It takes a lot of people to manufacture even the simplest products, so making a household appliance on your own shouldn’t be expected to be easy. It may even be impossible. That’s what the artist Thomas Thwaites is finding as he tries to make a toaster from scratch, traveling around the world to collect raw materials and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings.
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign makes a case for improving the Hudson River bus crossings connecting New Jersey and Manhattan using a combination of animation and statistics, such as
You can read Malcolm Gladwell’s review Chris Anderson’s Free: the Future of a Radical Price online for free–except of course for the price you paid for your computer, mobile device, electricity and internet connection. This hitch is just one problem Gladwell has with Anderson’s idea…
An exceptionally neat new working paper
points out that parents’ time spent with kids has increased hugely since the early 1990’s, particularly among highly educated parents. This is a remarkable fact, and surprising; these are the same parents whose value of time (their wage rate) has increased relative to that of all parents, as, unsurprisingly, have their hours working for pay (since we know that labor supply responds to wage rates). They thus have less non-work time available and are spending even more of it with their kids. Why the surprising result?
Readers of this blog know that we like baseball and explanatory graphics, so we were excited to hear about Craig Robinson‘s site, Flip Flop Fly Ball. Robinson presents a series of informational baseball graphics.
I’ve been reading a truly excellent book by Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke called Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist’s Companion. It’s not written for a general audience, but if you pulled an A- or better on a college-level econometrics course (and if you love Freakonomics), then this is the book for you. It should be required reading for anyone who is trying to write an applied dissertation. It is the rare book that captures the feeling of how to go about trying to attack an empirical questio; and it does this by working through two or three dozen of the neatest empirical papers of the last decade (often coauthored by Angrist). It is also peppered with references to Douglas Adams‘s writing — so what’s not to like?
It wasn’t easy picking the finalists for our “Worst Roads in America” competition, but our intrepid judges Genevieve Giuliano and Mohja Rhoads, top transportation scholars at the University of Southern California, made their decisions and selected the posts below. Now it’s up to you to vote for the winner in the comments section.
Some say that a major cause of the U.S. housing bubble was a surge in savings overseas, particularly in China, where the personal savings rate soared to 30 percent of disposable income. (In the U.S., meanwhile, we were saving next to nothing). Just why the Chinese were saving so much has been a puzzle to many economists. Now Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang think they’ve come up with an explanation.
Last week I posed a question: what five cities are home to the greatest number of my Harvard classmates?
Without a doubt, this was the hardest quiz ever on this blog. Over 1,000 guesses were made; the first 851 of these guesses were wrong. (Actually, blog reader Len sort of had the right answer earlier, but it is totally obvious, if you’ve ever seen the red book that is my data source, that he cheated.)
Not until John F. came along with comment number 821 did someone end the misery by getting all five cities correct (with number of my classmates in parentheses):
USA Today had a poll asking people, “Would you fly on airlines that charge for access to the restroom?” Most respondents said no, but I bet that people wouldn’t let this bother them, they wouldn’t alter their flight plans, and they would pay for use of the toilet.
Pricing the bathroom would reduce the quantity demanded; some people would wait and race off the plane to the airport bathrooms (unless airports started charging also). But I would think that the demand for using a plane’s bathrooms is fairly inelastic, so that — except on short flights — behavior wouldn’t change very much.
I took the family to last night’s Yankees-Mets game at the new Citi Field. We had a great time despite the very late hour. (More on that later.) This was the final game of the season between the crosstown rivals. Interleague play means that lots of away-team fans are present in home-team stadiums, and that was very much the case last night — a scenario that produced at least one interesting result that would disappoint anyone who thinks that game theory always prevails.
Incentives, or nudges, to get people to do things — like donate organs, lose weight, and pick up dog feces — are everywhere; some work better than others. Here are a few that various Flickr users have come across:
In a new Foreign Policy article, Christian Caryl describes how the events of 1979 defined the world we live in today. In 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, Margaret Thatcher led the conservative movement to power in Britain, Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to Poland, and Deng Xiaoping began laying the groundwork for China’s market economy.
One of the most thought-provoking papers at this year’s meeting of the American Association of Wine Economics was presented by Günter Schamel, a professor at the Free University of Bolzano.
