I’ve been reading an advance copy of Tyler Cowen‘s book Discover Your Inner Economist. Many of you may know Cowen as co-proprietor of the excellent MarginalRevolution blog, which we’ve cited here often. The book is fast, furious, and fun, with great examples of how to apply economic thinking to nontraditional subjects. (My favorite: Cowen’s advice for keeping a meeting short . . .
A while back, Levitt wondered why the Wall Street Journal charges for its online version while other papers generally offer their content ice for free. Sure enough, we have an answer. Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has an editorial in today’s Journal (available for free!) titled “How to Sink a Newspaper.” It offers a detailed explanation . . .
Here’s a really interesting article (albeit a few months old) from the Pew Research Center that concerns a point we’ve touched on before: Minority political candidates tend to do better in pre-election polls than in the actual elections, suggesting that voters want to sound color-blind to pollsters but in fact carry a strong racial preference into the booth. The article . . .
The final installment in the Harry Potter series is near (much to the dismay of its profiting publisher), and the release date for lucky No. 7 is fast approaching. Meanwhile, Amazon.com is marking the occasion by running a contest called “The Harry-est Town in America.” Whichever town pre-orders the most copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will receive . . .
I was searching the internet, researching a blog post I had in mind about the Duke Business School cheating scandal, when I stumbled onto the online version of the Russian newspaper Pravda (in English). For those who may not remember, it used to be the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Here’s a link to the front page. I have to . . .
In their May 6, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt wonder: Why do Americans spend so much time and money performing menial tasks when they don’t have to? What’s with all the knitting, gardening, and – as the Census Bureau dubs it – “cooking for fun”? Why do we fill our hours with leisure activities that look an awful lot like work? Click here to read the article and here to comment. This blog post supplies additional research material.
We have a new column in this week’s New York Times Magazine, which is a special issue on the boomer generation. Our piece is called “Laid-Back Labor,” and it actually germinated from a blog post here a few months ago. Here’s one paragraph from the column: Isn’t it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their . . .
Greetings, Freakonomics community! This is your friendly neighborhood web editor, Melissa. Starting today, while Steven and Stephen will continue to post the same high-brow discussions of crack dealing, cheating, gold-digging and online poker that have long graced this site, I’ll also be posting under the eponymous apple/orange. So keep sending your good ideas to levittdubner (at) freakonomics (dot) com. The . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about Phil Gordon. The other day, I finally picked up his Little Blue Book. I read just about any poker book that comes out, although not with the gusto I used to have. I am glad to say that I am experiencing rapidly diminishing returns from this activity, which perhaps shows that I have actually . . .
Time Out New York is the magazine that people buy when they’re visiting New York and want to know where to go and what to see. (It’s a British import but has been here at least 10 years by now; secret confession: my family and many other New Yorkers use it too, all the time.) This week, T.O.N.Y. is running . . .
As stated here before, this blog was barely meant to be born at all, much less go on for two years. But now we’ve decided to stick around for at least a couple more years — when, if all goes well, we’ll publish our next book. Since we’re going to keep at it, we figured, we might as well try . . .
Despite a complete lack of expertise and insight, I’ve made it an annual tradition here at the Freakonomics blog to offer my picks in horse racing’s Triple Crown. I’ve had some lucky successes (like Giacomo at 50-1), and, not surprisingly, some duds. My buddy Bill Hessert and I actually invested a little time over the last few months trying to . . .
A few years ago, I was working on a book about the psychology of money — a book I put aside when Freakonomics began to happen. The first chapter of the book was about a fellow named James Altucher, whom I’ve blogged about before. James’s relationship with money was fascinating and precarious. He grew up in a middle-class family that . . .
Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while, and especially those of you who play poker, may remember a research project called Pokernomics, which is meant to determine what makes a person a good (or bad) poker player. Lately, the question has become more than an academic one. As explained in this morning’s Wall Street Journal: The . . .
Blog reader Peter Bergman tells me that John Hollinger has an interesting analysis of the NBA racial bias piece at ESPN.com, although you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. I haven’t actually read it because I’m not a subscriber, but Hollinger apparently does a nice job of putting the magnitude of the bias into perspective: The . . .
