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Freakonomics Blog

Mao's Little Red Aircraft Carrier

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 Boring = Great

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.


Freakonomics Quiz: Where Does the Harvard Class of 1989 Live Now?

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.


Numbers Are Bad Liars

In a Washington Post op-ed, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco claim that the truth lies in the digits of the vote count. Humans are bad at making up fraudulent numbers, they write, and the fact that the vote counts for the different provinces contain “too many 7’s and not enough 5’s in the last digit” and not enough non-adjacent digits points to made-up numbers.


Bring Your Questions for White House Economist Austan Goolsbee

Many readers of this blog are well familiar with Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago who is currently serving in Washington on the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist for the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He is (in no particular order): brainy, talkative, excitable, and fully engaged in just about any modern economic issue worth considering, including the budget, the tax code, the auto industry, the bailouts, and on and on.


The Lure of Homeless Sims

Usually, your goal in The Sims 3 is to create a character and have it live out a pleasant, socially successful life in a well-appointed home. Robin Burkinshaw‘s Sims live in a weedy park at the center of town, broke, friendless, and looking for love. Burkinshaw chronicles the lives of this homeless family on a highly readable blog.


Why Pressure Cookers Are Big in the Netherlands

As the price of energy rises in the U.S., however, I would bet that we will be substituting away from ordinary cookers and toward energy-saving pressure cookers. It’s a nice illustration of how choice of technology depends on prices.


The Digital Divide?

The average job-seeker takes 12 weeks to find work. TIME profiles one laid-off software architect who used social networks including Facebook and Twitter to land a job in just 11 days. Will the recovery favor the internet-savvy in other fields as well? (Or: maybe this guy was just a super employee who, if he hadn’t been wasting his time tweeting, would have found a job in 10 days?)


Why Skinny Stays in the Picture

A study by evolutionary psychologist William Lassek has concluded, perhaps not surprisingly, that the more muscular a man is, the more sexual partners he has. So why haven’t skinny, fat, or average men been wiped out of the gene pool? One reason, according to Lassek, is that men with bigger muscles have to eat more to sustain themselves and have . . .


Vegetarianism as a Sometimes Thing

I’m toiling away this summer writing a book about commitment contracts. And out of the blue, I received an email from an aspiring economist (who is planning to apply to PhD programs this fall), named Matt Johnson, who has an interesting new wrinkle. Matt writes…


Disillusionment in the Developing World

Joseph Stiglitz reflects on the consequences of the economic crisis for market economies and democracy in developing countries, where the jury is still out on these institutions. “Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed,” he writes, “but that the very concept of a market economy has failed, and is indeed unworkable under any circumstances.” [%comments]


Will the "Green Revolution" Ever Hit Africa?

To most people in the developed world, agricultural science is a bit of an afterthought. We go to the grocery store and decide between small, vibrantly red cherry tomatoes and charmingly misshapen heirloom tomatoes. We buy big, juicy oranges and know that when we peel them the juice will run over our fingers and the sticky scent will linger. We can choose between 10 different kinds of apples, no matter the season. At no point during our shopping do most of us stop to think about the technology used to produce this bounty. …


Samuelson Sounds Off

Conor Clarke interviews Paul Samuelson, a recipient of both the John Bates Clark medal and a Nobel prize. Samuelson, age 94, discusses the history of Keynesian economics, his relationships with Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and Larry Summers, as well as the current stimulus debate. Part two of the interview appears here. [%comments]


Cushing's Syndrome or Nummular Eczema?

The New England Journal of Medicine‘s Image Challenge: sort of like the New Yorker‘s caption contest if it were multiple choice and featured only unsettling medical photographs that needed on-the-spot diagnoses. [%comments]


No Helmets for More Organs

Indeed, Texas is one of six states that have repealed mandatory helmet laws since 1994. The consequences remind me of an old Faye Kellerman novel, Prayers for the Dead, about a transplant surgeon who is active in a motorcycle club because he wants to discourage helmet use in order to increase the supply of transplantable organs (motor vehicle deaths being a major source of organs). A recent unpublished study links changes in state laws on mandatory helmet laws to the supply of transplantable organs, showing that where and when helmet wearing was no longer required, the supply of organs for transplants in the state increased.


