News of the Weird has a depressing economics story this week about food prices in the poorer sections of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which is perhaps the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The price of rice, the staple product, has doubled in the last year. This increase naturally has residents looking for substitutes for rice. Apparently in the past they have . . .
Lists are great. They can be revealing, cause anxiety, or serve no discernible purpose. But throw in some links and a statistic and you have … LIST-onomics, this blog’s newest diversion. Here is today’s list: 33 percent: … of parents say they set no rules for their children’s use of social networks. … the amount Indian steel prices shot up . . .
This really belongs over in the Naked Self-Promotion box to the right, but: Time magazine has conducted its First Annual Blog Index (totally scientific, I am sure) and guess what landed in the Top 25?
Back in June, 2007, we wrote a column about the research of Itzhak Ben-David, a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago (who has since accepted an assistant professor position at the Ohio State University). He had been studying the cash-back transaction — a real-estate sleight of hand in which cash-poor buyers received an unrecorded cash rebate from . . .
I became an editor at the Journal of Political Economy eight years ago. The J.P.E., as it is known within the economics profession, is one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics. Having a paper accepted or rejected at J.P.E. can make or break a young academic’s career. My guess is that having a paper published in the journal . . .
Last October, we gathered a group of experts together to find out what U.S. air travel will look like ten years from now. If you want to remember what air travel looked like twenty years ago, try booking a flight to Russia on American Airlines’s website, which appears to give you the option of flying to the Union of Soviet . . .
This is the time of year when high-school seniors receive letters, thick or thin, from college admissions departments. (I have two nieces who both just got some thick letters from great schools: way to go, H. and L.!) Those seniors will soon start a new life. What’s in store for them? Freakonomics contributor Nicole Tourtelot put a few questions — . . .
Aptonyms are the gifts that keep giving. You toss out one or two here on the blog, and readers keep coming back with more. This week’s aptonyms include: A home-schooling mom and blogger whose last name is Hermitt. (Okay, it’s not great, but it’s pretty good.) And this Newsday article about teacher-student sex affairs quotes a “former Hofstra University professor . . .
Burglaries are on the decline across the United States, with at least one notable exception: increasingly, thieves are breaking into foreclosed homes — stripping out the copper pipes, wiring, and appliances — and selling their pilfered goods as scrap. From there, Treehugger reports, the scrap metal is most often shipped to China. Coincidentally, that’s the country Tyler Cowen credits for . . .
We recently introduced you (or should that be “introductified” you?) to the Freakonomics Prediction Center that Predictify built for this blog. And you all went and predicted like mad. So here’s a new Predictify challenge. You can leave your answer in the comments below if you want but it is more fun and worthwhile to make your prediction in the . . .
At its heart, Inspectd is a simple game: it shows you a chart of historical data on a random stock, asks you to bet on whether the stock’s price will rise or fall, and then immediately tells you if you won or lost — with another performance chart showing you why. And maybe that instant gratification is what makes this . . .
Most of us who eat meat regularly would still rather not kill an animal with our own hands. So we have, for generations, delegated that work to others. Jennifer Dillard, at Georgetown Law, authored a new paper looking at what that delegation costs the workers of industrial slaughterhouses. She argues that prolonged work on a kill floor exposes workers to . . .
This morning I downloaded an update on the software for my iPhone. As so often happens with software updates, it completely screwed up the device, requiring me to spend an hour with tech support trying to get things fixed. One frequently faces the choice of whether to update software or not. The gains are some extra features. The out-of-pocket cost . . .
Last week we asked you for bleg requests — i.e., questions that the Freakonomics readership could collectively answer well. You responded with vigor, and we’ll turn “Our Daily Bleg” into a regular (if not exactly daily) feature. So look for your blegs to appear here in the future. (You can also send more suggestions to: bleg@freakonomics.com.) To inaugurate Our Daily . . .
Michael Shermer, author of Mind of the Market and columnist extraordinaire at Scientific American, delivers an excellent column in this issue on sports doping. Shermer, it turns out, was a competitive cyclist who observed the rise of doping first-hand. He offers a number of suggestions for fighting illegal doping, such as disqualifying all team members from any event if one . . .
In Argentina, buying a pack of gum can throw you into a standoff with the cashier, who, due to the country’s coin shortage, often lacks the correct change. Facing similar problems, nearby Paraguay has adopted a socially acceptable solution for vendors: when you don’t have change or need to round up, candy is acceptable currency. If Americans place as much . . .
We know that Levitt loves the Harry Potter series. The Golden Compass trilogy — not so much. But the bigger question is: why do any of us love fantasy, and what good does it do us? Some good ideas have tumbled out of a lively discussion on the subject at Oxford’s Overcoming Bias blog, where Robin Hanson points out that . . .
I was pondering why many of my undergraduate students performed so poorly on my recent final exam when this video and a second one came across my desk. Perhaps my students are just investing in skills that are not tested on my exam. (Hat tip: Peter Thompson and Bob Warrington.)
I may be wrong, but it strikes me that the articles that appear in nearly every newspaper every day that describe a particular day’s stock-market movements are pretty much worthless. They try to pin a cause or two on the effect that’s just been observed, when in fact the effect may have little relationship with the narrow causes being credited. . . .
If an e-mail message from a campaign or non-profit group were to pop up in your inbox on election day asking you to please go down to your polling place and cast your vote, would you do it? Probably not, if the results of a study by Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson are any indication. Nickerson conducted 13 field . . .
Bill James I sure hope the Red Sox don’t start the season with a wicked slump. If so, people might blame this blog. When we solicited your questions for Bill James, the Sox’s data wizard, we didn’t know there’d be so many questions and that Bill would answer just about all of them. I hope he found some time over . . .
Real estate is back. April Fools’!(Earlier) “Ask a Mexican” calls it quits. Feeling insecure? Play a video game. Did preparation for Earth Hour defeat its purpose?(HT: Andrew)(Earlier)
Justin Lahart at the Wall Street Journal suggests a new party game for economists (or at least something to keep you awake if a conference gets dull): Six Degrees of Joe Stiglitz. He’s suggesting the econ version of the Paul Erdos number in math: If you drew a diagram linking different mathematicians, many of the lines would cross at Erdos. . . .
Tonight at 10 p.m. E.D.T., ABC will broadcast a Barbara Walters special about longevity — or, really, super-longevity — that tries to sort out the many medical, social, and economic ramifications. I was interviewed for the show and apparently I appear toward the end of the hour. Most of the questions I was asked concerned the consequences, unintended and otherwise, . . .
Nancy and Harry Chapin’s song, “Cat’s in the Cradle,” is one of my favorites, partly because of the beat, and partly because it illustrates one of the essential trade-offs in life. For those who don’t remember the lyrics, it sings of the life of a busy man who isn’t there when his son grows up and who, in old age, . . .
Here’s a picture I snapped out the window at Newark (Liberty International) Airport not long ago. It’s a Continental Boeing 777 whose nose, as you can see, features the name of former Continental chairman and C.E.O. Gordon Bethune. I wondered: Do all Continental planes from Bethune’s era carry his name? No. According to a Continental spokesperson, this is the one . . .
I love stories about the unintended consequences of rising commodity prices. (Here’s one, and here’s another.) Now Susan Saulny writes in the Times about another strange trend driven by high commodity prices: the rampant theft of cars’ catalytic converters, which contain trace amounts of platinum, palladium, and rhodium. Levitt and I heard about this several months ago when we were . . .
My son and I recently returned from Israel where we had the chance to spend Purim in Jerusalem. Purim is a bit like Halloween — kids and parents dress up in costumes. And while there aren’t door-to-door “trick-or-treats,” there is a tradition of giving kids candies. Our cab driver even offered us Purim chocolate. So it was on a beautiful . . .
Producing a penny costs about 1.7 cents, and the Treasury’s annual penny deficit is about $50 million, according to a New Yorker article by David Owen. Yet folks — and some companies — still want the penny around, in part because they fear merchants rounding up prices and increased reliance on the even more expensive nickel (which costs almost ten . . .
When we recently wrote a column suggesting that philanthropies be run more like businesses, one factor we didn’t look into — but perhaps should have — was fraud. According to a Times report by Stephanie Strom, fraud and embezzlement in the non-profit sector account for a loss of $40 billion a year, or roughly 13 percent of philanthropic giving. The . . .