Naked self-promotion: the third edition of my book, Economics Is Everywhere (Worth Publishers), has just appeared. It contains little articles like those I have included on this blog (and, no doubt, some of the posts from this blog will be included in the fourth edition). I love many of the stories, but my all-time favorite from among the 700 that have been in the book’s various editions combines several basic economic ideas:
I’m alone in Europe, living in an apartment and cooking for myself. I bought a bottle of decent red wine for the remarkably low price of $2.99 and am consuming about one-fourth of it with each dinner (instead of the one-fifth or one-sixth of a bottle I would drink with each dinner at home).
Have I substituted toward wine, moving down the demand curve because the price is lower than at home? Or am I drinking more because I am alone and miss my wife? has my demand curve for wine merely shifted out due to my solitary lifestyle?
Conor Clarke suggests removing polls from the American political process. Not only are poll results frequently wrong, he argues, but polling “uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy.”
Barry Nalebuff and I have a new column in Forbes (“A Market Test for Credit Cards”) which criticizes some aspects of the recent credit-card legislation as being too anti-market.
After winning a stage of the Tour de France, Frenchman Thomas
Voeckler was quoted as saying,
In an article headlined “The Man Who Crashed the World” Michael Lewis profiles Joe Cassano, the former head of A.I.G.’s Financial Products unit. Lewis interviewed employees at the beleaguered F.P. unit and writes that most believed that “if it hadn’t been for A.I.G. F.P. the subprime-mortgage machine might never have been built, and the financial crisis might never have happened.”
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.
We previously featured some compelling guest posts by the legal scholar Ethan Leib on the subject of friendship and the law. Now he is back, along with his two co-authors on a new book called Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. This is their first of three posts.
… for a Sanka ashtray if Luc Sante made up a story about it? Apparently at least a few people would, as Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker found when they launched a project called Significant Objects, where they paired up creative writers with objects bought at garage sales and asked them to make up a story about the objects. Each object is for sale on eBay, where anyone can bid for it.
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist.
How can Swoopo, the online auction site, rake in $2,151 selling a laptop for $35.86? Easy: set an opening price of $0.01 (almost free!), then let each new bidder top the last by only a penny, and extend the auction each time someone places a bid in the final seconds. Oh, and collect $0.60 from each player for each bid they place. The winner of the auction might walk away with a good deal, but the losers will have racked up big fees chasing their sunk costs.
Concerned citizens can now track government spending at USASpending.gov. Users can view current and historical spending on contracts, grants, and loans, broken down by characteristics like congressional district and contractor. The website, mandated by the Federal Funding and Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, is a revamped version of fedspending.org. Warning: if you’re a pacifist, steer clear, or at least keep your blood-pressure pills at hand.
IBM researchers are hard at work creating a computer that will match wits against humans on the television show Jeopardy. Compared to checkers, chess, or backgammon, playing Jeopardy would seem to be a hard task for a computer because language is such a fundamental part of answering the questions correctly.
Slate columnist Daniel Gross thinks he’s found the female embodiment of Paul Krugman in Japanese economist Noriko Hama.
Barry Ritholtz, in his new book Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy writes, “The iconic image is the American cowboy. You can picture him on a cattle drive, wearily watching over his herd. All he needed to get by were his wits, his horse — and his trusty Winchester.”
A new study by a research team from Tokyo’s Keio University found that pigeons can distinguish between paintings the researchers consider good and bad.
Americans responded to the economic crisis and rising oil prices in 2008 by driving less and purchasing fuel-efficient cars. Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle have looked at the effect of these trends on carbon dioxide emissions between October 2007 and April 2009.
It was an extremely close race, but t paciello, come on up and thank the academy. The readers voted your ode to the horrors of the Cross Bronx Expressway as the best description of the worst in American transportation. For your victory, you will receive a piece of Freakonomics schwag.
After viewing this data candy from baekdal.com, the BBC’s Michael Blastland wonders: is there a point at which sexy design overwhelms the usefulness of the data?
By now, the financial woes of Lehman, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and the many other troubled banks is old news.
But we may need to start preparing for another round of bank failures … in the virtual world.
If indeed it happens, a character named Ricdic will likely be to blame. Ricdic is part of Eve Online, which I have never heard of, but according to this BBC news report “has about 300,000 players all of whom inhabit the same online universe. The game revolves around trade, mining asteroids, and the efforts of different player-controlled corporations to take control of swathes of virtual space.”
Two weeks ago, we solicited your questions for White House economist Austan Goolsbee. You will find his answers below. Among the highlights: no, the Obama administration is not socialist; and no, Goolsbee will not be trapped into telling you whether he’d buy an American car. Thanks for the good questions and thanks especially to Goolsbee for the interesting answers.
As the recession lingers and swine flu spreads, it appears that the antiviral drug Tamiflu has now surpassed Viagra as the most commonly spammed drug on the internet.
The Unthinkable author Amanda Ripley points to an interesting story about child safety in air travel. In the 1990’s, a call went out for the F.A.A. to stop letting air-traveling parents carry young children in their laps, making them buy a ticket for their children instead, so that every person could wear a seatbelt. The F.A.A. refused, saying that the cost of an extra ticket could force parents to travel by car instead.
Two papers at last month’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economists in Reims (this is my second of two articles about the conference) investigated this question with respect to the wine industry, which is, if not a microcosm of all consumer-products industries, at least an increasingly apt caricature of them. While creative adjectivism has long characterized the wine world, the practice in other taste industries — chocolaty coffee, metallic fish, grassy honey, peaty whiskey — is now ascendant.
The Obamas have a Flickr account. Its photos are labeled “United States Government Work” — definitely not Creative Commons material — and most of them look like standard PR material.
In the face of a difficult credit squeeze, more and more borrowers are turning to peer-to-peer lending networks, which directly connect lenders and borrowers. These networks have recently financed nearly half a billion dollars in lending. Ray Fisman examines these new networks and discusses the conflicting economic research on them. While economists have found some evidence of “human frailty and bias” in lending decisions, one recent study of a specific network concluded that the, “…credit market operates quite efficiently and without a bank pocketing a slice of the proceeds.”
The product sold is a combination of good tennis and beauty — and consumer satisfaction is increased by more of both. Event planners would like the top-seeded players to be the most beautiful; absent that correlation, they believe customers are willing to trade off some tennis quality to watch more attractive players. Are they catering to customer discrimination, or are they merely indulging consumer preferences?
Nepal’s prime minister was upset that officials at the country’s main airport had gained a reputation for bribe-taking. So the government is trying to put an end to corruption by putting an end to pockets, issuing pocket-less trousers to all its airport staff.
In case you haven’t heard, an accident on the Washington metro claimed nine lives last week. But then again, chances are you have heard, as the crash got wide coverage over the airwaves, on the net, and in the papers (by my count, at least five articles appeared in The Times). This is usually the case when trains or planes are involved in deadly disasters.
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.
