March Madness, Hedge-Fund Style
| When entering your office pool this season, check out the collective wisdom on winners and losers, then bet against it. Slate‘s Chris Wilson explains. [%comments]
| When entering your office pool this season, check out the collective wisdom on winners and losers, then bet against it. Slate‘s Chris Wilson explains. [%comments]
Last fall, I spoke at an SPSS conference in Las Vegas. As I was heading home, I saw a sign on a convenience store (right next to Bally’s) that made me do a double-take. I got so interested that after a couple of blocks, I convinced my driver to turn around and let me go back to take these pictures: . . .
O.K., I’ll admit that I’ve done plenty of hand-wringing about the state of economics. And now I’m going to do something about it. This morning, Brookings announced that David Romer and I will be taking over as the new editors of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. We’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill — left empty by Larry . . .
| During the boom economy, we took on historically unprecedented debt to finance our pursuit of the American Dream, all the while losing faith that we could achieve it. Now that the Wall Street party is over, we’re starting to dream anew. Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp has more, in an essay accompanied by some stunning photos of American . . .
Dear Secretary Geithner, I’ve been out of touch. Sorry. I spent the last month on grand jury duty, putting Manhattan’s poor minorities behind bars. I needed a little time to recover. As promised, this is the first in a series of friendly dispatches. Advice, if you will. Learned counsel. Wisdom from the streets (as opposed to “The Street,” where wisdom . . .
| From a New York Times review of an art exhibit by Shepard Fairey, the street artist best known for creating the Obama “hope” poster: “Before the Saks campaign makes it painful even to think about this artist, who did more than any other to get our current president elected …” If that is remotely true, expect the salaries of . . .
The American Society for Aesthetic Cosmetic Surgery released its annual statistical report this week. It makes for surprisingly interesting reading. The headline is that total procedures (surgical and non-surgical) fell by 12 percent between 2007 and 2008. If anything, that decline strikes me as small. In economic terms, cosmetic surgery would be thought of as a luxury durable good that . . .
| A Rice University study found that lenders may judge your creditworthiness based on how trustworthy they think you look. The researchers didn’t pinpoint which physical characteristics look most or least trustworthy, but if they do in the future, might plastic surgery go from a luxury good to a financially necessity? [%comments]
Toronto-based Hilco Consumer Capital won what many call the “holy grail of advertising,” reports NPR: the right to sell Bob Marley‘s name. The company partnered with the Marleys to begin rolling out Marley-branded products like salad dressing and a video game.
The obvious issue with the brand, as NPR‘s Katia Dunn puts it: “Marley was a major stoner.”
| Fewer Americans are choosing to quit their jobs than at any time in the last eight years, the Christian Science Monitor reports. So when you do quit in this economy, you’ve got to make it special. How special? W. Neil Berrett printed his resignation letter on a huge sheet cake and submitted it to his boss. (HT: Boing Boing) . . .
Nearly two years ago, I blogged about my fear of global pandemic and how I thought Google might be the thing that saves us by providing an early warning system. Since that time, Google.org has instituted a system that provides real-time measurement of flu queries. (By the way, Google flu trends shows that this was not a bad year at . . .
| Banking on Bollywood’s ability to sell almost anything in India, an Israeli arms firm thought it might work for weapons as well, and presented this song-and-dance missile commercial at an Indian trade fair. We already asked what Indian blog readers thought of the Bolly-infused, Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, so what about this commercial? Will it actually sell missiles? (HT: Mayur . . .
Here’s my favorite new fact about N.C.A.A. basketball: teams that are behind by one point at halftime are actually more likely to win than teams that are one point ahead. This striking finding comes courtesy of a terrific new paper by my Wharton colleagues, Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. Their findings are summarized in this graph, which collects info from . . .
Last week we solicited your questions for Penn Jillette, the prolific (and, yes, libertarian) entertainer.
Among other interesting topics, your questions covered magic, politics, Scientology, and Jillette’s red fingernail.
| Via Andrew Sullivan: romance novel sales are up — after generating $1.375 billion in revenue in 2007. Expect these numbers to rise, even as other areas of the entertainment industry suffer, because romance novels tend to do better in economic downturns. O.K., so if we’re spending the recession fighting off zombie banks, can we expect a big spike in . . .