Worried that peak oil is about to put a sudden end to cheap kiwis and civilization as we know it? Kathy McMahon is a clinical psychiatrist who wants to help. She runs a website for people with peak-oil panic, which pledges to help you separate “what’s ‘mental preparation’ from what’s just ‘acting mental.'”
A new blog, News from 1930, summarizes the news that appeared in The Wall Street Journal each day in 1930. For example, on Wednesday, June 25, 1930 a broker said, “When this economic and market readjustment has been completed, it will merely be represented by a small curve downward in our steadily mounting curve of prosperity, consumption, production, and efficiency … ”
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 latest Economist has an article about an Italian firm whose workers negotiated a deal during the recession for time off with no pay cut in exchange for promises to work overtime without extra pay when the firm’s demand recovers.
Jake Whitney of Guernica interviews Michela Wrong, whose new book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, tells the story of John Githongo‘s anti-corruption crusade in Kenya.
In case you missed it, take a look at this plan for the cash-strapped New York MTA to sell off naming rights to subway stations. The first taker: Barclays, which will buy the privilege to rename the stop at Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street in Brooklyn Barclays Center.
A while back we wrote about Adeona, a free tracking program that could help police locate and recover a stolen laptop. As a bonus, we figured, thieves might be less inclined to steal any laptop, since every laptop they stole could potentially lead police to their doors. Enter Find My iPhone, a new service by Apple that does the same thing for your iPhone. After losing his phone in Chicago, one man recently tracked his phone down personally and confronted the thief, who, shocked at having been found, handed it back with a handshake.
When Google opened a major routing center in Lenoir, N.C., some community members complained that the town gave Google to much in the way of incentives — such as sales-tax-free electrical power. Now Google seems to be giving back: the company is hooking up downtown Lenoir with free wireless Internet for the next three years.
Usually, when people talk in terms of billions of dollars, they are referring to macroeconomic questions. Recently, however, three economists (Jeremy Bulow, Jonathan Levin, and Paul Milgrom) were hired as consultants to advise a group that was bidding in a spectrum auction that would allow them to provide wireless service.
By following the advice of the economists, the group was able to purchase wireless coverage for the United States for $2.4 billion, while their major competitors ended up paying $3.5 billion for the same spectrum in the same auction. Thus, their advice was worth more than $1 billion to their clients.
… and five minutes later, is sent home. You get the sense that maybe his feelings are a little hurt: the only thing the lawyers knew about him was his being a Harvard economics professor. What’s wrong with that?
We recently introduced you to Captain Steve, an airline pilot for a major U.S. carrier, who will be regularly fielding your questions about any and all aspects of air travel. But before we get to that, Captain Steve had something he wanted to say about the overall state of the industry, and particularly how pilots fit in — or don’t.
Freakonomics readers know that a baby’s name reveals more about its parents than about the baby. That’s also true of naval ships. The Christian Science Monitor reports that China’s online community has taken a strong interest in naming that country’s first aircraft carrier — if it ever gets built. The most favored name? Mao Zedong. China’s state newspaper approved, with one caveat: if an aircraft carrier named after Mao is damaged in battle, “it might hurt ordinary people’s feelings.”
When we last talked about abolishing paper currency, we joked about it happening in 2012. In Japan, where the future comes early, they’re considering banning cash now, as a way to stave off deflation.
We are delighted to welcome Robin Goldstein to our family of Freakonomics blog contributors.
We’ve blogged in the past about Robin’s research involving blind wine tastings, as well as his research on whether people can tell the difference between pate and dog food.
John Lorinc profiles Mark Carney, the governor of the Central Bank of Canada. While the rest of the developing world’s banks are on life support, Lorinc writes that Canada’s financial system “has sailed through this crisis with its international reputation almost unscathed.” Carney is also a vocal advocate for increased regulation of the financial sector and is one of the primary architects of the G20’s regulatory reforms.
I could find nine people from my class who are famous/semi-famous/infamous. Interestingly, not one of them sent in an entry to be published in the book. Overall, about 40 percent of the people in the class sent in updates. What was most surprising about the famous people not writing in is that many of them are famous because they are writers.
The other thing that struck me as interesting and somewhat surprising was the geographic distribution of my former classmates. Let’s see whether the distribution is surprising to the blog readers by running a contest.