Imperial College, the science-oriented school in London, recently pulled out from the umbrella organization, the University of London. Imperial graduates will no longer have University of London diplomas, but will now have diplomas issued by Imperial. The reason for the pull-out is that the college administration apparently felt that the Imperial cachet was more valuable than the broader London label. . . .
“‘Libertarian paternalism’ is just the sort of phrase that makes me stop paying attention,” Levitt recently blogged. But he (and I) couldn’t stop reading about it in Richard Thaler’s and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nudge, which uses urinals, ABBA, and Homer Simpson (and cutting-edge research) to argue that by simply giving more thought to the way they present choices to people . . .
I had my students present and discuss a study of the market for organ donations. The study points out that prices are not used to elicit supply of live organs or to ration demand, and that the shortage (waiting list) of kidneys and livers has been increasing. The authors propose using prices to reduce the shortage of both live donations . . .
This morning’s inbox leads me to two observations: 1) There is some excellent research out there about marriage and divorce. 2) There is no shortage of ways for imaginative advocates to distort the findings of this research. Let me begin with the first point: an intriguing paper by Elizabeth Ananat and Guy Michaels, forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources. . . .
This is the dilemma faced by Michael, a 31-year-old who will soon inherit a large sum of money. For reasons that the truly wealthy will immediately understand, Michael has been advised to set up a foundation. “I have to donate about $70 million over the next decade,” he laughs. “Or maybe it’s $50 million. I can never remember.” I occasionally . . .
We’ve looked at how the rising cost of metals has changed the value of the coins in your pocket, the pipes in your walls, and the parts under your car. It turns out that gun lovers and local police have been looking at it, too. Consider the bullet. Basically, it’s made of lead wrapped in a jacket of copper or . . .
Advertisements like this one, meant to win people over to congestion pricing, just sound bitter after the death of New York’s proposed plan last week. And New Yorkers will likely continue to see Varick Street as I did at 7:00 last Thursday evening: Varick Street, 7 p.m. But even while the debate was still raging, many of the plan’s particulars . . .
As discussed earlier, Dubner went on Good Morning America today to talk about the motto contest that ran on this blog. Here’s the proof.
I was ugly from about sixth grade all the way through high-school. The worst was in high-school. I had braces, acne, glasses, and dark curly hair. I didn’t play any sports — my only real hobby was playing chess and I read a lot of comic books. That is James Altucher, whom I’ve blogged about before, writing in his Financial . . .
If you had asked me that question a week ago, I would have said with great certainty that the post office would not mail a letter without a stamp. A few days ago, however, my daughter got a letter delivered in the mail. Where the stamp should have been, the sender had instead written, “Exempt from postage: Guinness Book of . . .
The economy appears to be in recession, and while most industries are shedding jobs, consumer debt councilors, conservation consultants and green energy suppliers have ramped up hiring, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The Monitor also points out that the leading edge of the recession overlaps with the start of the baby boomer retirement wave. This has sparked a government hiring . . .
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this coming Monday, April 14, sometime after 8:00 a.m. E.D.T., to talk about a subject that was born on this blog: our contest to pick a new six-word motto for the U.S.
Justin Wolfers called a recession here not long ago. Ben Bernanke seems about ready to call it himself. Now a reader named Alexis Tatarsky has put the question to all of you on our Freakonomics Prediction Center: On a scale of 1 to 10, with the recession of 2001 being a 4 and the Great Depression an 8, what will . . .
Sixty-nine-year-old Bob Fanning may have hit upon a new senior citizen benefit that makes your home a more attractive sell the closer you are to dying, the Chicago Tribune reports. To stand out from other Wisconsin homes in the real estate glut, Fanning offers this incentive: The buyer of his home will be named the beneficiary to a 10-year, $500,000 . . .
Tucked into a Times report about a typically out-of-touch New York State budget crafted by the wizards of Albany comes this news: Another $50 million [of state revenue] will come from requiring online retailers like Amazon that do not have a physical presence in New York to collect sales taxes on purchases made by New Yorkers and remit them to . . .
I am not a huge fan of what people call “behavioral economics,” which is a subfield of economics that expands the standard economic models to incorporate systematic biases in the way humans act. I’ve written about some of my concerns elsewhere, so I won’t reiterate them here. I don’t deny that the insights that emerge from behavioral economics can be . . .
Meterologists at Colorado State University expect the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season to be an unusually active one. If that sounds familiar, it should. The team made a similar forecast for the 2007 season, just as they had in 2006. But both of those dire predictions turned out to be high of the mark — 2006 and 2007 turned out to . . .
Phil Gordon has made more than a few appearances on this blog, most of them concerning his skills as a jack-of-all-poker-trades: he’s a champion player, author, teacher, ringleader, analyst, and entrepreneur. He hasn’t always applied his smarts to cards: a former computer programmer, he started out working at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company on artificial intelligence projects; he also sold . . .
On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side. The site’s creator, Bertrand, uses Yahoo Pipes to retrieve comments from the most recent posts on both sites and displays them on one page, which is updated every hour or . . .
Last week, Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the The Yale Book of Quotations, inaugurated Our Daily Bleg, with a request to learn the true source of the quote “Read my lips.” A consensus has yet to be reached on the origin, but your thoughtful comments (to which Fred replied) made some headway — and possibly helped out Netflix.
John Tierney hits a home run with this fantastic column about a recent paper by Keith Chen (whose work on capuchin monkeys has previously caught our attention). The Monty Hall problem is as follows: You are chosen to compete on Let’s Make a Deal. There are three curtains. Behind one of the curtains is something wonderful like a new car. . . .
That is the name of a new program being offered by Starlight Ministries, the stripper outreach program in Virginia I recently blogged about. Here’s how Lia Scholl of Starlight describes the program: Our newest venture is called Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. It’s a one-day seminar for women who are exotic dancers (and there will be some private dancers/women in prostitution there, . . .
Germany had good intentions when it began hoarding solar panels.(HT: Saad Abdali) Hemingway’s haunt offers charity to American subprime victims.(Earlier) Student of law and economics gives it up for a career in fast food and amazing videos.(HT: David Black) Are male geishas the new handbag?
In response to our bleg request, Rafe Petty of the University of Chicago chemistry department wrote in with the following question(s). Let him know what you think in the comments section, and send future blegs to: bleg@freakonomics.com. I was recently at a lecture by George Whitesides, one of the most well-known living chemists. He gave a very interesting lecture at . . .
For fans of FareCast, there is a cool new site called DelayCast that’s just gone into beta. Type in the airport codes for your departure and arrival cities and the date and site come back with predictions about the probability of cancellation and delay for different airlines serving the route. For example, here are the results for a trip from . . .
Ben Mezrich Ben Mezrich‘s book Bringing Down the House — a nonfiction account of six M.I.T. card-counters who made millions in Las Vegas — has sold more than a million copies and was translated into 18 languages. But the changes made in the recent movie adaptation, 21, have (besides helping to bring in $23.7 million in the movie’s debut weekend) . . .
Some friends of mine recently were trying to get pregnant with the help of a fertility treatment. At great financial expense, not to mention pain and inconvenience, six eggs were removed and fertilized. These six embryos were then subjected to Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (P.G.D.), a process which cost $5,000 all by itself. The results that came back from the P.G.D. . . .
The debate about the effectiveness and safety of psychiatric drugs rambles on while new (if not conclusive) psychological studies come out with the frequency of fad diets. We invited some people who think a lot about such issues — David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi Kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz — and asked them the following: . . .
A few days ago, New York’s State Senate passed a bill making it illegal to recruit someone into a street gang. In the never-ending fight by city officials and legislators to combat gangs, this is one of the latest efforts to outmaneuver gang members. Other similar initiatives have included: city ordinances that limit two or more gang members from hanging . . .
Levitt doesn’t get why Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video generated thousands of YouTube comments when there’s the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics. They do mostly poetry, but also have a music video: “I.Q.R. [interquartile range: a measure of statistical dispersion] In a Box” — a spoof on S.N.L.‘s slightly racier version. Zero comments so far, but video director Allison Lind, . . .