Nineteen weeks ago 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.
Bob Clapp is 72 years old. He’s six-foot-one, weighs 190 pounds, has a 32-inch waist, 11 percent body fat, and claims to maintain the biological age of a 36-year-old. Clapp has also been a regular user of anabolic steroids for 50 years with “no irreparable negative side effects.” Jordan Heller profiles Clapp and other users, questioning the criminalization of steroids. A similar inquiry has recently been pursued by Miguel Sancho, Andrew Kirell, and John Stossel.
Now even better, the original song-a-day man, Jonathan Mann, has agreed to take a request: he’ll write a song about whatever you want. Leave your suggestions below. It doesn’t have to be about the recession — just make it clever, entertaining, wise, witty, etc. Jonathan (maybe with our input) will pick the best suggestion — and the winning suggester will get a piece of Freakonomics schwag. And, of course, a song. We will, of course, post the song here once it’s recorded.
Good luck.
Home prices continue to fall, dropping another 18.7 percent in March. The price plunge is being blamed in part on the glut of cheap, foreclosed homes on the market. How cheap are these homes? They’re selling for as much as 31 percent below market value. Of course, deteriorating home prices are a leading driver of mortgage defaults, so more foreclosed homes lead to lower home prices, which lead to more foreclosures.
In an excellent article for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande investigates health care in McAllen, Texas, “one of the most expensive health care markets in the country.” Gawande traces the high costs to overutilization and a culture of entrepreneurship among McAllen’s doctors. Lester Dyke, a cardiac surgeon in McAllen, told Gawande, “We took a wrong turn when doctors stopped being doctors and became businessmen.” Gawande advocates collaborative, accountable-care organizations, like Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic, and concludes that unless American health care moves away from the McAllen model and toward the Mayo model, “McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future.”
In the years since the Cold War, the threat of imminent global thermonuclear war has receded in the popular imagination. Computer hackers are buying up abandoned missile silos. It’s been almost a decade since a major Hollywood film revolved around a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange. But that doesn’t mean deterrence has succeeded in finally staving off nuclear war. Stanford University Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, comparing his love of gliders with his interest in nuclear deterrence, wants to remind you that when a system is 99.9 percent safe but the remaining 0.1 percent contains an absolutely catastrophic outcome, it’s not a great system. Sound familiar?
So does a graph of broadband prices and quantities in different countries tell us about the supply curve or the demand curve?
Social psychologist Malcolm Klein devised a test for Los Angeles that he says predicts how likely a child is to join a gang, reports the Wall Street Journal. The test, which can be found here in its entirely, asks kids questions like whether they have just broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend and how many of their friends have used marijuana. The problem: the city won’t know for several years if the predictions are accurate.
The annual skit party in the University of Chicago economics department gives the graduate students their one chance each year to exact revenge on the faculty for all the tough love/mistreatment we give them the other 364 days of the year.
At this year’s skit party, there was a faculty version of the old Bob Eubanks TV show The Newlywed Game. My partner was the legendary economist Gary Becker. Alas, we did not fare well.
The efficiency gains from marriage are well known. It’s also true that for most couples they grow over time.
A website called sellyourgoldteeth.com; among rappers, a sudden interest in cubic zirconia; and an auction of storied hip-hop jewelery canceled for lack of potential buyers: the Wall Street Journal reports on how the recession is damaging bling culture. (Whatever happened to Roland Fryer‘s paper that was to be called “Bling-Bling”)
We’ve written before about the occasional hyper-critical comments on certain blogs, but such comments are like valentines compared to what some Amazon.com customers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The Godfather, The Dairy of Anne Frank, and other standards. The Cynical-C blog lists the most caustic of these every day.
The good news is that he has agreed to share this knowledge with the rest of us on a regular basis. As longtime readers of this blog are well aware, airline issues have been a recurring theme, ranging from the old cellphone debate to safety precautions to the question of why flight attendants aren’t tipped.
So leave your questions for Captain Steve in the comments section and over time he will answer them in small batches.
That’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi really said in Star Wars (1977), according to AMC’s list of famous film misquotes, not the popular variant, which is properly attributed to Han Solo. The list also includes famous quotes that, AMC claims, were never actually spoken in the films to which they’re linked: “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” for example. For the doubters — run them past Fred Shapiro.
