There’s a pretty fascinating Editors’ Note in today’s New York Times concerning Hugo Chavez and Noam Chomsky. (An Editors’ Note is the most serious of three types of corrections the Times runs; the other two types are called For the Record and Corrections.) You all probably all remember Chavez’s performance at the United Nations a couple weeks ago, during which . . .
We mention in passing in Freakonomics that blacks and whites in the United States have very different TV viewing habits (see page 182 of the book). Monday Night Football is the only TV show that historically has been among the top ten in viewership for both blacks and whites. Seinfeld, one of the most popular white shows ever, was never . . .
I’m not much for fashion magazines, but judging from my wife’s reading habits, Allure is a pretty good one. That’s why I was happy when a nice blogger named Elsa Kaminsky (whose blog combines her interests in economics and fashion) alerted us that a copy of Freakonomics can be seen poking out of a model’s Chanel bag in the current . . .
Ever wonder what are the most common searches among Yellow Pages users? Here’s a list of the top 300 categories, from the Yellow Pages Association research institute. The top 10 categories are: 1. Restaurants 2. Physicians and Surgeons 3. Automobile Parts 4. Automobile Repairing & Service 5. Pizza 6. Attorneys/Lawyers 7. Automobile Dealers 8. Dentists 9. Hospitals 10. Plumbing Contractors . . .
Eric Clapton famously stopped performing the J.J. Cale song “Cocaine” once he got sober. But now he’s resumed. Why? After all these years, Clapton decided that the song is in fact anti-drug; plus, he admits, he just really missed playing the guitar riff. In other cocaine news, there’s a new carbonated energy drink called Cocaine, with about three times the . . .
I was in Las Vegas yesterday celebrating my 10 year anniversary with my wife Jeannette, who loves me but not nearly as much as she loves poker. So even though this blog is about my anniversary and about commitment, it is not about the sort of commitment you might suspect. Rather it is about what economists call a “commitment device,” . . .
I posted earlier about how Soviet chess players used to collude in international tournaments. As documented in today’s New York Times, and far more thoroughly on chessbase.com, we learn that the world chess championship has come to a halt because Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria filed a protest against his opponent, Vladimir Kramnik of Russia. Kramnik was leading 3-1 at the . . .
Think of all the service people who habitually get tips: hotel bellmen, taxi drivers, waiters and waitresses, the guys who handle curbside baggage at airports, sometimes even the baristas at Starbucks. But not flight attendants. Why not? Maybe it’s because they’re thought to earn a pretty good living and don’t need the tips. Maybe it’s because they’re simply thought to . . .
I get a lot of interesting letters in the mail. (To those of you who send me things, I apologize that I so rarely respond. If you want to hear from me, your odds are better — but still not great — on email.) I got a package recently, however, that really stood out. It came from a Texas woman . . .
I am pleased to announce that the Freakonomics website is now a part of Federated Media Publishing, a consortium of blogs (including BoingBoing, BuzzMachine, Digg, and GigaOM) founded by John Battelle. This means, among other changes, that our site will now accept advertising. (You may have already spotted a banner for CNBC earlier this week.) We are also planning a . . .
I really like my dentist, Dr. Reiss. He’s in his late 60’s, maybe even in his early 70’s. To say that he knows his way around the mouth is an understatement. But that’s not the only reason I like him. A couple years ago, he told me how he solved a particular problem. Because he’s getting on in years, a . . .
That’s the question posed by a reader named John from New York City. I am not sure whether he wrote in response to our New York Times column on hand-washing, which has prompted a lot of e-mails on all matters medical. Regardless, John raises an intriguing and important question whose answers I know nothing about, but I’d love to learn . . .
Read the Column » The Etiology, Concept, and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever By Ignaz Semmelweis Hand Hygiene Among Physicians: Performance, Beliefs, and Perceptions By Didier Pittet, MD et al Novel Antimicrobial Surface Coatings and the Potential For Reduced Fomite Transmission Of SARS And Other Pathogens By Craig Feied The September 25, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine . . .
A few days ago I wrote a blog post in which I asked why there is so much fear about medical privacy. There were many comments on the post, but they mostly missed my point. So let me try again. Many people wrote about public humiliation. I understand why people wouldn’t want the size and location of their hemorrhoids published . . .
