In a recent blog post, we linked to a New York Times article by John Branch showing that the percentage of made basketball free throws has remained steady for 50 years. A reader named Ashley Smart (aptonym?) replied with an amplification/caveat that is well worth sharing: I, like many of your other Freakonomics readers, was intrigued by John Branch’s article . . .
We’ve written before about musicians giving away their work for free online. Now you can add Mike Skinner (a.k.a. The Streets) to the list. He’s giving away new songs using Twitter because, he writes, “all this trying to sell you music … wastes valuable time.” A new study out of Norway suggests Mike‘s business model may be a good one, . . .
A story on NPR’s All Things Considered this week dealt with St. Lucie County, Florida, whose government is trying to counter high local unemployment by requiring that 75 percent of government contracts be reserved for local firms and that the firms employ local workers. This is true for both local tax revenues and federal stimulus package funds. Even ignoring the . . .
Beware moral self-regulation. Doing good works, it turns out, may make people feel justified in doing ill. A new study from psychologists at Northwestern University suggests that “affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally.” In other words, as Ryan Sager points out, acting green one day might leave you more willing to indulge your planet-destroying . . .
We’ve said it many times before: your name is not your destiny. Unless you choose to make it so. In our continuing quest to bring you Grade A aptonyms from every walk of life, here’s the latest offering: + The author of a new bread cookbook, Kneadlessly Simple, named Nancy Baggett. (HT: Raj Pandravada.) + The president of American Rivers, . . .
AOL Autos has a great article on new technologies that shut off your engine if you fail to make payments on your car loan. The devices, which are required by a growing number of subprime loan contracts, are the product of a revolution in telematics — the blending of telecommunications and wireless technology. The devices are usually controlled remotely by . . .
With the magazine industry in bad shape, newsweeklies are trying to imitate the one freakishly successful exception: The Economist. In a Vanity Fair article, Matt Pressman outlines four reasons why they can’t, using analogies like this one to explain: “The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Who Worried About Events? Spelling, Logic, and Frenchmen Why Don’t You Go Find Your Own Quotes? Fourteen 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 . . .
If you copy this post and pass it off as your own, that’s called plagiarism. If you illegally download a Freakonomics e-book for yourself, that’s downlifting (or, more traditionally, bootlegging). If you want to be a pirate, downloading a bootleg of Hook isn’t going to get you there — you’re going to have to actually go out onto the high . . .
Archaeologists worry a lot about looting. Artifacts stolen from historical sites fetch high prices on the black market, which gives looters strong incentives to steal these items. The emergence of eBay, therefore, was a nightmare for those who hated looting. Reducing transaction costs and making the market more liquid would certainly lead to more looting. EBay almost certainly had that . . .
Most people don’t consider geography a controversial field, but that perception may change in the wake of the Iraq war and the ensuing shift toward pragmatism and realism in international affairs. Robert Kaplan argues that, “of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.” Kaplan’s article outlines the . . .
When Japanese unemployment edged up to a three-year high of 4.4 percent in February, the government started looking for creative ways to lower it. One solution: get the unemployed out of the country by offering citizenship buyouts. The program applies only to unemployed people of Japanese descent who were born abroad but now live in Japan (they’re known as nikkei). . . .
Catherine Rampell had a nice post last week over at Economix (“Do It Or Pay”) telling of NPR’s recent interview with Peter Orszag, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, in which Orszag talks about writing an exercise contract exactly like what my beloved stickK.com offers:
In recent months, we’ve posted a few examples of music written about the current recession. Now it’s time to see just how sharp you are with a pop-music quiz. This song is called “The Final Day”: Click Below to Listen Caution: it is very loud. The lyrics are nowhere near as straightforward as, say, “Hey Paul Krugman.” It might be . . .
All of Clara‘s recipes have the same ingredients: potatoes and onions. That’s because she was raised during the Great Depression, and her family was so poor, she says, she was forced to drop out of high school because she couldn’t afford socks. Now a great-grandmother, she wants to teach you to make delicious, nourishing depression cuisine, to help you through . . .
