My son Solomon turned six the other day. This morning, he watched me on Good Morning America. My wife Ellen and four-year-old daughter Anya were also watching at home. Ellen later reported Solomon’s reaction: When Diane Sawyer said the word “economics” during the segment, Solomon turned to his mom and said, “Hey, why’d that lady say economics? Didn’t she mean . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
Here’s a quasi-serious letter, putatively written by a Marylander named Paul McGlaughlin, asking his senator (Paul Sarbanes) to revoke his status from legal citizen to illegal immigrant. He’s after the tax break, of course. You have to admit, it’s a pretty clever ploy. (HT: Chris Albon)
David Cay Johnston, who does an incredible job covering U.S. tax policy and other business issues for the N.Y. Times, today has an interesting article about how the I.R.S. is outsourcing the collection of back taxes to third parties — i.e., collection agencies. “The private debt collection program,” Johnston writes, “is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, . . .
The U of C economics Ph.D. program is hardly known as a place where dreams come true. It is a tough program that breaks the spirit of many who attempt it. Courtesy of Herbert Baum, here is the feel-good story of the year coming out of U of C economics. The story starts 60 years ago when Herbert Baum first . . .
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is starting a massive campaign against drunk driving. “We’re taking the gloves off on drunk driving,” Nicole R. Nason, the NHTSA administrator, told the New York Times. “This country has made tremendous strides against drunk driving through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. But the numbers have been flat for the last decade.” . . .
I am not a big fan of animal feces left lying about, whether on sidewalks or parks or at the beach. We even devoted one of our N.Y. Times columns to addressing the problem of dog poop in NYC. But dogs at least have owners, who sometimes pick up after their pets. Wild Canadian geese have no such overseers — . . .
I realize I am a little late on this, but a small company in Minnesota has decided to place ads in college textbooks, which means that instead of paying $500 or $1,000 for a semester’s worth of textbooks, a student might someday pay … $0. (HT: Alon Nir.)
In case anyone is interested, you can read it here. Our motion to dismiss has been filed and the judge is currently considering the arguments.
There is a website — one that is so stupid I feel embarrassed to even give it free publicity — called www.whotohate.com. The idea behind the site is you pay them five bucks, write in the name of someone you hate, and the website writes to the person telling them that there is someone who hates them. I got one . . .
I am in the middle of a Cape Cod vacation with my family, so I haven’t been to a Starbucks lately. But I’ve been told that Starbucks is now featuring a coffee cup with a Freakonomics quote on it, which goes something like this: “Morality describes the way that any of us would like the world to work. Economics describes . . .
This guy is offering to be your best friend, for a price, via eBay. He lives in New York City and calls himself Rent-a-Pal: “The lucky Winning Bidder and RENTAPAL will exchange unlimited emails for a period of 30 DAYS on any subject that you like. RENTAPAL will provide you with a compassionate ear, good conversation, feedback and advice – . . .
I went to the Wisconsin Dells as a kid. It was the hokiest sort of tourist trap you could ever imagine. All those same places I went to as a kid (Fairytale Garden, the Wonder Spot, etc.) are still there, almost unchanged. In the ensuing 30 years, what has changed are water parks. Now, everywhere you look there are enormous . . .
I was up with my family at the Wisconsin Dells last week. The water park we were staying at offered hair braiding for children on the following price schedule: 3 braids: $10. 6 braids: $22. Each additional braid: $4. This is a very unusual pricing schedule, to say the least. Rarely do you see a product priced so that each . . .
My friends over at Tradesports are catching some heat. Tradesports is an online prediction market that allows you to make bets on all sorts of unusual outcomes. A controversy is brewing, though, over the outcome of a contract on whether North Korea would have a missile launch before July 31. Reading the newspapers, you might think that North Korea did . . .
If you go to google images and type the word “children,” the first image that comes up is this picture of my kids. (I don’t routinely type the word “children” into google images…I only discovered this when a woman who works for Sesame Street e-mailed me asking if she could use the picture for a project she is doing.)
