The July 9, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine examines a simple supply-and-demand gap with tragic implications: the shortage of human organs for transplantation. This blog post supplies additional research material.
We have a new “Freakonomics” column out in the current New York Times Magazine. (For a year, we wrote the column once a month), but we’ve just scaled back to once every two months.) This one is about organ transplants — specifically, how the huge success of transplantation in recent decades has created a surge in demand for donated organs, . . .
A lot of people have been worried lately that MySpace has become a playground for sexual predators. And a lot of these worried people blame the technology itself for affording sexual predators an opportunity they might not otherwise have. As is often the case with a new, scary technology, an even newer version of that technology turns out to be . . .
A few days back some dastardly Coca-Cola employees got nabbed trying to sell corporate secrets to Pepsi. Pepsi turned the bad guys in and cooperated in the sting operation. Did the executives at Pepsi give up the chance to make huge profits at Coke’s expense in order to “do the right thing?” I had lunch with my friend and colleague . . .
A quick cruise through this morning’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times yielded a few remarkably interesting articles: 1. The Journal‘s Jonathan Eig reports on a poverty program in Chicago that uses an incentive program to give low-income people the chance to earn rewards like high-income people who rack up frequent-flier miles or bank points. “For the past year,” . . .
According to CipherTrust, a company that makes its money protecting computers from viruses and spam, all the phishing attacks in the world are issued by a mere five “zombie” networks. Even more interesting is the fact that their targets are just as concentrated. Here, from CipherTrust’s page of spam statistics, are the top 5 targets and the percentage of phishing . . .
Hello everyone. I’m Nicole, the new-ish Freakonomics assistant. A few weeks ago, Dubner blogged about Chicago School District 214, where the campaign of one board member to ban Freakonomics (among other dangerous books such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening) was successfully thwarted. The publisher, William Morrow, happily gave away 50 signed copies to students in appreciation. Someone commented that it . . .
No one has ever accused any publisher of making too-subtle a book jacket for Freakonomics. For those of you not keeping score at home, here is the Norwegian cover, e.g., and here is the U.K. paperback. But it seems that the good folks at ValeNovak publishing in the Republic of Slovenia may win the prize: While we’re sharing pictures, here’s . . .
The Sports Illustrated jinx is famous: all too often, as soon as an athlete appears on the cover of SI, said athlete loses the big game or hits a streak of very bad luck. The Jinx got so famous, in fact, that SI itself once ran a cover story on the Jinx. The piece was written by Alexander Wolff, who . . .
What’s that, you say? A strong nose of utility, a nice sharp yield curve, and a racy finish with just a touch of … is it, is it — yes: understated liquidity. The newly founded American Association of Wine Economists has a 5-member board of directors (I’m disappointed and surprised to not find Richard Thaler among them) and an academic . . .
We’ve posted before on the subjects of randomness and luck. Along those lines, there’s a fascinating article by Jim Yardley in today’s N.Y. Times about the Chinese appetite for lucky numbers — well, for 8’s, the luckiest of all numbers — and how the government now auctions off lucky license plates for thousands of dollars. It used to be that . . .
There is so much noise these days about obesity that it can be hard to figure out what’s important about the issue and what’s not. To try to keep track, I sometimes divide the obesity issue into three questions. 1. Why has the U.S. obesity rate risen so much? Many, many answers to this question have been offered, most of . . .
I have long been a fan of the folks at www.tradesports.com and www.intrade.com. They brought a whole new approach to sports gambling. Instead of acting as a bookie and charging a vig, tradesports and intrade are clearinghouses. They provide a platform for bettors to come together and make deals amongst themselves. Since tradesports and intrade aren’t taking any position on . . .
Both Dubner and the folks at Party Poker think so. Although supposedly illegal for Americans, online poker and sports betting is a huge business. At any given time, as many as 100,000 people are playing poker at Party Poker. More than half of these are Americans. Party Poker is successful for much the same reason that eBay is. Most internet . . .
Here is something that I don’t quite know how to interpret. In the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case, the police made the 46 players come down to the police station to have their pictures taken. Then these 46 pictures were shown to the woman who has accused the lacrosse players of sexually assaulting her. She was shown the pictures one-by-one. . . .
