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.
When blog reader Kyle contacted us with his story of how thinking “freakonomically” first netted — then lost — him significant amounts of incremental income, we had what we’d call an “aha moment,” if Oprah hadn’t apparently patented that phrase.
Here’s Kyle’s story — and if you have a tale of “applied Freakonomics,” we’d love to hear it, too, and possibly feature it on the blog.
It’s well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive contract between family members.
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:
Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitchen you’ve ever seen; nor is the cookbook he is producing like any other that’s been published:
Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement.
The question was how heavily to weight the negatives — those who disapproved — compared to those who wanted to postpone.
Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium’s first decade. My favorite section to date is the “Overblown Fears” list. Here they are, in order:
1. Y2K
2. Shoe Bombs
3. Vaccines Cause Autism
4. Immigrants
5. Bloggers
6. SARS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu
7. Web Predators
8. Teen Oral Sex Epidemic
9. Anthrax
10. Globalization
If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC’s piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron book club. Some U.S. tour appearances are available online as well, from the Commonwealth Club, the Motley Fool, and the Philadelphia Free Library.
In the first installment of our virtual book club, Emily Oster answered your questions about her research (co-authored with Rob Jensen) which argues that the lives of rural women in India improved on several dimensions thanks to the widespread adoption of television.
That story appeared in our book’s introduction. Now we’re moving on to Chapter One. We will probably feature a few Q&A’s with the subjects and researchers featured in this chapter, which is described in the Table of Contents like this:
We’ve blogged extensively about the serious organ-doner shortage in the U.S. and the debate over establishing a market for organs. Now it seems the recession has uncovered some unexpected potential participants in the organ market: unemployed white collar Americans.
We are trapped in a world with far too few IRS audits. Law abiding tax payers hate being audited and their representatives in Congress have heard the message loud and clear – strangling the ability of the IRS to conduct field examinations. The problem with the current state of affairs is that non-law-abiding tax payers find it far too easy to avoid paying their fair share.
Police in Hunan province, China, raided a workshop said to be producing counterfeit condoms. According to the (U.K.) Times:
Bare-chested employees were found using vegetable oil to lubricate the condoms to make them smooth and shiny before placing them directly in fiber bags without bothering with sterilization.
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman’s mind-blowing book — and totally engrossing website — Bird.
In recent years, replacing your car with a Schwinn has become a popular idea for reducing your carbon footprint. However, not everyone has rushed to their local bike store: fewer than 2 percent of the population relies on bikes for transportation.
The folks at Appfrica have put together some interesting infographs on infrastructure investment and Internet connectivity in Africa. The graphs provide information on internet penetration and network readiness by country, and the various infrastructure development projects that are rapidly transforming Internet connectivity in Africa.
Remember the transportation stimulus package? Whatever happened to that money? I’m pretty sure it got allocated, but weightier transportation stories like hot-air-balloon fraud seem to have bumped highway spending off the front page. To catch you up, here are some recent numbers that are worth mulling over.
SuperFreakonomics briefly considers the possibility of a rogue leader like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deciding to unilaterally try geoengineering the planet. Who’d have thought Chavez would actually try some geoengineering with his own hands? According to this Reuters report, Chavez recently asked a team of Cuban scientists to seed clouds over his drought-stricken country.
I respect Bill Belichick more today than I ever have.
Last night he made a decision in the final minutes that led his team the New England Patriots to defeat. It will likely go down as one of the most criticized decisions any coach has ever made. With his team leading by six points and just over two minutes left in the game, he elected to go for it on fourth down on his own side of the field. His offense failed to get the first down, and the Indianapolis Colts promptly drove for a touchdown.
I was talking with some folks at LSU who were working on a proposal to exempt textbooks from sales taxes in Baton Rouge, currently a whopping 9%. I’m all in favor of cutting sales taxes, which are generally not progressive; but textbooks are a luxury good—college education is disproportionately undertaken by the offspring of higher-income families. Why subsidize higher-income college students still further?
Can you decipher this first grader’s math assignment? BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder wants a second opinion.
We all know that information is valuable, and that more information is generally better than less.
But in the realm of pharmaceutical research (as in others, to be sure), there’s a troubling paradox: while successes are widely publicized, and while the results of clinical trials are usually published, the research from projects that fail before that stage is usually kept hidden.
Dubner will be appearing on the public-radio show The Takeaway every morning this week to talk about SuperFreakonomics. His past appearances can be found here, including this one about kidney donation and this one about climate change.
Over the last decade, the number of syphilis cases in China increased tenfold, according to this Associated Press report, because more migrant workers have been able to afford to hire prostitutes.
Malcolm Gladwell explains Christmas, as imagined by Craig Brown for Vanity Fair: “In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying in a manger. Logic would dictate that at least one of them would be visited by shepherds, wise men, or kings from the East, right?”
So while environmentalists may find the very notion of geoengineering repugnant, the fact is that geoengineering is already with us, and will likely be put to use whether we like it or not.
Unhappy with the clutter in your life? You don’t need to get organizized; you just need to ditch your extraneous stuff. The Happiness Project’s Gretchen Rubin punctures eleven myths of would-be clutter slayers.