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 . . .
On the bright side, that leaves a lot of running room for policy-oriented economists like me! On the dark side, that means that economists are often under the streetlight rather than closer to where their keys might be.
What’s a bleg? A bleg = blog + beg — i.e., using a blog to beg for information. (This is not to be confused with the Dutch beleg — which is either a sandwich filling or the declaration of martial law.) We have blegged before on this blog, asking our readers for Vegas travel tips, reading material, and new technologies . . .
I got an email the other day from a blog reader who tells me that there are now more non-native English speakers than native English speakers. That leaves ample opportunities for linguistic subtleties going unnoticed. I suppose it can happen to native English speakers as well. Here is an example: Back in 2006, I wrote a blog post entitled “You . . .
Germany is considering a new government-imposed minimum wage — a price floor in the labor market — to apply to postal carriers and related workers. One of the major proponents of the plan has been one of Germany’s biggest employers — its privatized postal service, Deutsche Post. One might wonder why a big employer is pushing a plan that might . . .
London has successfully instituted congestion pricing for private vehicles, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying very hard to do the same, but ran into stiff opposition from the public as well as political players. New York magazine reports, however, that Bloomberg has just gained an important ally: New York’s new governor, David Paterson. According to New York: . . .
A reporter friend of mine recently asked me for a short list of academic economists he should call to better understand the current financial and economic mess. I found it a more difficult question than it should be. It really has been quite striking how silent most economists have been in this hour of need. There are, of course, a . . .
We’ve blogged in the past about aptonyms — names that fit the people who own them, like a magazine fact-checker named Paige Worthy — and we’ve even held an aptonym contest. So we would have been delinquent to not make note of a byline in a special section of yesterday’s Times called “The Business of Green,” whose lead article, “Millions . . .
Dorothy (right) and her daughter Do-Do. Last week Sudhir Venkatesh solicited your questions for Mindy and Dorothy, two of his contacts in the high-end (and low-end) sex worker world. Mindy and Dorothy also had a pop quiz for Freakonomics readers — which you answered enthusiastically (though not all of you passed). Thanks to Mindy and Dorothy for their generosity and . . .
Earlier this month I asked readers what I should do to fill my post-Harry Potter void. I didn’t anticipate just how full of reading suggestions blog readers would be — 270 comments. Of the hundreds of books mentioned, I had to start somewhere, so I read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I can’t really say that I liked it. . . .
When elementary and high schools ban the sale of candy and sodas, students create flourishing underground economies to satisfy demand for the sweet stuff. In the ensuing crackdown, even high-profile figures are laid low. For example, in Connecticut last week, an eighth-grade student body vice president was forced to resign after he was caught buying an illicit packet of Skittles . . .
The playwright David Mamet, writing in the Village Voice, declared that he had renounced his unabashed liberal world view for a more conservative one, due primarily to the influence of economists like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Mamet found: … that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic . . .
Sex is a notorious depression balm — a recent study of Australian women provides evidence for this. But does pregnancy fill the same role? A research team from the University of Newcastle found that one in 10 Australian moms suffers from post-natal depression (and it’s likely that she had pre-pregnancy depression as well).
We’ve blogged fairly regularly about prediction markets, so the next step would seem pretty logical: make our own. Enter the folks at Predictify (see the latest news here), who have been kind enough to create the official Freakonomics Prediction Center. It can be found in the right-hand column of our home page. We’ll post questions and you’ll supply the predictions. . . .
It blows my mind that Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video on YouTube has over 45,000 comments. I’ve said this before, but I just don’t understand what motivates commenter No. 45,093. There’s no video — only audio — but if you like “White and Nerdy,” you will love “Baby Got Stats” — courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Department of . . .
Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank is introducing a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana on the federal level. He says existing laws unfairly target legal users of medical marijuana in states like California. We held a Freakonomics quorum late last year to debate the pros and cons of legalizing the drug, and many of you weighed in. With Frank’s legalization . . .
Bill James If the name Bill James doesn’t mean anything to you, then you are probably not a baseball fan and have no need to read further. If, however, you are a baseball fan — ranging from fairly serious to obsessively statistical — then the name Bill James probably sets your brain and heart a-clattering. Here’s what his bio says: . . .
This doesn’t really seem possible, but Edward Martin has found 160,000 four-leaf clovers. I’ve been looking my whole life and never found one. Trying to find one was my main reason for playing Pee Wee Baseball, but then I got moved from outfield to shortstop and my baseball career ended shortly thereafter. How fast does Martin find them? He is . . .
When Betsey got home from her morning run earlier this week, she beamed and told me she had covered eight kilometers. And this Sunday, after running the first two hours of my long weekend run, I gritted my teeth and told myself, “only five miles to go.” The strange thing about these observations is that I’m an Aussie, and so . . .
I recently whined about some of the historical inaccuracies in the HBO mini-series John Adams. If I had seen this list first — the Ten Most Historically Inaccurate Movies — I would have held my tongue. Here, according to Yahoo!’s list, are the ten worst offenders: 10,000 B.C., Gladiator, 300, The Last Samurai, Apocalypto, Memoirs of a Geisha, Braveheart, Elizabeth: . . .
Say you’re a talented young athlete. Would you rather be a doctor, a lawyer, or a Malaysian soccer star? Chances are, once you realize how little Malaysians pay their professional soccer players, you’d probably choose one of the first two. And maybe that’s part of the reason Malaysia’s two national squads were both defeated by Singapore in the A.F.C. Cup . . .
Between 2004 and 2007, the spot price of uranium more than quadrupled, reaching more than $140 before falling off sharply in the past several months to less than $80. Why was there such a huge spike in price? One reason is because there’s been an increased demand from nuclear power plants around the world, as nuclear energy becomes more palatable . . .
New research suggests that female mosquitofish can count, but only up to four with any precision. No word on how high male mosquitofish can count. The research design is quite clever: When males bother females, the females try to flee to the biggest group of nearby females. When given the choice between two groups — one with three other fish . . .
Sudhir Venkatesh’s book Gang Leader for a Day has been optioned for a film to be directed by Craig Brewer, who wrote and directed Hustle & Flow. Who should play Sudhir? And J.T., and Ms. Bailey?
Homeschooling is no longer a constitutional right. Monks use YouTube to land an album deal. Neuroscience benefits from brains on jazz. U.S. begins trading pollution allowances.(Earlier)
With this third and final post, we wrap up our day of divorce. Find our other D-day contributors here and here. History shows that we Americans generally like to elect politicians who have a stable family life, or at the least the appearance of one: a spouse, perhaps a couple of children, etc. Among candidates running for national and statewide . . .