These debates notwithstanding, Wikipedia’s popularity continues to make standard encyclopedias look as hip as buggy whips.
Wikipedia editor/administrator Andrew Lih, author of the book Wikipedia Revolution, has agreed to answer our questions about Wikipedia and what it means to society.
Soul searching continues among macroeconomists who failed to predict the economic crisis. One culprit behind the great macro-flub: the “Control Illusion,” in which economists are blinkered by overconfidence in computer models just because they, as Levitt recently wrote, “solve a problem that is really, really hard mathematically.”
An Economist article discusses how simple maps have become one of the most powerful tools that interest groups use to promote their causes. The Grim Reaper’s Roadmap, for instance, maps out mortality rates in Britain from different causes in hopes of sparking investigations. Ushahidi.com, by mapping instances of violence in Kenya, wants to hold the government accountable. And MAPlight maps political donations to show how money influences congressional votes.
George Foreman named all five of his boys after himself, but only one has taken up pro boxing. I met the retired boxer and “grillionaire” at his son’s pro debut last Saturday. George III won, but in a bout that some say looked rather unevenly matched.
When giants like Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson start to argue, they both sound compelling. Ferguson says that interest rates are rising because of the deficit, and Krugman retorts that Ferguson has forgotten his first-year economics. Fortunately, the data can speak, and it’s time to give them a voice. This is why I turn to my frequent collaborator, Eric Zitzewitz, who has an incredibly handy knack for getting financial data to speak clearly. Eric’s verdict? You’ll have to keep reading.
What happens when a lot of people get upset about copyright laws? In Sweden, the Pirate Party gets a seat at the European Parliament. As the Guardian reports,”revulsion” over a controversial I.P. enforcement directive and the arrest of The Pirate Bay’s owners helped the Pirate Party secure 7 percent of the national vote. Another Pirate Party won nearly 1 percent of the vote in Germany, and similar parties exist in Austria, Spain, Denmark, Poland, and Finland. It may be a good thing that Dubner’s new term for internet piracy didn’t catch on. The Downlifting Party just doesn’t sound as appealing.
Yes, we already know the facts — income inequality has been increasing since the 1970’s. But it can be easy to lose sight of just how important this has been. This presentation of the data — by Claudia Goldin and my former thesis advisor Larry Katz, really hits home:
Last week we solicited your questions for Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. In the interim, Twitter has announced it will begin verifying some high-profile accounts to make sure the Tweeters aren’t impersonators. What was most interesting to me about your questions was that so many of them were skeptical of Twitter’s underlying value.
Last year I blogged about the Cash for Clunkers program in which the government subsidizes consumers who turn in their beat-up old cars to buy new ones. I noted that this program was likely to have a host
of negative unintended consequences that its proponents were ignoring.
The bad news is that the House of Representatives has now passed a Cash for Clunkers bill. The good news is that the version they passed applies to so few vehicles that there is virtually no incentive for anyone to take advantage of the program, so its unintended consequences will be smaller than they otherwise would be.
Treasury Secretary Geithner‘s fears about unemployment appear to be disappearing fast. Or at least his personal fears. According to the prediction markets at Intrade.com, the chances that he departs his post this year have declined from a high above 40 percent to around 10 percent.
Seven years from now, a new study reports, your friend group will probably look entirely different, even though it’ll still be the same size. Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. How will social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter affect the rate of friend turnover in the next seven years?
American and international health insurers hold $4.5 billion worth of stock in tobacco companies, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine finds. The study’s co-author says the stock holdings represent a conflict of interest: “If you own a billion dollars [of tobacco stock], then you don’t want to see it go down…. You are less likely to join anti-tobacco coalitions, endorse anti-tobacco legislation, basically, anything most health companies would want to participate in.”
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.
What he hadn’t written yet, however, was a Freakonomics theme song. That’s the request Mann decided to fulfill. It came from a reader named Spencer, who’ll get his choice of Freakonomics schwag for winning the contest.
So here it is, the theme song we never knew we needed but now wouldn’t want to live without. Thanks to all for participating, and especially to Jonathan Mann for lending his talents to our cause:
David Leonhardt’s carefully-researched column in yesterday’s Times breaks down the causes of the increasing budget deficit. The bottom line: Don’t blame the Obama agenda, “it is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits.”
