Economists talk loosely about substitutes and complements as if each pair of goods can always be characterized as one or the other. That’s incorrect: their substitutability can depend on the situation, particularly the time and the individual’s circumstances, even for the same person. An acquaintance of mine reported the perhaps-apocryphal story that a major discount store is offering any customer . . .
| A new study by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University argues that the stress associated with living in poverty reduces the memory capacity of poor children, making it harder for them to learn and escape poverty. Makes you wonder how poverty might be fought in the future. Perhaps more focus on mental-health services, or even church attendance? . . .
I told you this was an easy one. A few days back, I asked why the park near my house was cleaner than ever before. It took only three comments (congratulations to Donny, the winner) to get the right answer: the International Olympic Committee was coming to Chicago. I happen to live about six blocks from Washington Park, which will . . .
There’s an interesting discussion over at Room for Debate on how the recession is affecting family life. A key question is whether recessions lead to a rise in divorce or not.
Here’s Betsey Stevenson (my frequent coauthor and significant other):
| Next month, a small army of meteorologists armed with 40 sensor-loaded vehicles and a flying drone will stalk America’s southern plains, trying to get an unprecedentedly detailed look at tornadoes as they form. The project, the largest and most ambitious of its kind, aims to unravel some mysteries of how these giant storms are born. Once we understand that, . . .
I have to admit, the transportation portion of the stimulus package troubles me. It’s not that I have a bad opinion of it; what troubles me is that I have considerable difficulty forming an opinion at all. The process is so hasty, and involves so many different players, and will fund such a vast number of projects, and has so . . .
Ryan Hagen, a prized Freakonomics research assistant, has previously worked as a research associate for N.Y.U.’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness & Response. He has an interest in pirates that might reasonably be deemed obsessive. Photo: Cliff Somali pirates hijacked an American cargo ship on Wednesday, with the intention of holding the ship and its 20-man crew for ransom. Unfortunately for . . .
If you can predict the future better than other people, you will soon become rich. If you can know better than other people what is happening right now, that is almost as good. After all, if no one else finds out the truth until a month after the fact, the present might as well be the future — nobody knows . . .
| Zappos created a map on its site showing, in real-time, orders being placed for its shoes across the U.S. Other than hypnotizing Zappos employees and allowing New Yorkers to see for themselves whether they have better fashion sense than the rest of the country, is the map doing anything to help Zappos sell more shoes? As people embrace thrift . . .
| Polling guru Nate Silver has built a regression model, based on demographic and political trends, to forecast when a majority of the voting public in each of the 50 states might vote against a gay-marriage ban, or vote to repeal an existing one. His findings: by 2016, most states will have legalized gay marriage, with Mississippi alone holding on . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Why Don’t You Go Find Your Own Quotes? Who Wanted the Least Government? Did Emerson Define Success? Twelve 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 . . .
| You might want to think twice the next time a stranger asks to befriend you on a social networking site. If this IT World article is to be believed, that stranger might want to use innocuous personal information to create a convincing clone of your identity on another social network. Why clone your identity? To use it in nefarious . . .
A thoughtful piece in the Washington Post on Ben Bernanke is extremely laudatory about his new approach at the Fed. I still worry that in the end that the government will have spent trillions too much to fight a recession and that economic growth will suffer for decades. There is a real principal-agent problem at work here. If the government . . .
| You may have read about the glut of cars abandoned at Dubai’s airport as expats fled the country in the wake of the global financial crisis. Journalist Johann Hari digs deeper and tells the story of a Canadian woman who moved to Dubai with her husband. He got into debt trouble in the emirate and was sent to prison . . .
Photo: Library of Congress There is a review of Kat Long‘s The Forbidden Apple in last Sunday’s New York Times. The review describes a number of incidents where efforts to ban or restrict transactions in one market spilled over with negative consequences into a related market. To eliminate drinking on Sundays, New York City restricted it to hotels. In response, . . .
| About 250 Kindle users are using Amazon’s tagging system to boycott e-books that cost over $10, claiming that an e-book is more “restricted in its use” than a paper book and should therefore cost less, reports Wired. One of the boycotters’ main complaints: you can’t lend out your e-books to friends. When digital music fans were confronted with this . . .
