You probably heard about the terrible air crash in New York on Saturday between a small plane and a tourist helicopter. Nine people were killed.
As Levitt once noted, getting a paper published in an academic journal is an often comically belabored process, and of course it’s even worse when the paper is rejected.
The cover for our new book, SuperFreakonomics has just been revealed. Come take a look!
Justin Wolfers argues for more stimulus spending, highlighting a recent debate between himself and Reihan Salam on CNN.
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.
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.
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.”
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either. The PowerPoint crutch isn’t just an academic problem: it’s wrecking the Pentagon’s decision-making, too.
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.
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’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.)
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.
Memes are made to be heisted. So here’s one I heisted from the (U.K.) Times‘s Comment Central blog by Daniel Finkelstein, who of course heisted it from someone else.
It’s as simple as this:
One of my classmates wound up _____________________.
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”: