What are the odds of your marriage ending in divorce? This is a risk with some pretty important consequences, but chances are, you don’t have the foggiest idea on how to quantify it. Until now. My favorite economist (and my significant other), Betsey Stevenson, has put together a neat online widget for the folks at Divorce360.com. The widget crunches recent . . .
Photo: G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times A few years back, I wrote an article about the N.F.L.’s annual “rookie symposium,” a four-day gathering during which the league tries to warn incoming players about all the pitfalls they may face — personal threats, bad influences, gold-digging women, dishonest money managers, etc. The N.F.L. even brought in a bunch of veterans . . .
Congratulations to my friend Amy Finkelstein who just won the Elaine Bennett Prize. The prize is given every other year to the most outstanding young female economist by the American Economic Association. Our careers have many parallels. Like me, Amy was an undergraduate at Harvard, got her Ph.D. at M.I.T. with Jim Poterba as her advisor, and then spent three . . .
The Big Three auto companies are back in Washington this week, asking Congress for more money to keep themselves afloat — and, of course, to keep their employees employed and their retirees able to draw pension benefits. The Times reported last week on the state of the automakers’ pension plans. In a nutshell: not as bad as might be expected . . .
Like many others, I’ve had a difficult time during this Thanksgiving weekend to get my mind around the tragic trampling of Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour. Did people keep shopping? Did the Valley Stream store make any sales before the police closed it down? Who put up the sign outside the store saying “Blitz Line Starts Here”? The president of a . . .
Last week, President-elect Obama dominated the news — and perhaps moved the markets — by spending the three days before Thanksgiving introducing one economist after another to the American public. There were Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, and Austan Goolsbee; and don’t forget Tim Geithner and Paul Volcker, neither of whom are Ph.D. economists, but neither of whom are . . .
Photo: Tom Lemo One of the changes that the “Yes We Can” movement has already wrought is a substantial increase in voter registration — particularly in swing states. In Virginia, for example, the number of registered voters increased by almost 10 percent. Since voter-registration lists are also used to construct juror lists, a possible benefit of this registration boost is . . .
What was Paul Krugman thinking when he met President Bush last week? Here’s a list of over 300 photo captions from readers of this blog, and another couple hundred from Marginal Revolution here (with others here and Tyler Cowen‘s favorites here). Krugman, who graciously agreed to judge our Freako-versus-MR caption-that-photo contest, has spoken: Actually, I think it’s a tie — . . .
The free newspaper on the London tube has this front-page advertisement: “From 10 a.m. tomorrow, £10 ($15) hotel rooms, on the web site lastminute.com.” For an economist this is a heartwarming advertisement. Clearly these are hotel rooms that would otherwise go unfilled. While $15 is not much, I would imagine that it is a bit more than the marginal cost . . .
Photo: cobalt123 According to this collection of turkey statistics, “more than 45 million turkeys are cooked and eaten in the U.S. at Thanksgiving.” In a country of some 300 million people, that’s one whole turkey for every 6.67 people. According to this report, the average Thanksgiving gathering has about 11 people. So that’s nearly two whole turkeys on every single . . .
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 famous quotations from Spanish or Latin American literature, history, or culture, particularly if they are . . .
Yesterday, I asked Tyler Cowen if he’s willing to bet his Marginal Revolution readers against Freakonomics readers in the caption-that-photo contest we announced earlier this week. I’m pleased to report that Cowen is a betting man after all. Yes Tyler, your bet is accepted — and it’s dinner on the loser. I remain confident that the winning caption will be . . .
I’m wondering if any blog readers can explain something to me. Back in the old days, banks didn’t package and resell the mortgages they wrote. So when a homeowner got into trouble, they could go down and talk with the bank about working out some solution other than foreclosure. For instance, the bank could allow the borrower to pay back . . .
I love my TiVo. And like a good economist, I’ve been trying to quantify this love. Here’s what I came up with. I watch about six hours of television programming per week. The miracle of the “30-second skip” button means that I haven’t watched an advertisement in years. Consequently, six hours of programming only takes me four hours to watch, . . .
No, you are not imagining things. This is the Q&A-with-elder-statesmen-who’ve-made-unorthodox-but-splashy-runs-for- president season. Ross Perot We just finished up with Ron Paul. Now it’s Ross Perot‘s turn. Perot ran for president in 1992 as an independent candidate, winning 19 percent of the vote; he ran in 1996 on the Reform Party ticket, winning 8 percent of the vote. These days, he . . .
This piece from Tom Ricks, the military correspondent at the Washington Post, has some excellent stories about creative anti-terrorist strategies used by the British to fight the I.R.A., including a laundromat where they run the clothes through a machine that tests for bomb residue before they dry clean the clothes. To pin down where the bomb makers live, they mail . . .
Yesterday, President Bush invited the most recent round of Nobel laureates to the White House to accept his congratulations. And yes, this included his trenchant critic and economics prize-winner, Paul Krugman. Photo from Economist.com This photo posted on Economist.com (from Agence France-Presse) makes me wish I were better at reading body language. I’m going to shamelessly rip off The New . . .
Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (Photo: Gary Tramontina/The New York Times) My University of Chicago colleagues Josh Rauh and Luigi Zingales have written an insightful essay on G.M.’s plight and what the government should do about it. They, like virtually all economists, think the auto industry bailout under consideration is not the right solution. They believe the best option is . . .
I have been posting on this site about the trials and tribulations of young donors. I’m in the middle of chronicling the life of Michael, an heir to a trust, who must soon begin giving away $78 million (U.S.). More on his philanthropic journey in the next post. Another group is stumbling into the American philanthropic scene. Young South Asians . . .
This is the time of year when we like to announce that if you are planning to give a copy of Freakonomics as a holiday gift, whether via Amazon.com, at a Barnes & Noble, or from a street vendor in India, we will send you a free autographed bookplate to stick in that book for your extra-special someone. Just follow . . .
Martin Feldstein has written another Wall Street Journal op-ed (here’s an NBER version) extending his idea for stabilizing home prices. Steven Levitt has written about Feldstein’s basic idea before. The basic idea is for the government to provide low-interest loans to mortgage holders in return for mortgage debt: The federal government would offer any homeowner with a mortgage an opportunity . . .
Photo: Felicity Paxton I’ve never thought much about my toilet. (Though we’ve discussed toilets on this blog here, here, and here.) It usually does its job; sometimes it needs a little help from the plunger. Rose George‘s new book The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters not only got me wildly interested in my . . .
It is home to this fine monument: And here it is in wider view: Yes, that’s the Parthenon, but no, I was not in Athens, and no, Athens hasn’t rebuilt the thing. I was in “the Athens of the South,” a.k.a. Nashville, Tenn., to give a talk at Vanderbilt University. I have always liked Nashville and Vanderbilt in particular, and . . .
According to a new study, a statewide workplace smoking ban in Massachusetts may be responsible for a steep drop in heart-attack deaths since 2004. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which produced the study, says the biggest health gains came among those people the ban saved from regular exposure to second-hand smoke. The rate of heart-disease-related deaths has been cut . . .
It would seem to be a fantastic time to raise gas taxes right now: while the economic climate is so dire that all other tax hikes have been shelved (even the high-earner income-tax increase that Obama pushed during his campaign), gas prices have fallen so far in recent weeks that even an outrageously high per-gallon tax wouldn’t hurt much right now. (It’d be kind of like a SMarT Plan in reverse.) But as with all tax matters, things aren’t so simple.
Do you remember the following quote from Barack Obama? “I am like a Rorschach test,” Mr. Obama noted at one point during the campaign. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” That’s not quite what I think of as a Rorschach test. This is what I think of as a Rorschach test: From Caffeinated Politics Robin . . .
The Forever Portfolio, spotted this week in the Nashville airport. Our friend James Altucher has a new book out, The Forever Portfolio, which is an investment book — the subtitle is “How to Pick Stocks That You Can Hold for the Long Run” — but it is also full of James Altucher stories about poker-playing and idea-generating and other stuff, . . .
Economic historian Price Fishback, who recently guest blogged about the original Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, is back for an encore. This time, he tackles the issue of whether the New Deal and World War II are good examples of Keynesian stimuli. If you want to see these sorts of issues tackled in greater detail, check out Newdeal2. I always thought . . .
Very, it would seem. This isn’t exactly a surprise. Obama campaigned hard on the subject. But a couple of personnel moves in recent days suggest that, despite the cratering economy, the administration is also eager to tackle the energy/global warming issues. The first move is the ouster of John Dingell as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, . . .