Continuing his push for a gas-tax holiday, Sen. John McCain told a town-hall session last week that he “trust[s] the people and not the so-called economists to give the American people a little relief.” So who do “the people” trust to give them economic relief? By a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent, it’s Sen. Barack Obama, according to . . .
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen draws an intriguing parallel between accusations made by disgraced NBA ex-referee Tim Donaghy, and models of collusion. While David Stern has denied explicit collusion between the league and the refs to influence game outcomes, Tyler argues that there may instead be implicit collusion: refs may simply perceive that the league wants them to produce . . .
Does an “unpopular” name make a criminal? (HT: Ryan Barker) (Earlier) A teenager makes plastic rot faster. Professor threatens to sue over student “anti-intellectualism.” More ways to use less gas. (Earlier)
We ran a contest asking readers to submit the one question they’d ask to help pick a partner for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Then we had a special treat: the University of Chicago economist John List (whose writings, by the way, were the inspiration for the contest) agreed to comb through the 350+ entries and choose the Top 5. He did . . .
When I first stumbled onto the name voyager at the Baby Name Wizard a few years back, I felt like I was seeing the future. It was the sort of web tool that folks dream about. I had exactly the same feeling when I recently visited Gapminder.org. They have an interactive data tool called “gapminder world” that is truly remarkable . . .
A reader from Boston named Robert Veneman-Hughes writes in with a bleg request on a subject we’ve wondered about before here: gas siphoning. Here’s what I wrote not long ago at the end of a post about an increase in theft of catalytic converters: I haven’t read many articles lately about people who steal gas out of people’s tanks, even . . .
Starbucks prides itself on how green it is. No negative externalities here — and it proudly advertises on its website its commitment to “Environmental Stewardship.” I wonder, though, about its total effect on the environment. On most mornings I stop by my own local coffee shop on the way to the office, park my car (Honda Civic or my wife’s . . .
My vote is for the companies that design closets. The photos in their ads routinely show closets that are drenched in sunlight while the owners of those closets always seem to possess exactly three pairs of (identical and very clean) pants or skirts but not a single accordion, hockey stick, papier-mache dragon, or any of the other stuff that actually . . .
Safety is an all-too-familiar issue in the construction industry — workers in Las Vegas are striking over it; in April, New York’s building commissioner resigned in light of more than 26 construction worker deaths in the city this year. As for the two recent crane collapses in New York, Patrick Crean, a construction worker at the Freedom Tower site, suspects . . .
It may be surprising to learn that one of the leading scholars studying U.S. politics is in fact a Swedish economist. But the advantage of this unusual state of affairs is that during my recent trip to Stockholm, I had a chance to catch up with David Strömberg. David and I spent an interesting afternoon exploring data from both political . . .
Between 1960 and 2000, Brazil’s fertility rate plummeted from 6.3 to 2.3. The only other country with a comparable decline during that period was China, under its rigid one-child policy. But what was behind the Brazilian fertility plunge? One major factor may have been the influence of soap operas, according to a fascinating new working paper by Eliana La Ferrara, . . .
Ralph Steadman, self portrait from Stop Smiling magazine. Last week we solicited your questions for British cartoonist and caricaturist Ralph Steadman. He graciously fielded your questions about his friendship with the late Hunter Thompson (a “partnership and provocation,” he called it), why his work can be found on beer labels, and why an artist should constantly imitate himself. He also . . .
Reader Leonardo Piccioli sent this photo of one employee’s adaptation to smoke in Buenos Aires caused by natural fires nearby. In a similar fashion, Americans should begin adapting to man-made pollution instead of trying to reverse the inevitable, writes Spencer Reiss in Wired. “Climate change is inevitable,” he writes, and we should “get used to it” by focusing our energies . . .
You may like Katherine Heigl because she is very pretty, but there are other reasons to like her too: She is really, really candid. If you’re not too busy looking for more links to Heigl pictures, you may want to read a bit about the economics of candor in this (gated) paper by Oliver E. Williamson.