Expected consequence of the mortgage crisis: fewer Americans want second homes. Unexpected consequence: Fewer American state legislatures want second houses.
Many improvements in technology shift the production possibility frontier outward. Many of these increase human happiness, and a few do this by increasing marital harmony (Viagra?).
One piece of technology my wife and I just acquired does all of these while saving that most precious of all things — time:
For years, colleges have treated their students as consumers, building ever more elaborate facilities and hiring ever more dazzling star scholars to lure applicants. They did this regardless of how high these investments drove tuition, since easy credit meant families could stretch to cover the costs. But with the credit crisis comes signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests.
A reader named D.J. writes in with a problem that requires some sensitive game theory, trickier than the roommate dilemma. Note that he is wise enough to flatter you as “intelligent and thoughtful,” so do your best to live up to his bias.
As searchers recover more wreckage from the Air France jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic last week, Miles O’Brien reports on the perils the jet faced as it flew headlong to its doom in a gauntlet of equatorial thunderstorms. In an interview with BoingBoing TV, O’Brien wonders why jets don’t transmit telemetry data all the time, moving the black box from the back of an aircraft, where it could be lost, crushed or incinerated, to computers safely on the ground. Any ideas, readers?
John List and I stumbled onto the original, never-analyzed data from the original illumination experiments done at the Hawthorne Plant. These studies gave rise to what is now known as the Hawthorne Effect.
A couple of months ago, some Freakonomics readers wondered whether the president really had any discernible impact on the economy. This question has actually received a lot attention from political scientists and political economists. Although these scholars still dispute precisely how presidents influence the macroeconomy, few would deny that the impact is real. The following are three macroeconomic phenomena that have been attributed to a president’s party affiliation.
Welcome to the Freakonomics “Paved With Good Intentions” contest, in which we pay loving tribute to the most abysmal roads in America.
Here’s how it works. Write a brief homage (no more than 150 words) to the worst stretch of road you know of. You have broad latitude in your definition of “worst.” It may be the most congested, the most poorly maintained, the ugliest, the most dangerous, the most confusing, the worst integrated with adjacent land uses, or any combination of the above. You may also devise a standard of your own. Tell us why your road is the best example of the worst in American transportation, toss in a bit of wit and literary flash, and post your entry in the comments section.
This ad demonstrates that T-Mobile has a deep understanding of human nature.
Either that or they have been reading the economics literature.
My demand is quite inelastic, and the near monopolist at this smaller airport is taking advantage of that. I know that the price in the main part of the airport is lower for the same quality food, and the average quality is better too. I wonder: is this generally true?
NASA research suggests that there may be life on Mars after all — but that, up ’til now, we’ve been destroying it when we visit. (Does this hurt the case for space exploration?) As New Scientist tells the tale, The Phoenix Mars lander, which NASA uses to search for organic compounds on the red planet, may have been mistakenly burning up those very compounds.
Take a look at the final vote tally in Time magazine’s online poll of the most influential people.
It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that things didn’t turn out quite as one would expect; I’d never even heard of a handful of the folks who ended up near the top of the list, including the winner, Moot, who both has way more votes than anyone else and a much higher average rating.
I learned of this article via Market Design, the blog of the always-interesting Al Roth. His headline was striking: “Anesthesia Was Once Repugnant.” There’s no way, I thought, that he could be right on this one (even though he has always been right in the past). But after reading Jay’s article, I was thoroughly convinced. Like most good arguments, it is not only convincing but humbling: how could we not have seen this earlier?
We’ve blogged before about how people fear strangers more than they should, whereas it’s the people you know who often cause trouble. According to this new study, urban mockingbirds may be better at risk assessment than people. It found that the birds apparently learn to recognize the faces of people they’ve seen before and, based on past encounters with an individual, assess how threatening they are; but they aren’t as fearful of complete strangers. (HT: VSL) [%comments]
We know Freakonomics readers love brain teasers. We hope you’ll test your brain on these five puzzlers. The results, completely anonymous, will be compiled and analyzed by the Vision Lab and the Social Neuroscience and Psychopathology Lab at Harvard University. Have fun, for science!