As a child, I first realized how dumb birds must be when I saw my first scarecrow. How could the birds’ behavior be so radically affected by something that is obviously fake? Now a new study suggests that humans (at least psychology professors) don’t behave much differently. From the writeup about the article: Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, . . .
The bookies seem to think so. From an AP article: “British media said up to $546,000 of wagers were placed on No. 89 Carlos Berlocq of Argentina to lose the match Tuesday. He lost 6-1, 6-2, 6-2 to Richard Bloomfield, who is ranked 170 places below him and got into the draw as a wild card.” “London media said the . . .
Warren Buffett has been in the news twice recently: yesterday for having announced he’s giving $31 billion to Bill Gates’s foundation, and several weeks ago for buying an Israeli tool company. The Israeli stock market surged on the news that the Oracle of Omaha had bought one of their own companies — a welcome vote of confidence in a remarkable . . .
In my paper with Tim Groseclose and Pierre-Andre Chiappori, we test the predictions of game theory using penalty kicks in soccer. We find that the players’ actions conform very closely to the theoretical ideal. There is one big deviation that we see between what players actually do and what the theory predicts: kickers kick the ball right down the middle . . .
A few years ago, Germany legalized prostitution. It wasn’t hard to surmise that this was meant to make Germany a bit more hospitable for all the World Cup fans who have been visiting this month. Indeed, brothels across the country staffed up and prepared for the boom — which, apparently, hasn’t happened at all. It may well be that enough . . .
A number of reviewers criticized Freakonomics because it explored issues but stopped short of making broad policy pronouncements. A few months back Louis Uchitelle even wrote an article in the New York Times (available through TimesSelect or by purchase only) about how young economists like me were leaving the politics out of economics. Yesterday, though, I was accurately “accused” of . . .
Bjorn Carey reports on a new article in Nature talks about the economics of getting rid of parasites. (You can also get the actual scientific study here if you either have a link through a university or want to shell out $18 for it.) This is not about humans, but rather, a species of fish Scolopsis bilineatus that “hires” another . . .
I gave a speech at the PCBC builders conference earlier this week which Glenn Roberts, Jr. summarizes on the Inman News blog. (The link is to a subscription site, unfortunately. I could get to the article yesterday, but today it asks for a login.) In his article I am quoted as saying that the N.A.R. lawyers threatened to sue me. . . .
Nothing, except for the fact that I’m going to write about both of them here. A couple weeks ago, I posted about Thomas Robinson, an accounting professor at the University of Miami who, through ancestral DNA testing, had been deemed the first American to be able to genetically claim to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. Well, it turns out . . .
Several months ago, we proposed a plan to rid city streets of dog poop. It should be said that no one has acted on our plan — which used the poop itself, or rather the DNA contained therein, to solve the problem. Now it turns out that scientists using DNA profiling of panda poop have discovered a very encouraging fact: . . .
It’s a known affliction, especially once summertime hits: the dad or mom at the beach, with the kids in tow, struggling to read the BlackBerry screen in the glare of that damn sun, then tapping out a reply with sandy thumbs. No wonder they call it a CrackBerry. According to Joe Sharkey in today’s New York Times (it’s just a . . .
After the book “On Bullshit,” was a surprise commerical hit, everyone and their brother decided that the word “bullshit” could get you on the best-seller list. Now a new book figures maybe an apple combined with an orange will also do the trick: Judging from the Amazon sales rank of this book, it doesn’t seem like the apple/orange is getting . . .
Tyler Cowen of marginalrevolution.com devotes his monthly economic scene column in the New York Times to my colleague John List. (If you want to learn my opinion of List’s research, you’ll have to read the article.)
From the Financial Times, a picture of what it is like to have lunch with Gary Becker, seen through the eyes of Tim Harford. It is an accurate depiction, nicely capturing Becker’s unique mix of kindness, toughness, and genius.
In response to my last blog post, Steve Sailer posed the following question in the comments: The abortion rate among whites fell from 19 in 1991 to 11 in 1999, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute of Planned Parenthood. Should we thus soon expect an upturn in crime rates among white 14-17 year olds? This is a great question. And . . .