new role: private sector investor. This development has raised a host of questions about the government’s role in the economy and a new book by Josh Lerner, Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed – and What to Do About It, is required reading for anyone hoping to understand the issues.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, E.S. Browning has written a quietly important article (gated) about the fact that stock-market returns are almost never adjusted for inflation. While most shrewd investors factor in this omission, my sense is that a great many people never think about it, and therefore significantly overestimate their investment gains.
Despite the recession, the Associated Press reports, U.S. crime rates continue to fall in 2009 compared to last year. Sociologists and crime experts are citing the economic stimulus, people staying home from lack of work, and even an aging population as possible causes of the drop.
One of the great unresolved questions of predictive analytics is trying to figure out when prediction markets will produce better predictions than good old-fashion mining of historic data. I think that there is fairly good evidence that either approach tends to beat the statistically unaided predictions of traditional experts.
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round.
Only one in ten Israeli adults is an organ donor and the country is addressing the situation with an innovative new policy. Organ donors and their close relatives will now receive priority if they require a transplant.
The MIT Technology Review — one of my favorite magazines —
writes about geoengineering in the January/February 2010 issue. Much of what is said in the article will be familiar to people who have read SuperFreakonomics, but it also talks about carbon capture, which we didn’t discuss much.
Australian mothers pay up to $1,000 for it on the Internet due to the country’s shortage of breast-milk banks, the Courier Mail reports.
For a few months now, we’ve been soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline. You can find his first few batches of answers here, and he’s back now with another round. You can leave new questions for him in the comments section below.
The great Paul Samuelson passed away last weekend at the age of 94, and several economists have now written about his life and work…
The Economix blog links to a PBS Newshour piece that includes two discussions of the current macroeconomics debate — one between talking heads, and the other in the form of economics hip hop (a genre we’ve reported on previously).
Same for Nigerians seeking to transfer millions of dollars to me (if I give them my bank account number).
I haven’t gotten one of these in a year, after often getting several a day. I assume that the spammers realized that the return per period of time — the price of the activity — was less than its marginal cost: the opportunity cost of their time.
And, Nathan being Nathan, there is a brief discussion of penguin poo.
For the 20-year period ending in 2007, the Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA championship record did a surprisingly good job of reflecting the stock market.
Who owns the rights to an air space and to a view? What are property rights in such cases? An article in our local paper discusses complaints of residents in a luxury condo complex who are insisting that the City Council help pay the $75,000 it would cost an outdoor advertiser to move a billboard that blocks their view and lowers their property values.
What was Stanford statistics student Ryan Tibshirani to do when his buddies kept beating him at darts?
The second chapter of SuperFreakonomics, which is primarily about catching terrorists and running an emergency room, includes a few passages about the timing quirks of births and deaths.
If you’re in Times Square on Saturday, Dec. 19, keep an eye out for SuperFreakonomics on the Dow Jones news zipper. A piece of Freakonomics schwag will go to the first person who sends us a photo of the book’s name up in lights.
Waiting may be fun when it involves opening Christmas presents or paying off your credit cards, but waiting for the bus is a miserable experience pretty much any way you look at it.
Long waits are one of the most important — perhaps the most important — barriers deterring Americans from riding mass transit.
Each week, I’ve been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round.
Christmas and economists go together like – well, like drinking and walking. Joel Waldfogel, the economist who is famous for highlighting the deadweight loss of gift-giving, has a new book out called Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.