At least two factors are conspiring to turn a top N.F.L. draft pick into a liability rather than a prize. “A No. 1 N.F.L. draft pick may be one of the most overvalued assets in our society.” The first is the rotten economy, which means that a team with a top pick will be compelled to spend a huge chunk . . .
Other than winning the Nobel Prize, getting the John Bates Clark medal is the best thing that can happen to an economist. Without question, winning the Clark medal in 2003 totally changed my life. It was because of the Clark medal that Dubner came out to interview me, and eventually Freakonomics was born. The Clark medal used to be awarded . . .
If surfing the web increases workplace productivity, what does spending time on Facebook do to college students? According to a study by Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein, college students who use Facebook have lower GPA’s and devote less time to studying than other students. While the study didn’t prove causality — do low-GPA, anti-study students self-select into Facebook? — could . . .
For college students and their parents, the steady spike in tuition prices in recent decades has been not only troubling but mysterious: why on earth is tuition inflation double the general inflation rate? What’s behind these huge tuition bills: Massive legacy costs? Less public funding? The cost of acquiring real estate? While none of those reasons are necessarily off the . . .
In the Times Magazine, Jon Gertner takes a look at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which is dedicated to analyzing how people make environmental decisions. CRED has discovered, for instance, that if a carbon tax is framed as an “offset” instead of a “tax,” it makes a substantial difference in how people, particularly Republicans, feel about it. . . .
A 60 Minutes segment on Sunday presented sad stories about people in their 50’s and early 60’s who had counted on their 401K plans to provide a comfortable retirement income by age 65 or even earlier, but who have had their dreams destroyed by the stock market bust. Anyone born in the 1940’s or 1950’s who planned on retiring by . . .
Go ahead, complain all you want about living in America — but at least you can name your kid whatever you want, whether it’s Temptress, Yourhighness, or even Marijuana Pepsi. In China, meanwhile, the government is cracking down on uncommon names. From today’s Times: Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau . . .
I wrote a book on the underground economy a few years ago. For about a decade, I observed activity in Chicago’s South Side — our current president’s backyard. I was surprised to learn about the importance of “creditors” — otherwise affectionately known as “loansharks” — who operated an informal lending network in the area. (These people are known for charging . . .
Winner became a lifetime criminal; Loser a detective in the NYPD. The story of these two brothers matched the findings of my academic research with Roland Fryer, which found no impact of a child’s name on her life.
According to a study by scientists at DePauw University in Indiana, people who frowned a lot in photos when they were kids and teenagers are five times more likely to get divorced later in life than those who smiled in their photos. Unlike an earlier study that claimed happiness is “contagious,” the authors in this case don’t argue that smiling . . .
David Simon, creator of The Wire and Homicide, announced plans to shoot an HBO pilot of Treme, about the New Orleans neighborhood of that name. New Orleans is unfortunately rife with material for a crime drama. As Simon tells the Times-Picayune, the show would explore “political corruption, the public housing controversy, the crippled criminal-justice system, clashes between police and Mardi . . .
Here’s an article in today’s Financial Times about a class on business experimentation that John List and I taught at the Booth School of Business. It does a nice job of laying out our philosophy regarding data and experiments. Thankfully, the reporter did not mention that most of the students hated the class.
Library of Congress In his recent New York Times article on scientific studies of baseball, Alan Schwarz discusses a study showing that sacrifice bunts benefited the 2008 Mets, who bunted a lot, but would have hurt the 2005 Red Sox, who sacrifice bunted very rarely. This seems to me to be a mundane illustration of what we call the Roy . . .
The crew of the Maersk Alabama, having survived an attack by pirates in Somalia last week, has returned home for a much-deserved rest. But with tensions ratcheting up between the U.S. and the rag-tag confederation of Somali pirates, it’s worth looking to the past for clues on how to tame the outlaw seas.
Hoping to harness new parents’ love of photographing their babies, researchers at the University of Washington have put together a computer program that tracks a child’s development in photos. With a photographic record of each milestone (first steps, first word spoken, and so on), pediatricians and parents can better detect early signs of developmental problems. [%comments]