I ran into someone the other day whom I had never met and who fit the following five criteria:
1. He/she attended the University of Chicago.
2. He/she is still alive.
3. He/she is a whole lot smarter than I am.
4. He/she is a whole lot more famous than I am.
5. He/she is even more controversial/notorious than I am.
Organ donation is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. And yet, Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics spells out, relying on altruism for organ donations has proved to be largely unsuccessful. There are a lot of reasons people give for not signing up as organ donors.
Students apparently consume mass quantities of the performance-enhancing drug Adderall during exam time. Normally the price is $3 for 10 mg., but it rises during exam week to at least $5. One student reports that in his suburban Dallas hometown drug dealers, realizing this price variation, speculated by buying up large supplies of the drug at $3 and dumping them on the market during exam time, hoping to sell at $5.
In the wake of the national publicity that accompanied the beating death of Chicago Public Schools student Derrion Albert, the issue of teen violence has come to the fore.
Violence toward students in the Chicago Public Schools is, however, neither new nor rare.
Faced with a plague of rabbits, some wild and some abandoned pets, the city of Stockholm is pursuing a unique pest-control strategy. The city is hunting, deep-freezing, and shipping the rabbits to a heating plant in central Sweden where they’re processed for fuel. Three thousand rabbits have been culled this year.
By the time you finish this blog post, you will understand why we differ from our critics in our conclusions.
Tonight, ABC’s 20/20 devotes a full hour to SuperFreakonomics. The show’s five segments can be previewed online:
Not if the mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov has his way. According to Simon Shuster at TIME magazine,
For just a few million dollars, the mayor’s office will hire the Russian Air Force to spray a fine chemical mist over the clouds before they reach the capital, forcing them to dump their snow outside the city. Authorities say this will be a boon for Moscow, which is typically covered with a blanket of snow from November to March.
You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your conventional wisdom about what makes you tick–what makes you happy, healthy and whole–turned out to be wrong? How would you find out? You’d probably start by…
My son Andrew died exactly ten years ago today, October 23, 1999, nine days after his first birthday. No one would describe me as emotional. And yet the wound still remains remarkably raw.
The makers of World of Goo, a “physics-based puzzle game,” let customers pay what they wanted for the game — which normally sells at $20 — and a week after the offer, 57,000 people bought the game, bringing in over $100,000 in sales.
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Casey Frank asked:
[Who said] “England and America are two countries separated by a common language”?
Ten percent of Arkansans have been married three or more times, double the national average. That’s according to new data from the Pew Center. Arkansas also has one of the lowest median ages for first marriage: 26. If you’re looking for marital stability, look no further than New York State, where the “serial marriage” share is among the lowest in the country, at 2 percent (tied for last place with New Jersey and Massachusetts).
Each year in my 500-student principles class I gather a group of eight students and tell them that I will auction a $20 bill to the highest bidder. If two or more students bid the same thing, the difference between $20 and their joint bid will be divided among the winning bidders. They can collude to fix the price just like oligopolists who violate antitrust laws, but they must mark down their bids in secret.
We’ve written extensively about the consequences of baby naming. The name you choose for your children can affect his “Google-ability” or even get you in trouble with the law. A new survey of 2,000 elementary school teachers in Germany finds that your children’s names may also affect how teachers perceive them (translation available here).
I took a ride in one of the city’s famous (or infamous) cabs. My experience was perfectly adequate, if not quite a trip on the QEII. But to many, New York cabs are synonymous with poor upkeep, dismal service, fraud, and reckless driving.
We’ve blogged before about sites like Swivel and ManyEyes, data-mashup sites which allow users to upload datasets, create tables, share them with other users, and compare them to other datasets on the sites. This week a new open data project, Factual, was launched by Google alum Gil Elbaz.
The popular Becker-Posner blog has been turned into an excellent book entitled Uncommon Sense.
For anyone who wants a quick and easy crash course on Chicago economics-style thinking, this book is as good as it gets. I
That was the question posed in this recent contest.
As usual, it didn’t take long for the correct answer to be posted. In this case, it came from one P. Mardel, commenter No. 3:
Both introduced low-cost interventions that had dramatic results. Both were also ostracized by the then-conventional wisdom. Ignatz Semmelweis promoted hand-washing in maternity wards, Robert S. McNamara introduced seat belts in Ford cars.
Paul Offit is one of America’s most-hated scientists. He’s been called a “biostitute” for the pharmaceutical industry and been threatened with death for his advocacy of one of medicine’s greatest innovations: vaccines. In recent years, anti-vaccine sentiment has spread like, well, an epidemic, with frightening results.
One of the hottest topics among business people is how to increase profits by being environmentally friendly. There are many ways to achieve this. At hotels, for instance, by not washing towels during a guest’s stay unless the guest asks, the hotel saves both money and the environment. Green innovations can be featured in advertising campaigns to attract customers. Another potential benefit of “going green” is that it makes environmentally-minded employees happy, increasing their loyalty to the firm.
A Berlin brothel has hit on another way to use environmental arguments to its benefit.
We tell quite a few stories about unintended consequences in SuperFreakonomics, including what happens when governments add or increase a trash-collection tax — like this one and this one.
But I don’t think any stories we tell are quite as interesting as the following one, sent in by a reader named Jack Crichton in British Columbia:
It seems inevitable that discussions of climate science would degenerate to being deeply politicized and polarized. Depending on which views are adopted, individuals, industries, and countries will gain or lose, which provides ample motive. Once people with a strong political or ideological bent latch onto an issue, it becomes hard to have a reasonable discussion; once you’re in a political mode, the focus in the discussion changes. Everything becomes an attempt to protect territory. Evidence and logic becomes secondary, used when advantageous and discarded when expedient. What should be a rational debate becomes a personal and venal brawl. Rational, scientific debate that could advance the common good gets usurped by personal attacks and counterattacks.
SuperFreakonomics officially debuts today, already near the top of the Amazon bestseller lists here in the U.S., in Canada, and in the U. K.. The Financial Times calls SuperFreakonomics “a page-turner… a book with plenty of style; underneath the dazzle, there is substance too.” The New York Post advises: “Don’t go to the water cooler without it.”
Obama expressed his disappointment recently when rapper Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest singer Taylor Swift’s win of the “Best Female Video” trophy. Soon after, Obama himself was Swifted by critics who felt he was undeserving of his Nobel Prize win. This process is “not wildly out of character with how awards generally work,” writes Jonathan Chait at The New Republic.
We blogged a while back about the sad state of financial literacy in this country. This has been diligently investigated by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, who insert a few financial questions in government longitudinal surveys. Here’s an example.
International children’s rights advocates focus significant resources on eliminating child labor in developing countries, often advocating consumer boycotts and international regulation. Despite all these efforts, however, child labor is still prevalent throughout the developing world. Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti think all that international pressure may actually be worsening the child labor problem.
Our critics accuse us of manipulation and cherry-picking and misrepresenting a variety of arguments about climate change and energy production. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it�s not.
SuperFreakonomics isn’t even on sale yet, and the attacks on our chapter about global warming are already underway. We are working on a thorough response to these critics, which we hope to post on the blog in the next day or two. The bottom line is that the foundation of these attacks is essentially fraudulent, as we’ll spell out in detail.
Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. Where we differ from the critics is in our view of the most effective solutions to this problem.
We blogged about musical stairs in Stockholm that try to encourage stair-climbing rather than escalator-riding. One of the issues with this “nudge,” as Dubner wrote, is that it’s probably more fun for people to descend them than to ascend.
These stairs in Lisbon, however, address that problem by appealing to the calorie conscious.