We’ve written now and again about various honor-system commerce schemes (the Bagel Guy in Freakonomics) or pay-as-you-wish systems for coffee shops, bakeries, music downloads, and the like. Just don’t try this if you happen to live anywhere near Northumberland in England. That’s where a business consultant named James Cookson regularly left out his surplus vegetables, along with a piggy bank . . .
Governments intervene in markets all the time — and they should, in order to make markets more competitive; to solve problems of externalities (which are ubiquitous); to resolve difficulties caused by individuals’ shortsightedness, including the spurring of innovation; and to reduce transactions costs. Where does the auto bailout fit in? It certainly doesn’t make markets more competitive; instead it subsidizes . . .
The author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford is the presenter of the BBC podcast More or Less, a 25-minute program about numbers and statistics. Based on the following list of recent topics, it would seem to be of interest to Freakonomics readers: Nassim Taleb and Paul Wilmott on a simple conceptual error that contributed to the credit crunch; the . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here. In my last bleg, I asked for the most famous quotations of all time from comic books or graphic novels. . . .
Yesterday we wondered how the Blagojevich Affair would influence other politicians who need to fill vacant seats in the Senate or elsewhere. (BTW, the procedure for filling a vacant Senate seat varies state-by-state; here’s a related article.) We particularly wondered how New York Governor David Paterson would approach the task of replacing Hillary Clinton, now that the eyes of the . . .
You can find the whole document of the complaint against Blagojevich here. The more interesting stuff comes in the second half of the document. I bet there are a lot of anxious folks out there studying the document to see if they might appear as Contractor A or Consultant 3 or Senate Candidate 5. Not all of the pseudonyms in . . .
To call Rod Blagojevich‘s alleged crimes lunacy is to give the moon a bad name. So I won’t even ponder here what led him to do what he is said to have done. Blagojevich earned a brief mention in Freakonomics, in a section arguing that having a lot of books at home doesn’t cause children to do better at school. . . .
Who will buy the movie rights for this charming article about a 73-year-old college basketball player, and when, and for how much, and what will the eventual movie be titled? A piece of Freakonomics schwag goes to the person whose guess is most entertaining or, failing that, most accurate. Photo: Shawn Poynter for The New York Times
Ross Perot We recently solicited your questions for Ross Perot. You asked him about third-party candidates, the national debt, what kind of car he drives, and “why do guys from Texas with the initials R.P. have so much integrity?” (We’re pretty sure that last one was a reference to our earlier Q&A with Ron Paul.) Perot doesn’t have an answer . . .
We economists love to talk about Pareto optima and Pareto-improving changes. Frankly, though, when the group of interested parties is considered broadly enough, there are extremely few changes that are truly Pareto-improving. I just came across one. I was scheduled for a seminar next week at the German research institute where I’m on sabbatical; it would have been my sixth . . .
See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die. In “Proposition 8 — The Musical,” Neil Patrick Harris argues “there’s money to be made” — from weddings (and subsequent divorces) if California legalizes same-sex marriage. But my coauthor Jennifer Gerard Brown beat him to the punch. In “Competitive Federalism and the Legislative Incentives to Recognize Same-Sex Marriage” 68 S. CAL. . . .
If Barack Obama‘s inaugural address could be just six words long, how would it read? Back in February, we ran a contest asking for a new six-word motto for the U.S. (The winner: “Our worst critics prefer to stay.”) We were riffing off of a then-new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, which contained six-word memoirs by people from . . .
Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, now runs the invention company Intellectual Ventures. He is a polymath’s polymath: a physicist by training who practices many feats of technology as well as dinosaur-hunting, intensive cuisine, photography, and other, more esoteric pursuits. Earlier this year he contributed three guest posts about his visits to Greenland and Iceland. Now he . . .
I recently saw a remarkable short documentary entitled Smile Pinki. It tells the story of two poverty-stricken young children (one a girl named Pinki) in India who are born with clefts and have the opportunity to receive free surgery to fix their condition. It is incredibly moving. I’m not the only one who feels that way — the movie is . . .