Levitt blogged a few minutes ago about today’s N.Y. Times piece by Alan Schwarz about possible racial bias among N.B.A. referees. The piece is based on a draft academic paper by Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers. I have two quick things to add to Levitt’s post, and then a separate but related question. 1. Never in the history of the . . .
I’ve blogged before about my friend Justin Wolfers’ research on point shaving in college basketball and the death penalty. Now Justin is back stirring up more controversy with a paper that claims that there is racial bias on the part of NBA referees, written up in the New York Times by Allen Schwarz. The claim of the paper is that . . .
We’ve mentioned a few times on this blog (see here and here) how often criminals seem to have the middle name “Wayne.” Turns out the shooter in the Kansas City Mall was named David W. Logsdon. I have a pretty good guess what the “W” stands for. (hat tip to Matt Randolph.)
I blogged the other day about the nice service I got on having my IBM laptop repaired. The second commenter on the post, “Kent,” wrote this: Why is the co-author of Freakonomics buying overpriced insurance/ warranty for a computer?! He then goes on to cite our friend Tim Harford as arguing that add-on insurance for things like computers, cell phones, . . .
In research with Roland Fryer, later written up in Freakonomics, we asked the question “Does the name you give your child matter for her life outcome?” (I say “her” because we could only look at girls because the way we tried to answer the problem was by linking a baby girl’s birth certificate to the birth certificate of her child . . .
I blogged a few days ago about the sad fact that my beloved three-year-old child, a.k.a. 2687, a black IBM (Lenovo) laptop, had to be repaired. The LCD had gone dark. I tried to get it fixed locally, but none of the vendors recommended by IBM could move fast enough. Nor were any independent outfits like Geek Squad up to . . .
Maybe it was guest blogger Paul Kimmelman’s dissection of the Wii shortage, or your many-voiced response. Regardless: Nintendo is boosting its Wii production: Nintendo’s president acknowledged Friday that the shortage of the hit Wii game machine was “abnormal,” and promised production was being boosted to increase deliveries by next month.”We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of . . .
I gave a lecture at Wayne State University yesterday. They were a really fantastic set of people. I got to spend some time with the president of the University, Irvin Reid. He is very impressive. I suspect we will be hearing a lot more from him in the future. The most memorable part of my day though, was when two . . .
For the next five days, I will be forced to live without my laptop. It is an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad, machine type 2687 for those of you who care about such things, and I love it to death. My wife is a Mac devotee — a Maccabee is the term of affection in our home. I am perhaps less hip . . .
I blogged a few weeks back about a piece in The New Republic last month that claimed I was ruining economics. At that time, there wasn’t a full version of the article online to link to, so there did not seem to be much point in saying much about the piece. Now, you can read the full article here. If . . .
We have blogged in the past about an anti-poverty program in Chicago that gave cash and prizes to poor families who paid their rent on time, got their kids to school, and looked for work. But Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has gone even further than Chicago to suss out an anti-poverty program that he may adapt for . . .
I just returned from a fascinating and enjoyable trip to Warsaw. The only negative to the trip (besides the fact it is a 9 hour flight to get there) was how incredibly rude the Poles were about lines. I have never seen such obvious disrespect for other people when it came to cutting in lines, even when it meant that . . .
Aside from the actual sadness of events such as this, I am additionally saddened by how they tend to play out in public. They become instant platforms for people with all sorts of motives to opine and rant against their pet targets — media, guns, mental illness, privacy, etc. — when in fact what happened was a tragedy and an . . .
Tim Davis, an artist who teaches at Bard College in upstate New York, wanted to sculpt a life-size self-portrait out of album covers of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. But he’s been having trouble getting enough copies, as explained in an e-mail note he sent along to friends: “I’ve been buying them on eBay, but have artificially driven up the price . . .
My good friend Roland Fryer has taken as his life’s mission to understand every aspect of the economic life of Blacks in America. His latest research, co-authored with another good friend, Michael Greenstone, tackles the issues of (a) who attends historically Black colleges, and (b) does it help them or hurt them if they do. Here are their key conclusions: . . .