Here’s the latest guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. His past blegs can be found here; send us your own bleg requests here. The Motley Fool used my blegging for modern proverbs as an inspiration to write about “investing proverbs.” Wall Street is indeed a rich source of memorable quotations, including: “Buy on the . . .
In today’s Times, Andy Revkin reports on a new study by the Lenfest Ocean Program that will surely inspire a rush to the barricades for certain environmentalists: Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries. “This loss . . .
It isn’t often that economics makes the pages of Science, but I finally got around to taking a look at E. Roy Weintraub‘s review of Steve Marglin‘s The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community. (Gated copy here.) The prophet Jeremiah is alive and well and teaching economics at Harvard. It is not often that a scholar with . . .
We wrote earlier about how concern over climate change may lead to a nuclear-power revival in the U.S., despite longtime opposition and fear on many fronts. The issue is unfolding similarly in Europe. Here’s a fascinating short article from Spiegel, via BusinessWeek: Italy on Thursday said it would join a growing number of European countries returning to nuclear power in . . .
People who make millions of dollars doing one thing often come to view themselves as being experts in subjects far afield from those in which they made their wealth. Because they have so much money, others tend to humor them and tell them they are brilliant in the hopes of currying favor, so they don’t get realistic feedback. (The same . . .
When we choose a major in college we are to some extent choosing a series of future wage rates. The amount of human capital in which we invest is to some extent linked to our college major — different college majors generate different wages. Many of my students, and often unfortunately too their parents, believe that unless they major in . . .
From the Journal of the American Medical Association, the results of a randomized controlled trial using St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) to treat children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: To our knowledge, this is the first placebo-controlled trial of H perforatum in children and adolescents. The results of this study suggest that administration of H perforatum has no additional benefit beyond that . . .
David Singh Grewal, an Eliot Fellow in the Social Sciences at Harvard University, is author of the book Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, in which he explores, among other topics, the relationship between language, networks, and globalization. In the wake of the recent quorum we ran on this very subject, David has agreed to guest blog here. We . . .
There is a very interesting nugget in a paper by Benjamin Hippen about the market for human organs in Iran, which I blogged about not long ago. Hippen writes that in the earlier days of kidney transplantation, both the U.S. and Iranian governments “paid for dialysis while continuing to develop transplant options.” As more and more patients needed dialysis, the . . .
Here’s a good way for the government to reduce the heat it’s taking about high gas prices: giving every American a miles-per-gallon meter (worth about $200). The Web site Hypermiling claims that knowing your gas mileage is the best way to cut gas consumption. Using a meter and gas-saving driving techniques, self proclaimed “King of Hypermilers” Wayne Gerdes recently got . . .
Mere hours after Apple’s announcement of a new GPS-enabled iPhone, I received this e-mail from Amazon.com: Is this in response to the new iPhone? Wouldn’t surprise me. Amazon.com never ceases to amaze me in its responsiveness, flexibility, and willingness to try new things — even if a lot of them fail. Experimentation is so cheap on the web that it’s . . .
As the average price of gasoline nationwide topped $4 a gallon this week, Sen. John McCain said he would renew his call for a summer gas tax holiday. The idea was roundly panned by economists (including the ones on this blog) when McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton first raised it in May. This time around, McCain says he won’t “pretend . . .
We made some ice cream at home last weekend. Someone had given one of the kids an ice cream maker a while ago and we finally got around to using it. We decided to make orange sherbet. It took a pretty long time and it didn’t taste very good but the worst part was how expensive it was. We spent . . .
I’m guessing Doc Rivers doesn’t read this blog, especially when we ponder why he isn’t using a bench player as good as Leon Powe, but I’m also guessing that Rivers is pretty happy he changed things up last night. Here’s Powe’s line for the evening: Playing time: 14:39 FG made: 6-7 FT made: 9-13 Reb: 2 Fouls: 4 Points: 21 . . .
Many people know about the World Series of Poker from the television coverage on ESPN. Mostly they just show the “Main Event” on TV. Hoa Nguyen from worldseriesofpoker.com. The main event has a $10,000 buy-in and lasts for two weeks. Leading up to the main event, there are dozens of other tournaments, some of which are going on right now. . . .