If those riding intellectual fads are sometimes guilty of sloppy reasoning, imagine what happens when two fads collide. That’s what happened when the British Medical Journal elected to publish a study analyzing 1) happiness in 2) social networks. The study, by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, concludes that happiness is contagious within social networks. According to the authors, your happiness . . .
Or, put another way:
What does WalMart have in common with Oprah Winfrey?
The writer Jonathan Franzen is best known for his 2001 novel The Corrections. He carries a very strong reputation among the high-end literary set, and is as opinionated about said set (in the affirmative) as he is scornful of low-end culture.
Some of us saw it as a sign of the times when Metacritic suddenly stopped compiling book reviews. For those of you unfamiliar with the site, Metacritic carries aggregate review scores for video games, TV shows, movies, and music. For a time, it was also a cheat sheet to literary taste-making. Then in 2007, CNET, Metacritic’s parent company, killed the . . .
I’m pretty sure Manny Pacquiao is a better fighter than Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton. But who is the better crime fighter? At least for one day, it appears that Pacquiao wins that title as well.
Imagine for a moment that you are a stay-at-home mom with a workaholic husband, five kids between the ages of two and nine, a new dog, and almost no babysitting help. What would you do? How about start up a new business? That’s what Jennifer List, wife of my colleague and co-author John List, did. The result is Seven Smooches. . . .
We received an interesting bleg from Martin Saavedra, who is studying international economics and finance at the Catholic University of America and plans to start an economics Ph.D. next fall. He is interested in a subject we’ve written about before — the utility of voting — although he is after a more personal set of information, namely: why do you . . .
The Book Design Review has released its picks for the best-designed book covers of 2008. We’re a little disappointed not to see any economics books on the list. In the category of excellent cover design for an economics book, we’d like to nominate Robert Shiller‘s The Subprime Solution, Michael Heller‘s The Gridlock Economy, and Loretta Napoleoni‘s Rogue Economics. Any other . . .
Some Italian professors told me about one of the most bizarre incentive systems in the world. The amount of fees that an Italian university can charge to students is linked to the amount of support the university receives from the national government. Sounds sensible, right? After all, public universities in the U.S. typically try to make up lost state revenue . . .
From a reader we’ll call E.K.: I thought you might get a kick out of this photo of my kids, who are big fans of your work. The little one is 6, the older one (who already read Freakonomics) is 10. They had gotten up early Sunday morning and were hanging out reading while we (the parents) slept in. When . . .
There’s a scarcity of Obamas in the U.S. (HT: Going Like Sixty) Does having a weird name make you more likely to play football for L.S.U.? (HT: Nathan M. Gaudet) (Earlier) If you still didn’t get a flu shot, take a look at some vaccine economics. In election predictions, the bettors beat the pundits. (Earlier)
About 140 million people in the U.S. will attend a major-league sporting event this year, according to this NPR article. But as the same article says, museums will draw about 850 million attendees this year. So why do more people make trips to museums than to sports games? Well, they are obviously cheaper, and more abundant, but it may also . . .
I’m a bit late getting to this, but I just saw that my friend Roland Fryer appeared on The Colbert Report on Monday. He was — officially — talking about his current experiments with providing incentives for kids to get better grades. While it is pretty hard to look good next to Colbert, Roland pulled it off. And it takes . . .
Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of The Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own — it needn’t have anything to do with quotations — send it along here. I would welcome suggestions of what are the most famous quotations of all time from comic books or graphic novels. . . .
It looks like David Gregory has been selected by NBC to replace the late Tim Russert as host of Meet the Press. I predict he will flourish. Why? I don’t know much about his talent, since I’ve rarely seen him on TV. My prediction is based on the fact that he is, by my reckoning, approximately 17 feet tall. He . . .
Ronald Reagan famously described the distinction between a recession and a depression as follows: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours.” Right now, a few more economists might be willing to use the D-word. The “help wanted” publication for Ph.D. economists is sporting a brand new section: suspended or canceled listings. . . .
I spent my Thanksgiving at the New Orleans Fair Grounds Racetrack in a gaudy hat, betting on horses. A U.S.A. Today photographer snapped this photo of me: Photo: Sean Gardner/U.S.A. Today By the time I left the track, I had spent $20 on bets, made back $33 in winnings, bought lunch for $5, and had a gin and tonic for . . .