There is a new study claiming that music with sexually explicit lyrics causes teenagers to have sex earlier. The lead author is Steven Martino, a Rand researcher, and the study will be published in the August issue of Pediatrics; the data come from telephone interviews with 1,461 participants, aged 12 to 17. I haven’t read the study itself, but here’s . . .
That’s what I learned these past few days, when I took my 5-year-old son Solomon to visit the Pittsburgh Steelers’ training camp in Latrobe, Pa. Watching a pro football team in camp is awesome in a very different way than watching a game live, even if you watch a game from the sidelines, as I’ve done a few times. A . . .
My son Nicholas is three and hopes to be a Power Ranger when he grows up. Thanks to Tivo, we are able to tape every single showing of Power Rangers (for all Dubner’s critiques of Wikipedia, it sure is a good place to learn about Power Rangers). In various incarnations, the show has been on for more than a decade. . . .
Not long ago we wrote about organ donation and how the current shortages could likely be solved if we let the market work. The most obvious way to accomplish this is by paying organ donors. Governments have been quite hostile to this idea around the globe. On Monday, Israel took some halting steps in this direction. As reported in a . . .
Wikipedia is generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining. What it isn’t is very dependable, for the very reason that makes it fun: it is an encyclopedia whose content is generated by random contributors. We’ve touched on this subject a few times on this blog, here and here and here. But Stephen Colbert has done a better job of ridiculing Wikipedia . . .
It may be that the unattractive man has a lot of money, or some other compelling attribute. But a new study by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggests it may be a simple supply-and-demand issue: there are more beautiful women in the world than there are handsome men. Why? Kanazawa argues it’s because good-looking . . .
As reported by the BBC, Malaysia has banned “unsuitable” first names. An excerpt from the article: Parents will not be able to call their babies after animals, insects, fruit, vegetables or colours. Numbers are also not allowed, so little James Bonds cannot flaunt their 007 status on their ID cards. Other restrictions stop parents giving children royal or honorary titles . . .
I personally was far too pampered to deliver newspapers as a kid, but many other people I know (like my wife Jeannette) did deliver newspapers growing up. Anecdotally, at least, newspaper deliverers are now mostly adults with cars, rather than kids on bikes. Does anyone have any theories as to why? I can think of many possible explanations, but none . . .
If you can’t wait for the polished version on ESPN, here is the rough cut of the final showdown in the World Series of Poker Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. Thanks to Dean Strachan for filming and posting the video.
The answer is, apparently, not very. Several months ago, Newsweek magazine proclaimed economics the “sexiest trade alive,” arguing that “There’s no doubt that Freakonomics did its part in glamorizing the trade.” But in Turkey, where our book has recently been published, the book alone clearly did not have enough sex appeal. So the publisher had to sex it up with . . .
The main event of the World Series of Poker gets underway today at the Rio in Las Vegas. Why do I want Phil Gordon to win? It’s not just because he’s such a nice guy, or because he’s so smart, or because of his philanthropic endeavors, or even because he’s so tall. It has to do with the game of . . .
After Bode Miller told 60 Minutes that he often drank the night before ski races, and that he’d even raced while still drunk, he was raked over the coals and forced to grovel and apologize. Now we learn that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis (here’s a recent posting on the subject), who tested high for testosterone after his miraculous . . .
A few months ago, after someone claimed I was a celebrity, I offered to test that hypothesis by giving $100 to anyone who identified me spontaneously over the next 30 days. (In the deal I excluded the U of C campus area, because people know me there just because I am a professor.) It was an easy bet to make, . . .
This may well be old news to many of you, but it’s the first I’ve seen of a plausible explanation for why Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi. According to this British TV interview (via YouTube) with Alex Hayes of the French newspaper L’Equipe, Materazzi happened to call Zidane’s mother a whore on the very day she’d been taken to the . . .