In my research with Chad Syverson on real estate agents, which is also discussed in Freakonomics, we argue that the current system doesn’t do a great job of aligning the interests of the agent and the homeowner. Consequently, you may not want to believe what your real estate agent tells you. So how else are you going to figure out . . .
To all devoted blog readers who’ve requested signed bookplates: Don’t lose faith! Demand continues to outstrip supply here in the Freakonomics office. A great many of you have taken the authors up on their offer, and we are happily working to make good. I’ll be mailing 2,000 bookplates this week from HarperCollins and will send the remainder as fast as . . .
University of Chicago economists have a reputation for being outspoken, libertarian, and conservative. My good friend and Chicago colleague Austan Goolsbee, who has been advising Barack Obama on economic policy since his Senate campaign, is only the first of these. There is an article about economists advising presidential candidates that features Goolsbee in today’s New York Times. My guess is . . .
A recent post on Consumerist.com asked readers to comment on a plan to install rear-facing seats on airplanes. The options for commenting were basically: a) I don’t like it b) I like it fine; and c) Whatever, no comment, who cares, people should just be happy airlines provide the miracle of flight, so let them do whatever they want. For . . .
Nielsen BuzzMetrics wanted to know what people really think when they think about Sanjaya, the onetime faux-hawked American Idol contestant. So here, according to Max Kalehoff, is what they did: “We took a sample of all the blog posts about American Idol over a week, then focused on keyword sanjaya, then mapped out all the most closely associated words and . . .
Hunter Walk, a brand manager at Google and a friend of ours since he invited us to give a talk at the Googleplex, has an interesting post on his personal blog. Here’s the brief background: Hunter was helping run Google Video and, since the Google acquisition of YouTube, he has been working with the YouTube folks. The point he makes . . .
Do you regularly read the Marginal Revolution blog? If you care much about actual economics, and especially if you are a student of the same (either literally or figuratively), you would be wise to do so. This typically excellent post offers a brief review of a book called Money-Driven Medicine, by Maggie Mahar, whose argument Tyler Cowen summarizes thusly: I . . .
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois is apparently not much of a Freakonomics fan, or maybe he thinks it’s something that it’s not. He trashed our good (ha!) name the other day during a Senate Appropriation Committee hearing that was probing the budget of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Here’s the story, as covered by OMB . . .
Have you ever heard of Chef Jeff Henderson? Until a few weeks ago, I hadn’t either. That’s when our publicist mentioned him and his new book. (We have the same publisher.) Jeff grew up in L.A. and San Diego, became a big-time crack dealer, and was sentenced to a long term in prison, where he learned to cook and became . . .
Levitt and I are off to give a lecture this afternoon at Colgate University. I know that Colgate is a very fine school but I have to admit that I always think of it as the alma mater of the athlete/ humanitarian/ democracy-lover Adonal Foyle, whom I’ve been reading about in the New York Times for years. He has always . . .
On April 12, 2005, Freakonomics was published. We had high hopes and low expectations. From what I recall, nothing magical happened on that day. But at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of April 13, this Wall Street Journal review appeared. It was the kind of review that, in the theater, is known as a “money review”: it doesn’t just say . . .
Remember this discussion about the likelihood of a three-way tie on Jeopardy? Everyone agreed that the estimate of 1-in-25 million was absurdly high. So too does Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Numbers Guy.” Men outnumber women on the Internet, by a long shot … right? Wrong. Stockpickr.com takes a brief look at the stocks of companies working on treatment . . .
The last quiz and the answer are below. My two further thoughts: 1) Many people outside of academia think that peer review is some sort of magical elixir that guarantees that papers that get published are right. This is simply not true. It is hard to do good research, and it is hard to read other people’s work and accurately . . .
The winner of the quiz goes by the tag KZ. If I can find out more about KZ, I will post that info. KZ recognized that there do not seem to be any controls for a time trend in the paper. While the authors control for all sorts of other factors like unemployment and seasonality, I think they have left . . .
We have written before about advertising in strange places — on fresh eggs, on airplane barf bags, on time itself. There is now an effort to advertise in [the place we used to think of as] the final frontier: space. The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Pasztor has this to report: California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science . . .
