Levitt and I had the pleasure of visiting Rapid City, S.D., recently to give a lecture. Yes, we had time to visit Mount Rushmore, a good time made all the better by our charismatic tour guide, National Park Service Superintendent Gerard Baker (Yellow Wolf), the very tall gentleman between us here: We also had occasion to meet a phalanx of . . .
Some people invest in stocks, others invest in lobbyists. Still others, The Wall Street Journal reports, are investing in assault rifles. Just as Slate laments spring as the start of gun season, Freakonomics readers might find more to worry about with the start of swimming pool season. [%comments]
We recently asked you to consider renaming “digital piracy” in light of recent actual piracy. The question appears to have some resonance, as it was picked up by The Guardian, The Washington Post, and others. For my money, the best suggestion by far comes from a reader named Derek: Downlifting. Download + shoplifting. Pretty accurate description that doesn’t imply violence. . . .
We’ve written earlier about Anders Ericsson‘s research on talent, and we’ve blogged on the subject repeatedly. Ericsson’s thesis is that raw talent is overrated, and that experts in a given field (be it hockey or music) accomplish excellence primarily through “deliberate practice.” Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday about a new book about I.Q., also reviewed here, by Richard Nisbett. He argues . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Spelling, Logic, and Frenchmen Why Don’t You Go Find Your Own Quotes? Who Wanted the Least Government? Thirteen 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 . . .
According to NPR, recession-themed marketing is a way to “rais[e] money from lower expectations” and “turn bad times into glad times” by selling thrift, good value — and, as Gawker claims, more sex and alcohol. This photo, taken in a New York City subway station, then, is the perfect recession-ad sampler: Photo: Ryan Hagen
Stuart Brown Whether he’s playing tennis with “a convivial group of codgers” or hanging out with his grandkids, Stuart Brown, the author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, plays as often as he can. With a background in neuroscience and behavioral medicine, Brown has studied play globally, both in civilization and in . . .
Our telecom bill is huge; for cable (no premium channels), cable modem, landline, and my iPhone, it’s about $250. I’ve tried to get AT&T to give me a deal on the landline and iPhone, but to no avail. The cable company, however, will take over my landline at a total price for everything but the iPhone at $5 more than . . .
Readers of this blog may recall Dubner’s crusade against the penny due to opportunity cost as well as the high actual cost of producing pennies. Now Slate takes a look at another currency question: is cash or credit more environmentally friendly? The article doesn’t manage to answer the question, but it does point out the heavy environmental toll of producing . . .
In my last post, I argued that (the truly excellent show) Friday Night Lights might unwittingly be exacerbating the mistaken idea that the vast majority of high-schoolers have sex. I worried that this discrepancy between what adolescents believe (virgins are rare) and the truth (high-school virgins are the norm) is a dangerous combination. Here’s why I’m concerned (and what it . . .
The potential benefits from Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics extend even beyond the Washington Park beautification project. A new paper by Andrew Rose and Mark Spiegel finds that hosting mega-events like the Olympics has a significant positive impact on a country’s exports. Interestingly, the authors also find that even unsuccessful Olympic bids have a positive effect on . . .
Hoping to grab a place alongside the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the euro, India is looking to design a symbol to represent its currency, the rupee. Any suggestions? [%comments]
As procrastinators across the country furtively shuffle W-2’s under their desks while on conference calls and google “post office hours,” Natalie Angier points out that humans aren’t the only ones expected to contribute to their society. In fact, dominant male fairy wrens may punish delinquent citizens for up to 26 hours and vampire bats actually regurgitate meals to feed hungry . . .
Recently, we highlighted a British journalist’s story about the underside of Dubai’s startling ascent. Some in Dubai called foul, including one writer who wants to remind Britons that their own country has a dark side. After all, what to think of a country in which one fifth of the population lives in poverty? [%comments]
Looking for a 22,000 percent return on your investment? Hire a lobbyist, send her to Washington on your behalf, and watch the money roll in. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that every $1 spent by firms lobbying Congress for a single tax break in 2004 brought in $220 in tax savings. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
Last week, we solicited your questions for Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, a rambunctious tragicomic novel about modern India.
This may sound like a chorus of goblins, but it’s really the sound of the internet — of two thousand people, each paid to make just one tone, synthesized into a rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” Why this song? When scientists used a computer to synthesize music for the first time, in 1962, they used “Daisy.” A few years . . .
I’m a huge fan of Friday Night Lights — to the point that when a student makes an especially good point in class, I sometimes intone “Clear eyes, full heart,” emulating the coach in the series. But it was with some sadness that I watched a couple weeks ago an episode in which Julie, the coach’s daughter, lost her virginity . . .
Over the past half-century, ballet dancers who perform Sleeping Beauty at London’s Royal Opera House have been raising their legs higher and higher. (More here.) So why, over the same time period, have professional basketball players not improved their free-throw shooting?
Remember when we wondered if stricter regulations and restrictions on executive compensation would spark an exodus of talented bankers from top Wall Street firms? Turns out it’s happening, and it’s probably not a bad thing. [%comments]
Andrew Cherlin has a new book coming out today called The Marriage-Go-Round. He’s a first-rate sociologist, and so I’m looking forward to reading it. But for now, he’s teasing us with the following striking fact: Take two children, one growing up with married parents in the United States, and one growing up with unmarried parents in Sweden; which child has . . .
A few months ago, Princeton economist Angus Deaton offered his vision for development economics. In his piece, he rails against the movement toward relatively atheoretical, randomized experiments, calling for closer ties between theory and empirics. “The great economists should be trying to do something that is harder.” Now, in an excellent new paper, Harvard economist Guido Imbens fires back. Imbens . . .
Please welcome to our corps of in-house bloggers Dwyer Gunn, a young writer who has studied economics at Wellesley, worked in finance, and been a research assistant at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. “The biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression,” as described by Richard Posner, began in December of 2007 amidst plunging housing prices and reached its . . .
Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than 70 locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring — in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the like? The records the U.S.D.A. have kept show that those same lilacs . . .
Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters? Not too long ago, they did; in 1849, to pick an extreme . . .
To get Google to open a major routing center in Lenoir, N.C., and bring with it 200 jobs and about $172 million in local investments, the state and local governments offered the company $200 million worth of incentives, reports The Lenoir News-Topic, including sales-tax-free electrical power and computer purchases. When the deal was signed in 2007, some members of the . . .
| If you’re browsing the internet to increase your workplace productivity, why not brush up on your geography at the same time, with this punkish roast of the 50 state capitals — animated with M&M’s. [%comments]
Here is a nice profile of Sudhir Venkatesh, who is a co-author, friend, and Freakonomics blogger.
In light of the recent spate of Somali pirate attacks (here’s one interesting long view, and here’s another), I wonder if it’s time to start calling “digital piracy” something else.
| For those of you who enjoy dollar origami, we bring you a gallery of Mark Wagner‘s intricate and beautiful dollar bill collages. His portrait of Marxism is our favorite. [%comments]