Ghost Jams

You know those strange traffic jams that appear to come out of nowhere, with nothing causing them, and then suddenly end? As Wired reports , a team of M.I.T. mathematicians calls them “phantom jams” or “jamitons,” and has found mathematical equations to describe them, similar to those that describe detonation waves from explosions. Phantom jams, the mathematicians found, can form when a single driver slows down (to take a sip of coffee or talk on the phone) on a road with too many cars on it. They hope the new equations will lead to roads engineered to keep traffic below the density where a jamiton can form.


The Yellow Face, It Burns Us

Draw a picture of the sun. If you’re like us, you probably have to fight the urge to add a smiley face to it. That’s a cognitive leftover from our childhood: young children almost always add smiley faces to sun drawings, and believe that the sun benignly follows them around. It turns out that this same tendency, to assign agency to patterns and objects beyond our control, also drives conspiracy theorizing among adults.


Zach the Cat as an Example of Why Businesses Should Experiment More

We found our cat Zach at the beach as a tiny kitten, hungry and flea-ridden. We brought him, four kids in tow, to the anti-cruelty society (which we now refer to simply as the “cruelty society”), but they told us that he would almost certainly be put to death if we left him. Not quite ready to give that life lesson to the kids, we let him join our family, and he has been a model citizen ever since.
Until recently. After a year, he suddenly stopped using the litter box, preferring instead rugs and piles of our clothes. So Jeannette took him to the local vet, who advised the following plan of action:


Would You Like Some Gold With Your Chocolate?

Germans may soon be able to purchase gold in vending machines at the country’s airports and rail stations. It is said that the machines will charge a 30 percent premium (!) and prices will be updated every few minutes. Gold has generated significant investor attention, particularly in Germany, since the financial crisis hit.


The Story of the Tell-Tale Tail

Biologist Robert Full thought he was just teaching a bunch of engineers how gecko feet work so they could build a wall-climbing robot. Then the engineers reported back something strange. Their prototype didn’t work unless they gave it a tail. Then they asked Full a pretty straightforward question: what are gecko tails for, anyway? To Full’s surprise, he wasn’t quite sure, so he set out to investigate gecko tails, and discovered an entire universe of surprises, which he describes in this TED talk.


Hurricane Foreclosure

Although the 2009 hurricane season has opened with a whisper this month, the Gulf Coast is particularly vulnerable to storm damage. Why? The recession has left the region littered with thousands of foreclosed homes. With nobody around to secure them before a hurricane hits, these houses could break apart under heavy winds, pelting neighboring homes with debris. One possible solution under consideration: turn the foreclosed homes into hurricane shelters.


Breast-Feeding and the "Missing Girls"

A new working paper by Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko offers another explanation for the “missing girls” phenomenon observed in some developing countries. Breast-feeding both improves health outcomes and temporarily decreases fertility. Jayachandran and Kuziemko argue that women with a preference for male children may wean daughters earlier in the hopes of restoring their fertility and conceiving a son, resulting in worse health outcomes for girls. The authors find that daughters are weaned sooner than sons and conclude that the breastfeeding factor explains 14 percent of India’s missing girls.


The Poetry of Journalism

Last week, Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, took a one-off chance, temporarily replacing its workaday reporters with 31 of the country’s leading poets and authors. The writers, as writers do, ran amok. They filed epic front-page news reports on daily life in the first person; ruminated about childhood in an interview with the country’s defense minister; and delivered the weather report as a sonnet. The market report, written by a celebrated children’s book author, read like a fairy tale: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place … Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9 percent to a level of 1,860 points …”


Leap Months and Kings

The Hebrew calendar is lunar, so that a leap-month has to be inserted every once in a while to keep the seasons and holidays at appropriate times. But when to insert the month, and what group should decide?