The National Football League’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has just made it a lot more expensive to be a thug. Goodell suspended the Titans’ Pacman Jones without pay for the upcoming season (a loss of $1.29 million in base salary) and the Bengals’ Chris Henry for the first half of the season (surrendering as much as $230,000 in base pay). Jones . . .
Usually our quizzes are more on the whimsical side, but here is a serious one that requires a real investment of time. Some academics (at most one out of the three is an economist) in the United Kingdom recently published a paper in a journal called Applied Economics claiming that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer in . . .
Under what circumstances would you be willing to pay $731 for a pizza? If your answer has something to do with raising money for charity, then you are halfway right. But that’s not the interesting half. Here are a few clues: + The pizza was sold at auction. + The bidding began at $0, and climbed fairly steadily to the . . .
Mary Black, a public-health physician in Serbia, offers her ideas in the current issue of the British Medical Journal (abstract only). [Yes, I know: two posts in two days from BMJ — but hey, it’s interesting stuff.] Black’s criteria: “[T]hese are jobs that seriously compromise ethical and moral standards, are difficult to justify to your children, and are likely to . . .
This piece in the Washington Post is one of the most interesting articles I have read in a newspaper in a long, long time. The Post arranged for Joshua Bell, a world famous violinist, to bring his $3.5 million violin to a subway stop, open up his case for donations, and see how people respond. The story even shows you . . .
To everyone who responded to this help-wanted ad for a junior freakonomist: thanks, but also apologies — because I haven’t replied to anyone yet. Thanks to a small pile of deadlines and some computer trouble, I haven’t answered a single applicant, though I promise that over time I will answer all of you.
An editorial in the current British Medical Journal makes a very sharp point that many of us have probably been thinking about in the last few weeks while reading the latest medical news in the papers: It’s easy to feel contempt for deluded practitioners of the past who advocated bloodletting and tonsillectomies for all. Easy, that is, until one considers . . .
Dubner worries a lot about whether people comment on our posts, which is definitely evidence that he doesn’t have enough important things to worry about. Every time I have made a post about baseball, it has unleashed a torrent of comments. So as an Easter gift to Dubner, here is my annual baseball post. I’ve been working for the last . . .
The average U.S. retail price for a dozen large eggs was $1.51 in the first quarter, up 33 cents, or 28%, from the fourth quarter and 43 cents higher than a year ago … Behind the higher prices: Feed. Rising corn and soybean prices have led to increased costs for feed. The increase is in large part because of rising . . .
Although it is in a fairly primordial stage, this new home-finding tool from Google may turn out to be as formidable a challenge to Realtors as the Department of Justice. It does little more than aggregate public information (as is Google’s wont), but when the public information in question is the listings of homes for sale in any given city, . . .
Two days ago I taught my two older daughters how to play seven card stud. That night we played a few hands before they went to bed. Last night we played a few more hands. Tonight I got home from work and one of my daughters, Amanda, was particularly eager to play poker. So eager that she had already dealt . . .
I was on an airplane yesterday, and when I landed I saw that there were about 4 million e-mails on my Treo. This meant, I figured, that Levitt had run some kind of quiz on the blog. And indeed he had — this one, asking what his wife and LeBron James had in common. The airport I landed at was . . .
Last April, we wrote a column about tax cheating. It included a passage about the I.R.S.’s National Research Program, “a three-year study during which 46,000 randomly selected 2001 tax returns were intensively reviewed.” The goal was to determine some of the specifics of tax cheating: what kind of incentives work and don’t work, what kind of people are more likely . . .
The winner of the quiz is Willy, who had the 64th guess, correctly noting that LeBron James and my wife are both studying mandarin. My wife and four kids are all studying Mandarin, in part because we have two daughters adopted from China. (I tried learning a while back, but I had no talent for it and gave up.) LeBron . . .
Nobody has even been close to giving the right answer to the quiz, so I added a clue to the original post which is directly below. If it is true that LeBron had a paper route and likes poker, then he does share that with my wife, but that is not what I had in mind.