I asked my ophthalmologist on Friday how his business was doing in the recession, and he said it was stable. He noted, however, that his colleagues who specialize in Lasik surgery had seen a 60 percent drop in business. Clearly, Lasik, which is not reimbursed by most insurance plans, is postponable in times when incomes drop; at least in the . . .
Computers are sophisticated enough to play a flawless game of checkers. They can beat the world’s greatest chess masters. But humans still put them to shame on the Go board.
| White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers recently summed up our economic trouble this way: “Greed gives way to fear. And this fear begets fear. That is the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis.” Daniel Gross sees the economy hunkering on a ledge, and he has one word of advice: “Jump!” [%comments]
When the stock market plummets, where does the value of your holdings actually go? This article from Investopedia explains it well.
| We tweet! There are a lot of ways to enjoy Freakonomics: while looking for a job (someone please hire this man), with hot chocolate on a rainy day, and as a tool for learning how to talk about incentives. Hello to everyone who follows us; hope it doesn’t creep you out if we follow you too. … [%comments]
Aaron Zelinsky is a Yale law school student with a knack for coming up with interesting ideas. Last year, I blogged about his proposal for fighting steroid use in sports if the governing bodies really cared. Now, on the Huffington Post, he has an interesting angle on how the federal government might stop the A.I.G. bonuses that have everyone so . . .
| When the owner of a translation agency asked his international acquaintances how the recession is treating them. In Latvia, there was sarcasm: “Everything’s just peachy. The government resigned last week. … Prices rise so fast you can actually see the difference from one month to another. I miss living in the U.S.” In Russia, there was bitterness: “I see . . .
| Mormon church leaders have criticized HBO for planning to air a fictional version of a Mormon temple endowment ceremony on Big Love this Sunday, saying the ceremony risks being “misrepresented or presented without context or understanding.” But is it possible that more media exposure of Mormonism — like Salt Lake Tribune reporter Brooke Adams‘s The Plural Life blog — . . .
| Mad Money host Jim Cramer took a drubbing from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last night (watch online). But talk about creative destruction — at the end of the interview, Cramer accepted a challenge to take a more hard-nosed, investigative tack on his own show. Imagine if Cramer had gone on Mad Money in August of last year . . .
Thanks to Flickr’s Creative Commons (made possible, in part, by Lawrence Lessig), where Flickr users make their photography available for public use, we often use Flickr images to spruce up this blog.
So how does Freakonomics show up on Flickr?
| In this crisis of capitalism, it’s all well and good to re-read John Maynard Keynes, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the New York Review of Books. But Sen also says that we tend to ignore Keynes’s rival Arthur Cecil Pigou, who said market fluctuations are partly driven by psychology, and that we do so at our own . . .
At the end of their latest radio piece on the financial crisis, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson make a great point about uncertainty in the nationalization debate: Of course, if [Tim Geithner and the Obama administration] were planning to take over the banking system, they wouldn’t announce it beforehand. They’d probably say exactly what they’re saying right now, wait ’til . . .
| Just when you were convinced that your bike is a free alternative to driving, a bill is proposed in Oregon that would require cyclists to pay a $54 registration every two years. Wayne Kriger, the bill’s chief architect (and, natch, a non-cyclist), says bike riders should help pay for the roads they use. Just be glad he didn’t propose . . .
Matthew J. Darnell, writing on Yahoo!’s N.F.L. blog, talks about how Andre Smith, an Alabama offensive lineman slotted as a potential overall No. 1 draft pick, has destroyed his own value with a series of bad decisions and, most recently, a really bad workout in front of pro scouts: I can’t recall anyone’s draft stock falling quite like Andre Smith’s. . . .
| Good news, Levitt: your dream of emergency-only E.R.’s may be more realistic than you think. A program in Camden, N.J., hospitals to cut down on repeat visitors (known to E.R. docs as “frequent flyers”) seems to be working. (HT: Megan Williams) [%comments]