The institute is offering cash prizes to the high-school and post-secondary students who provide the best answer (in video format) to the question “What is the appropriate role of government in the economy?”
The extortion concern might explain a lot of our reluctance to offer bribes. But there are circumstances where a one-off bribe can work wonders. When my kids were little, I remember bribing a college student on an Amtrak train to move to another open seat so that my family could sit together.
Denny’s breakfast menu in Provo, Utah, offers something that combines demand-based and cost-based price discrimination, but it’s neither.
The “French toast slam” is two pieces of toast and two eggs, two strips of bacon and two sausages for $6.99. The “senior French toast slam” is one piece of toast and one egg, and two strips of bacon or two sausages for $5.49, and you must be at least 55 years old to buy this.
Kahneman, who has described economics as a strict priesthood, says, “Yes, I have spoken of a church, but it is not a church where you get burned at the stake for being a heretic, because otherwise a lot of people wouldn’t be around!”
Quick, how many of you can tell me:
1. Your cars’ fuel economy in miles per gallon or, even better, gallons per mile.
2. How much you drove in the last year.
3. The cost to fill your tank.
4. Your monthly and annual fuel expenditures.
5. How your cars’ fuel economy sits in relation to other cars in their classes.
6. What your fuel savings in gallons and dollars would be if you switched to a hybrid or other highly economical vehicle.
From my office window, I have a glorious view of the Grove Street Cemetery, where Yale students often go to read. By far, my favorite spot in this vast city of monuments is near the end of Cedar Avenue, past the graves of Eli Whitney and Noah Webster. There, just beyond the intersection with Myrtle Path, you can find the extraordinary headstones of two Yale chemists.
The Economist has a special section this week on mobile phone technology in emerging markets. The section includes articles on trends in mobile phone ownership, the role mobile phones are playing in economic development, and new uses for the technology.
I especially like that last paragraph; not only is Clinton doing something different, but there is an economic twist to it. By letting people allocate their points, it is revealing attendees’ preferences as well.
A Trinity College survey predicts a quarter of Americans will identify as nonreligious in 20 years (as opposed to the 15 percent who do so now). Dan Gilgoff, in his U.S. News column, predicts what that might to do American politics.
Dubner and I both made a huge mistake: we got married before Freakonomics came out.
I’ve seen many variations on “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Who coined this expression?
They’re two of the only places a modern business columnist can escape the round-the-clock news cycle. But there’s no true refuge from the business cycle, as Daniel Gross reminds us.
So plainly there are limits to the viability of PWYW. But one factor that PWYW pricing calls into play is human conscience: if set up properly, PWYW can make it hard for all but the most callous customer to rip you off.
In the 1980’s, fishermen trawling for tuna killed tens of thousands of dolphins each year, scooping them up as “bycatch” in their nets
My wife and I were speculating on how long last Friday’s Rosh Hashanah service would last. We both figured on two hours, but my wife said, “Services always last longer than you expect.”
Biologists from the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont plan to study how climate change might affect this year’s “foliage viewing season,” whether it is longer, shorter, or more muted.
So in my continual (and seemingly fruitless) attempt to stump the readers of this blog, I offer what may be the most difficult Freakonomics quiz ever:
What magazine was the first to use the phrase “King of Farts” in reference to my father’s research?
Researchers have long puzzled over the relatively poor health and education outcomes for babies born in the winter months. Past explanations have focused on school attendance laws, vitamin D exposure, and other environmental factors, but economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman have found an overlooked explanation.
I would recommend introducing your wife to the theory of real option valuation. Point out that the option to marry her was likely to remain open for many years after you originally met. By exercising the option so early, you showed your bride that the net present value of your relationship was large and positive and your uncertainty about the decision was very low.
Installation artist Luke Jerram creates glass sculptures of diseases to “contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial coloring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena.”
There is nothing conclusive in this report, but it is nevertheless sad and remarkable: Malcolm Casadaban, a University of Chicago medical researcher working on a better vaccine for the plague (Yersinia pestis), has died at the age of 60 and was found to have Yersinia pestis in his bloodstream.
Congratuations to MIT economist Esther Duflo who brings home a MacArthur Genius grant!
Ian Ayres recently posted about his returning to his students the royalties on his book that he assigned to them.
This has caused me trouble: one of my students read it and asked why I don’t do that as well for my little book, Economics Is Everywhere. I have done this before, when I assigned my labor economics text to a class of 35 students, but not in her class.
In the spirit of its Big Mac Index, The Economist rolled out its Global Debt Clock, which features a running global-public-debt tally.
Although hybrids and electric vehicles can help automakers meet these targets, enough efficiency can be reaped with internal combustion autos. This can come through improvements to things like tires, engines (e.g. smaller ones with turbocharging), air conditioning, transmissions, and vehicle weight. The administration estimates that this will cost $1,100 per vehicle but that the improvements will pay for themselves with $3,000 in fuel savings over the life of the car.
When people use cardboard signs to ask for money, their success depends on a number of factors, including the sign’s explicit message, the target of its solicitation, and even whether a passing historian happens to find it worth buying. Consider the following approaches, turned up in a scan of Flickr photos.
There are a few who consult to the Fed. I’m not aware of any significant engagement of these folks with the IMF or World Bank. Perhaps, with time, this generation (my generation!) will become directly involved in the policy debate. But until this happens, Narayana’s optimism about the state of academic macro won’t translate into equal optimism about the state of macro policy debates.
A new paper by William Congdon, Jeffrey Kling, and Sendhil Mullainathan provides an excellent summary of the implications of recent behavioral economics research for tax policy.
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.
The concept of survivor bias, if you don’t know it, is well worth being aware of. It’s most often used in finance, where it refers to a “tendency for failed companies to be excluded from performance studies” (thanks, Wikipedia). Think of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which indexes the stock prices of 30 of the largest and most important U.S. companies – until, that is, one of said companies does so poorly that it is booted from the index and is replaced by a company that’s doing better.