Susanne Freidberg, a professor of geography at Dartmouth, has been guest blogging here about the food supply. This is her final post; we thank her very much. You can thank her too by picking up a copy of her just-released book, “Fresh: A Perishable History.” Photo: Stephen Ausmus A White Leghorn hen. Last week’s post talked about early-20th-century “egg gamblers” . . .
| The economic boom of the mid-2000’s brought horror stories of an air travel system straining to operate well over capacity. But fewer people flew in 2008, and a survey shows that translated into better service — fewer delays and cancellations, fewer lost bags, and fewer overbookings. Maybe it’s time to add airline service quality to the list of economic . . .
I recently had occasion to visit India for the first time to speak at a conference put on by the media conglomerate India Today. Sadly my visit was very short, just a toe-touch. Still, it was fascinating from start to finish. On the way over, one of the flight attendants told me she was using her down time in New . . .
| Greenpeace Canada believes Toronto’s Pickering Nuclear power plant is putting the city’s residents in mortal danger. So last week, the group distributed leaflets around town warning of impending radiological disaster, each leaflet carrying a pill made of seaweed that was supposed to represent an anti-radiation iodine pill. Alarmed and bewildered, residents alerted the police, who intervened, ending the campaign. . . .
| On the one hand, URL shorteners are handy tools that shrink long, clumsy internet addresses into cute linklets that can fit into a Twitter message. On the other hand, writes Joshua Schachter, they needlessly slow internet traffic, pose a security risk, and can deprive site owners of valuable visitor information or even revenue. Shorteners can be helpful for individual . . .
John Dunn/The New York Times Courtney Paris Oklahoma’s loss in the N.C.A.A. tournament raises interesting questions of both economics and law. The Sooners’s star player, Courtney Paris, promised before the tournament to pay back her scholarship if the Sooners didn’t win the championship. As an economist, I can’t wait to find out whether Paris will follow through (and if so, . . .
Photo: wili_hybrid It’s been a while since we did a Freakonomics quiz. Here is an easy one. The first correct comment wins Freakonomics schwag: Today, the park near my house was cleaner than I have ever seen it. Why?
| Did this German invent the perfect board game? Wired has the story of The Settlers of Catan, one of the most popular new board games in Europe and, now, the U.S. Why is it so popular? For one, instead of having you conquer or bankrupt your friends and family, Catan makes you cooperate with them in a tabletop free-market . . .
Photo: Lorri37 My friend Tim Groseclose passed along this interesting passage from the book Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard. The premise of the book is that the author, having just graduated from college, sets out to see if — starting with the clothes on his back, a sleeping bag, and $25 — he can build that into a furnished apartment, . . .
| North Korea launched a threatening-looking rocket over the weekend. It crashed harmlessly into the sea. Wonder what North Korea actually looks like on the ground these days? Two Austrians recently entered the country by train, through a border crossing that has been closed to tourists since 1994, and took these rare and fascinating photos of life in the Hermit . . .
Why are these ominous British posters (photographed by David Byrne) informing you of your rights? Photo: David Byrne A stylistic riff on the “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters from the Blitz, these new posters are a publicity campaign for a promise by police to be more engaged with their communities. The evidence is mixed on whether or not community . . .
| To ring in the new year, Tropicana rolled out a weird, minimalist, futuristic redesign of its iconic orange juice cartons. Sales immediately plunged 20 percent, and after just two months on the market, Tropicana scotched the redesign. The quick rollback is all but unprecedented. Why did people react so negatively? After all, the design switch, from an image of . . .
| We can’t decide whether this blog is best before, during, or after lunch: delicious sandwiches, brought to your screen by an ordinary scanner. Naturally, it’s called scanwiches. (HT: Liz Bloomfield) [%comments]
Chris Markl Chris Markl Reader Chris Markl emailed us these photos of signs from Nairobi offering insurance against political violence, terrorism, and riots. If Sudhir Venkatesh is right, we probably won’t be seeing similar insurance pitches in the U.S., though maybe London could use them. Markl wonders why another type of insurance isn’t offered in the U.S. by now: the . . .