Today I will give my long-awaited response to the many questions about the leading phraseological enigma of our time, namely the origin of the phrase “the whole nine yards.” I am sorry to disappoint by having no definitive answer, but the reality is that many of the major etymological riddles have no known answer.
National borders may sometimes seem like arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but a new study from the University of Haifa reveals that those borders mean something to the resident animal populations.
There’s a strange view out there that with unemployment above ten percent, and inflation nascent, the Fed should be thinking about raising interest rates. Yesterday Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser attempted to explain his view:
Gautam Naik provides an interesting and cleverly written piece on the search for a biological basis of violent behavior.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice (here’s his TED talk on the topic) was, for me at least, very persuasive. It made a compelling if counterintuitive argument: even though many people (economists especially) argue that more choice is almost always a good thing, Schwartz argued that too much choice is actually a bad thing, causing decision paralysis and unhappiness.
A Boston Globe article explains how “positive deviance” — a way to change behavior by using “nudges” that already exist in a community, rather than imposing them from the outside — substantially decreased malnutrition in a Vienamese village: researchers observed children who looked more nourished than others, found that their families were feeding them crabs — considered a low-class food — and encouraged neighbors to follow the family’s good example.
A lot of industries are obviously weather-dependent — agriculture, tourism, etc. — but I hadn’t known that the traditional production of roofing slate in the U.K. was also at the mercy of the weather. Here is but one of many fascinating things you can learn from Simon Winchester’s excellent book The Map That Changed the World, about the proto-geologist William Smith:
It seems to make all the sense in the world. You are WPMI-TV, the NBC affiliate that covers southern Alabama and some of the Florida Panhandle, and you rent a big electronic billboard to promote your nightly news and weather team.
Last week we opened up the questioning for Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist whose fieldwork on street prostitutes in Chicago is the foundation of a long section of our first chapter. Here are his replies. Thanks to Sudhir and all of you for participating.
I got a good chuckle out of this piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian about the recent global warming e-mail controversy.
My view is that the emails aren’t that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals?
Foreign Policy released its list of 2009’s Top 100 Global Thinkers. The No. 1 spot goes to Ben Bernanke for “staving off a new Great Depression,” while Obama takes No. 2 for “reimagining America’s role in the world.” A few of our old favorites also made the list.
Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home last year, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn’t include bagels eaten at work, where a not-completely-insignificant number are delivered by bagel economist Paul Feldman). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, 1,979 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.
Bring your questions for George Atallah, and follow him on Twitter at @gatallah.
At Big Think, Dan Ariely discusses ways to think about money so you splurge less — like equating expensive wine with gallons of milk and making paying hurt a little more.
Our new study poses a conundrum: in a professional market (for economists), having more scholars pay attention to your research raises your reputation and your salary. Conditional on that attention, though, writing more papers lowers your reputation — but it raises your salary!
The island of Kiribati began to subsidize coconut harvesting in the hopes of encouraging fishermen to switch to the coconut trade and thereby help preserve Kiribati’s reefs from the ravages of overfishing.
Indeed, the conclusion of the slogan “you’ve come a long way, baby” ironically demonstrates that women had not come quite as long a way as they might have hoped. Even now, important gender differences persist, and they show up quite clearly in the realm of transportation.
‘Tis the season for turkey shopping, and the price is right. According to this Wall Street Journal squib, the price of whole frozen turkeys has fallen from 94 cents per pound last year to just 66 cents per pound, with Wal-Mart leading the way, selling turkeys for just 40 cents per pound. (Note: price estimates vary.)
We spend a good bit of time in SuperFreakonomics writing about doctors’ hand hygiene: specifically, how important good hand hygiene is in order to cut down on hospital-acquired infections and yet how historically it has proven difficult to enforce.
Drinking alcohol puts people at high risk for all kinds of misfortunes. Exposure to date-rape drugs, however, doesn’t seem to be one of them.
In a study published in the British Journal of Criminology, more than half of the 200 university students surveyed said they knew someone whose drink had been spiked. But judging from evidence in police and medical records, these numbers are probably highly inflated.
Yesterday, and for much of the past year, I regularly did something that was perfectly legal.
Starting today, if I do the same thing, I am breaking a New York State law.
What is it that I’m doing?
The first correct answer earns a signed copy of SuperFreakonomics or a piece of Freakonomics schwag.
Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics, called “Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism,” takes a look at the research of John List (the Univ. of Chicago economist, not the notorious murderer of the same same — although the same chapter does cast a new light on a famous murder as well). List’s research challenges the prevailing wisdom on a few decades’ worth of lab experiments which seemed to prove that human beings are innately fair or even altruistic.
If you’d like to turn your garden-variety copy of SuperFreakonomics (or Freakonomics) into a nifty autographed copy that suddenly seems much more gift-appropriate, you can sign up here for a free bookplate that is hand-signed by Levitt and Dubner. If all goes well, the Freakonomics elves will dispatch your bookplate via mail in plenty of time for the holidays. It’ll look something like this:
Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents “to raise undergraduate fees – the equivalent of tuition – 32 percent next fall.” But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity. As Aaron Edlin and I wrote back in 2003:
The last two years I’ve run an “externality” contest in my giant intro class, offering $5 to the student who comes up with the best example.
Daron Acemoglu describes what makes a nation rich in a new article for Esquire. According to Acemoglu, experts who believe geography or the weather or technology are to blame for persistent poverty are missing a much simpler economic explanation: people respond to incentives.
When we think about “scientists,” most of us probably envision people toiling away in the lab or the field, accumulating and analyzing data in order to test theories, leaving their personal biases at home, scrupulously considering any confounding data or theories and willfully distancing themselves from the political implications of their research.
How quaint.
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good?
In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty memoirs beginning with 2005’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The books were adapted for television in the U.K. (where she is portrayed by Billie Piper) and later in the U.S.
“What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?” These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University’s Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in the world, no one really understands why one person hates another.