When oil was discovered in 2007 off the shores of small, sturdy Ghana, the country’s government officials called the discovery “perhaps the greatest managerial challenge” the country had faced since independence. John Kufuor, Ghana’s president at the time, warned that “instead of a being a blessing, oil sometimes proves the undoing of many … nations who come by this precious commodity.”
Ghana’s reaction no doubt surprised oil-starved observers in developed countries, but the Ghanaian officials were referring to the “resource curse” that has wreaked havoc in other resource-rich, developing countries. Natural-resource wealth not only increases civil violence but, in a bizarre development paradox, is linked to lower economic growth.
By jingo, what a boom it was! So much so that I just noticed a local Philly contractor, perhaps more honest than most, who named his business “Bubble Builders.” In a sign of the times, I haven’t seen a single customer enter over the past few months.
With the housing bubble now truly behind us, you might imagine that Bubble Builders either needs a new name or a new line of business. What would you recommend?
We’ve blogged repeatedly, and somewhat skeptically, about the “peak oil” frenzy. Chris Turner of The Walrus recently profiled Dave Hughes, a Canadian geologist who has crisscrossed North America lecturing on the end of the fossil-fuel age. Hughes, who spent 32 years mapping Canada’s coal reserves, believes that “there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning [hydrocarbons].”
Tato, maker of the world’s cheapest car, is turning its attention to low-cost housing. The company plans to build 1,000 apartments outside Mumbai. The units range in size from 218 square feet to 373 square feet and will sell for $7,800 to $13,400.
Before moving on to other facets of transportation stimulus funding, here’s one more post about the formula for determining what share of those funds go to each state. (Earlier posts are here and here.) Let me pass along a few of the perceptive comments made by readers.
Implanting false memories of childhood tastes can affect adult food choices.
So we asked a group of people — Paul Armentano, Mike Braun, Joel W. Hay, Jeffrey Miron, and Robert Platshorn — to think about a national decriminalization of marijuana (unlikely, let’s be honest) and answer the following: What would be some of the most powerful economic, social, and criminal-justice effects?
There’s been some interesting recent commentary on the Human Development Index. But first, some background. This index is calculated each year by the U.N. Development Program as a summary indicator of “Human Development,” combining data on life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, educational enrollment, and average income (measured as G.D.P. per capita). And earlier this week, Catherine Rampell noted a recent effort by the SSRC-funded American Human Development Project to develop a Human Development Index, for U.S. states. Philosophically, it is an attempt to broaden the development debate beyond G.D.P. But does it succeed?
The Obama administration this week unveiled its new proposal to raise fuel efficiency in American cars. Clear as smog, right? Well, Freakonomics Q&A guest Keith Hennessey, a former economics adviser in the Bush White House, has written up a detailed post on the proposal’s complications and its likely unintended consequences.
Yesterday we solicited your questions for an author Q&A that will go in the paperback edition of Freakonomics. Your response has been phenomenal! Great questions, covering the gamut, suitably irreverent, and far better than anything we could have made up ourselves. So … thank you.
A group of us went out for dinner the other night at a reasonably fancy restaurant. As we looked over the menu, the waitress was kind enough to let us know that the salmon was particularly delicious. We might also want to try the artichoke dip, she told us. It was her personal favorite. Half-joking, one of us asked her if there was a particular reason why she wanted us to try the artichoke dip.
Eighteen weeks ago 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.
To ward off brain drain, Google has developed an algorithm to determine which employees it most risks losing.
Last week we solicited your questions for New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Here are his answers to a selection of them. Thanks to all.
Just before Christmas, I reported that the CBOE‘s Volatility Index (^VIX) had fallen from “an apocalyptic 80 percent” to a merely extraordinary 45 percent.
And I said:
When it drops below 30 percent, it will be a strong indication that the market correction is complete and we’re back to business as usual.
Happily, we’re going to get a chance to see if I was right.
When it’s paired with a book of photographs by filmmaker David Lynch and an invitation to fill the blank CD with tracks from an illegally downloaded album. That’s the weird new distribution scheme being floated by musicians Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse.