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Freakonomics Blog

Secret Starbucks

For years, as its stores spread like kudzu across the country, Starbucks was accused of driving neighborhood coffee shops out of business. In most cases, it seems to have done exactly the opposite. In recent times, the Seattle-based company is in retreat, having closed hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of employees. But now it’s making a crafty move on its community competitors.


Conservation By Urination

According to the Brazilian environmental organization SOS Mata Atlantica, a household that flushes its toilet one less time per day saves more than 1,100 gallons of water per year. So the organization has launched a TV ad campaign encouraging Brazilians to avoid a flush by peeing in the shower.


Keeping Kosher and Benefiting from Cheap Pork

The Economist reports that pork prices have plunged 24 percent in the past year, partly because the demand for U.S. pork exports has dropped sharply. I don’t eat pork, so how does this help me?


Runaway Train?

Robert Moses, the titanic “power broker” who is responsible for much that is wrong (and some that is right) in the planning of modern New York, had an infamous dictum: once you’ve turned the first shovelful of dirt, they’ll never make you stop building.


The Paradox of Road Choice

Two physicists and a computer scientist used Google maps to study traffic in Boston, London, and New York, and found that when people use real-time driving maps to try to pick the fastest routes, traffic slows down.


Does Government-Provided Health Care Lead to Bad Teeth?

Does government-provided health care lead to bad teeth?
In the United Kingdom, at least, my former colleague Delia Lloyd says the answer to that question is “yes.”
The problem, as usual, is perverse incentives which arise out of the difficulty of developing sensible formulas for reimbursement.


Multidecadal Fantasy Baseball

Barry Bonds, Todd Helton, and Mickey Mantle are the top three batters in baseball history … well, according to a new study that used network science to rank players by analyzing the outcome of every at-bat from 1954 to 2008.


Scaling the Heights of Corporate Greed: Chafkin and Lo on Risk

Andrew W. Lo, who teaches at M.I.T. and is director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, has contributed to this blog before. Here he is joined by co-author Jeremiah H. Chafkin, president of AlphaSimplex Group (where Lo also serves as chairman and chief scientific officer) for a guest post about the best (and worst) ways to manage risk.


The 50 Worst Cars of All Time

A few years back Time magazine teamed with automotive critic Dan Neil to compile a list of the 50 worst cars of all time. It is pretty amusing to read. My own opinion is that they are way too tough on SUV’s — among the handful included on the list is the Ford Explorer (one of the best-selling vehicles in this country for over a decade), for example, because its success helped trigger the super-sizing of American vehicles.


What Does This Sad Story Say to You?

In today’s Washington Post, there’s an incredibly affecting long article about a down-and-out family in Indiana. It’s called “Nowhere to Go But Down.” Husband and wife have both lost their jobs; there’s a teenage son and a very young daughter, and it looks like they’re all going to have to move back to Michigan to live in the basement of the wife’s mother. I urge you all to read it, and to look at the photo gallery too.


Detroit Produce City?

Detroit is practically a giant food desert, with no produce-carrying grocery chains left and its citizens resorting to local raccoon and pheasant meat. According to Mark Dowie in Guernica, that makes Detroit a prime candidate for the world’s first “100 percent food-self-sufficient city.”


Why My Wife Doesn't Cook Dinner

We teach that people make decisions comparing marginal benefit to marginal cost. We labor economists apply this to decisions about work, telling students to compare the return (the wage) to the opportunity cost (the value of non-market time).


Random Lives in Northern Uganda

I went to northern Uganda to observe an economic experiment — a randomized program intervention focused on highly vulnerable women in the region. The program, Women’s Income Generating Support (WINGS), is being implemented by the Association of Volunteers in International Service (AVSI) and will provide the women with grants and business training.

“Less than an hour after we started, the randomization was complete and the immediate future of 1,800 women was determined.”

Due to resource constraints, the women will receive the intervention in two different phases, allowing a team of economists to evaluate the effectiveness of the program.


Is Somebody Lying About "Cash for Clunkers"?

Congress set aside $1 billion to fund the program. If all of that money was going to pay these subsidies, there would be enough money to pay for 250,000 clunkers.
The program went into place on July 24th. One week later, the program was said to be out of money.
In 2006, before the current ills of the automakers, the average number of new cars sold in a week in the United States was 125,000.


Fire-Starting Incentives

Two French firefighters admitted to starting brush fires on the island of Corsica on July 8 and July 14. Their motivation: overtime bonus pay of 19 euros for nighttime work (July 8) and 38 euros on July 14, for Bastille Day.


Bring Your Questions for Genetics Entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki

Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and biologist, is co-founder of the “personal genetics” company 23andMe — which, for $1,000, will take a bit of your spit and map out your DNA to learn genealogical details as well as your risk factors for certain diseases. Clients can also join the company’s gene-themed social networks and share their genetic info with others. Sort of like Facebook for your innards.


The Ketchup Revolution, Postponed

Five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell pronounced ketchup ripe for the kind of diversity revolution that had already shattered the staid monotony of the spaghetti sauce and mustard markets. Now The Smart Set wonders why we’re still waiting for ketchup to storm the barricades.


Quotes Uncovered: Fools and Theory

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 researches by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.


The Three-Day Weekend Experiment

For the past year, all government employees in Utah have had a four-day workweek. The results of the trial run are in, and they look good: the state says it saved $1.8 million in electrical bills, eliminating 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, while 82 percent of workers say they like the new scheme.


It Won't Be So Bad: A Q&A With the Author of $20 Per Gallon

It’s notoriously hard to predict gas prices. Who would have thought in 2006 that we’d be paying $4 a gallon in 2008? Or, as prices peaked last year, that we’d be filling up for $2.50 a gallon this summer?
That said, civil engineer and Forbes reporter Chris Steiner argues that prices will rise precipitously over the next few decades. (It would probably make as much sense to argue that electric cars will take over and gas prices will fall, but that’s another argument for another day.)


A Lottery for Smart People

Most lotteries are a sucker’s game. But a group of credit unions in Michigan has come up with a lottery that everyone wins. The idea is that each time a customer makes a savings deposit of $25 or more, he or she is entered into a raffle to win $400, plus a chance to win the $100,000 annual jackpot.


Apparently I've Ruined Economics (Again)

A few years back, the New Republic accused me of ruining economics.
Now The Economist magazine, in a much more subtle way, makes the same implication. Here’s the second sentence of an article entitled “What Went Wrong With Economics”:


Pareto Parking

We parked our car at the Austin airport for six days, and my brother then picked it up to use during his three-day visit to my mother. He left it in airport parkinglot when he flew off three days later, a few hours before we returned.


Who's Ready for a Fat Tax?

From a Wall Street Journal article by Betsy McKay come these tantalizing facts (emphasis added):

The medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases may have soared as high as $147 billion in 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, as its new director set a fresh tone in favor of more aggressively attacking obesity.


The Latest Entry Into the Cheating Hall of Fame

If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.