Some time ago Pete Rose signed a bunch of baseballs with the inscription “I’m sorry I bet on baseball.” According to media reports, he gave these balls to friends and never intended them to be sold for profit. But the estate of one of the collectors who received the ball decided to put 30 of them up for auction. There . . .
I think I am the only person in the world who genuinely loves Sky Mall — the catalog you find in the pouch in the seat in front of you when you fly on airplanes. I cannot go through Sky Mall without finding a dozen things I want. I once did an entire season of Christmas shopping from Sky Mall. . . .
I was talking with a doctor the other day and he raised an interesting question: why is there so much attention given to the privacy of hospital records? The laws about medical privacy place very strong restrictions and prohibitions on those data. On those occasions where someone loses a laptop with such information, everyone goes nuts. This doctor said that . . .
If you do a search for the words “game theory” on amazon.com , you find books by eminent economists like Roger Myerson, Fudenberg and Tirole, and our recent critic Ariel Rubinstein. But at the top of the list is a new album by the Philadelphia hip-hop band known as “The Roots”. Do The Roots have a soft spot in their . . .
Our latest “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine is about hospital-acquired bacterial infections, and how doctors don’t always do a very good job of washing their hands, and how one hospital set out to fight this problem. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this website.
I blogged a few months back about how ridiculous the rules are regarding the use of electronic equipment on airplanes. I often leave my iPod on, and sometimes (gasp!) my laptop, which I leave secretly running inside my briefcase. I am happy to report no problems so far. A flight attendant did something on my flight a few days ago . . .
Just arrived in the mail is a handsome new book called Freakonomics: Revised and Expanded Edition, which should be in stores in a week or two. (Here is the Amazon link.) As the name implies, it is a little bit revised (mostly correcting errors or things that have changed in the world since the book was originally published, in April . . .
If anyone is still reading this blog, let us offer our apologies for a couple of weeks’ worth of very buggy behavior. The site has often been inaccessible, even to us, which is why we have barely blogged in recent days. The problem seems to be largely the fault of — well, of you. When we started this blog and . . .
Langston Walker is 6-foot-8 and 345 pounds. He majored in economics at Cal. He plays football now for the Oakland Raiders. He said this in a recent Sacramento Bee article: “I bring a book for the plane ride,” Walker said. “Something that’s educational, something that will expand my mind.” Such talk causes running back Justin Fargas to ask Walker, “Are . . .
The final chapter of Freakonomics is about first names — whether they have an impact on a person’s life and how they travel through the different strata of society. While it’s true that most popular names start out among the middle and upper classes and then travel downward, it’s also true that some old-fashioned names (we cite Max and Sophie . . .
It seems like not a week goes by without another prediction market being launched. This week’s entry: CasualObserver.net . Up and running just one week, it focuses on the U.S. midterm elections. The good news is that you can participate for free. The bad news is that if you want to win real money, you have to look elsewhere. (I . . .
Lindsay Davenport, former number 1 ranked female tennis player, talking about the new tournament format being introduced in professional tennis, via Reuters: The ATP, as part of sweeping changes aimed at making tournaments more attractive to fans, television, players and tournament directors, plans to play early rounds of tour events as round-robins to ensure that marquee players remain throughout the . . .
The “efficient market hypothesis” argues that markets quickly and correctly incorporate all publicly available information into prices. Under the strong version of this theory, the only reason prices of assets like stocks move is because new information becomes available. (The ideas underyling efficient markets are largely associated with the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s.) Most economists these . . .
A few days ago, I posted about GetHuman and Bringo!/NoPhoneTrees.com, two sites that help people deal with customer phone support. I then received this follow-up e-mail from Clement Wang, one of the founders of Bringo, who wanted to respond to some of the reader comments on this blog and elsewhere. It read, in part: I’d like to make a few . . .
… is an e-book version of the North American Business Islamic Directory. One likely reason it’s ranked so high on Amazon is the price: one cent. (So much for my support of the penny’s extinction.) But does anyone have any idea why this unusual book is ranked, as of this writing, at No. 5? In related news on book pricing, . . .
Of all the questions that readers of Freakonomics ask me to explore, understanding the explosion in autism is at or near the top of the list. I haven’t read the original study, but this news report offers an interesting hypothesis about the rise in autism: older fathers. Don’t tell Dubner I’m citing Wikipedia, but there is a nice entry there . . .