Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here’s a recent one: I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I’d like to pay you something. This is also an experiment in how accessible famous people are. . . .
Football as in soccer, that is. Here is proof that Europeans take their football very seriously. A little too seriously, perhaps. In other football news, Patric Andersson of the Center for Economic Psychology at the Stockholm School of Economics (and a collaborator with Anders Ericsson in the Expert Performance Movement) has written to let us know about an upcoming conference . . .
As many readers of this blog may recall, we have written about child car seats and how they seemingly provide no safety advantage over seat belts for children 2 and older. This aroused the ire of many safety officials and researchers, who felt we were giving car seats an unduly bad name. Well, it seems like Britney Spears has just . . .
A really interesting link on MarginalRevolution.com about a really interesting proposal by Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff (authors of Why Not?, a book I liked an awful lot) to send a portion of every lottery ticket purchase to an individual retirement account. This means that all the people who make the poor choice of spending too much money on lottery . . .
Probably not. But, in what is either a very odd coincidence or some kind of concerted effort to get out the organ-market message, there are OpEds in both the N.Y. Times and Wall Street Journal today arguing the case. The first one, headlined “Death’s Waiting List,” is by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and American Enterprise Institute scholar. Satel herself received . . .
From Bill Tancer’s blog at hitwise.com, some interesting patterns regarding internet searches and the price of gasoline. When gas prices go up, Tancer sees a sharp spike in searches for hybrid vehicles and a less pronounced decrease in SUV searches. (And if you are obsessed with American Idol rather than the price of gas, here is another post by Bill . . .
In our recent New York Times column, we talked about what makes people good at what they do. As one example, we conjectured (based on some academic work done by others) that people born in the early months of the year would be overrepresented on World Cup rosters. The underlying theory is that in 1997, FIFA made January 1 the . . .
New York City, home to the United Nations and many foreign diplomats, has famously coped with the problem of diplomats racking up comically high numbers of parking tickets. Ray Fisman and Edward Miguel have made a good lemonade from these lemons, writing a paper that explores the correlation between a given country’s level of corruption and its diplomats’ willingness to . . .
In Freakonomics, we wrote that children who watch TV don’t do any worse (or better) on early childhood test scores than kids who don’t watch. More recently, Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro made a similar argument in a paper called “Does Television Rot Your Brain,” which Austan Goolsbee wrote about in Slate. But in two separate incidents in Brooklyn recently, . . .
Last year the book On Bullshit by philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt was a surprise bestseller, even reaching #1 on the NYT Bestseller list for one week. That is an amazing commercial success for my friends at Princeton University Press. The success of that book apparently inspired some other authors: The golfer John Daly has a new autobiography out this week . . .
It’s true that we just published an article about the importance of “deliberate practice” when it comes to succeeding in life. But I’ve also been long intrigued by how large a role luck plays in any given person’s success. In the vast majority of the “success literature” I’ve read (including rags-to-riches autobiographies as well as the biographies of politicians, athletes, . . .
Our latest “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine, which is about how people get good at whatever they’re good at, is as of this moment No. 5 on the list of most e-mailed articles in the Times. Here’s our webpage with further information about the psychology professor Anders Ericsson and other researchers in the Expert Performance Movement. [P.S.: . . .
The May 7, 2006, Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine asks a fundamental — but very hard — question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? This blog post supplies additional research material.
The Chinese version of Freakonomics has been released, and here is what it looks like: I am told that the title of the book is “Devil’s Economics” in Chinese. I kind of like that! How ironic that on the same day I heard about this choice of titles I spoke for the first time ever in a house of worship. . . .
I have bet on the Kentucky Derby just about every year for the last 25 years. The only winner I can ever remember having was Giacomo last year at 50-1. Accordingly, I have had zero requests for my picks in today’s Kentucky Derby. Here they are anyway. There are 20 horses. The early betting favorites at tradesports are: Brother Derek, . . .
Our new “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine asks a fundamental — but very hard – question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good? To find the answer to this question, we turned to Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University and the ringleader of . . .
Apparently, Jane Siberry doesn’t appreciate people calling attention to her website, which allows people to pay as they wish to download Siberry’s music. I liked the idea, and blogged about it a few days ago. But here’s what Siberry wrote on her MySpace journal today: The ‘self-determined pricing’ policy of the store is in the spotlight again, freakonomics has an . . .
One of the best books I have read lately is “Stumbling on Happiness” by Dan Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. The book is about how what we think makes us happy and what really does make us happy are often two completely different things. It is based on decades of incredibly creative psychological studies. The conclusions are amazing but compelling. . . .
As of the last few days, the friends of Freakonomics are dominating the best seller list at Amazon. The number one book is by Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz. Michael Roizen used to own the house Levitt now lives in and was a doctor at the University of Chicago; Mehmet Oz is a longtime friend of Dubner. The number three . . .
The National Association of Realtors has more than its fair share of adversaries, including the U.S. Department of Justice (which is suing the N.A.R. for anti-competitive practices) and the Consumer Federation of America (whose executive director recently told the N.Y. Times what he thinks of the N.A.R.: ”Because the industry functions as a cartel, it is able to overcharge consumers . . .
Much like Paul Feldman, the bagel guy we wrote about in Freakonomics, Jane Siberry has decided to offer her wares to the public via an honor-system payment scheme. She gives her fans four choices: 1. free (gift from Jane) 2. self-determined (pay now) 3. self-determined (pay later so you are truly educated in your decision) 4. standard (today’s going rate . . .
Almost all economics PhD students hate being PhD students. They get demoralized and abused constantly. The one day a year that they rise up in triumph is the “skit party.” Almost all the programs have skit parties where the students make fun of the faculty. This video (from the Columbia skit party as far as I can tell) is the . . .
My family just visited Disneyworld. It was fine and the people there were mostly nice and friendly. It was not cheap. We paid $400 a night for a standard hotel room and a 3 day pass to the park was over $1000 for my family. Renting a double stroller for a day costs $18 just as one example of inflated . . .
I had the chance to visit New Orleans and got to see the areas hit by the flooding. In most places the flood damage is enormous but invisible. The water is of course long gone, but the houses ruined by mold and rot are vacant. Where the levees broke and the water came with a rush, the scene is very . . .
Time magazine thinks so. Malcolm Gladwell, a previous member of Time‘s 100-most-influential club, wrote a very good essay about Levitt’s rare talents. Here’s the kicker: In Freakonomics and in his astonishing, wide-ranging academic work at the University of Chicago, Levitt, 38, reminds us that we owe a bigger debt to those with the humility to go wherever logic and discovery . . .
University of Birmingham A reader sent in this picture of a student prospectus from University of Birmingham in the U.K. It sure does look familiar, but we can’t take credit– the Freakonomics cover in the U.K looks completely different.
The National Association of Realtors has started a blog. The lead item today is headlined “The Cost of Selling without a REALTOR?: $31,800.” Pretty scary, huh? Here’s the lead: “Real estate professionals do more for sellers than make the transaction easier. They make them money. In fact, the average seller who uses a real estate professional makes 16 percent more . . .
I’ve spent a lot of time around economists the past few years, and a lot of time around journalists for longer than that. It strikes me that our work is often similar: have an idea; gather data; analyze, synthesize, and present your findings. There are significant differences, of course. To most journalists, especially those on deadline, the data that’s gatherable . . .
… on technology, futurism, etc., by a fellow named David Houle, called Evolution Shift. More original writing than mere linking; for fans of MarginalRevolution, kottke.org, etc.
The conventional wisdom says it is. But research on the subject is considerably more murky. (Hat tip: Ben Elder Jr.)