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Freakonomics Blog

Pirates in Government

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.


Economic Growth Across the Income Distribution

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:


Still No Cash for Clunkers

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.


Markets Give Geithner a Vote of Confidence

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.


Friend Turnover

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?


Sin-Vestments

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.”


Our Song-Request Contest Has a Winner

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:


What G.P.S. Can Do for Your Marriage

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:


The College Bubble

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.


Black Boxes and Coffin Corners

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?


The President's Party and the Economy: A Guest Post

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.


Paved With Good Intentions: A Freakonomics Contest

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.


Is Airport Food Always This Bad?

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?


Precision Hacking

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.


Is Pain a Moral Good?

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?


Survival Tips From Mockingbirds

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]


How Fit Is Your Brain?

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!


Fun With WolframAlpha

The jury’s still out on whether WolframAlpha.com will turn into a tool that is useful to solve real world computational problems, but it certainly is fun to play with.


Who Gets Hurt In A Crisis?

There’s interesting research waiting to be done explaining just why some countries have been hit harder by the global financial crisis than others. For now, here’s an interesting observation from my former boss at the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glenn Stevens


When to Rob a Bank

I wish I had more details, and/or I wish I knew how true this story may be. But the point is that, like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns — whether it’s a lack of vacation or a string of Thursdays — that point the finger right at them.


The Unintended Consequences of Secrecy

Washington, D.C., is underlaced by miles of fiber optic cables that carry information for the nation’s intelligence agencies. The exact locations of these cables are kept secret so that terrorists and other enemy agents can’t snip the lines. The secrecy has indeed kept the cables safe from terrorists. Instead, the danger comes from well-meaning construction crews, who occasionally sever these sensitive conduits during the course of an innocuous building project. That’s when the men in the black SUV’s show up.