Our latest New York Times Magazine column, to be published on Sun., Sept. 11, explores the work of Seth Roberts, a Berkeley psychologist who has used self-experimentation to arrive at, among other things, a diet that may prove revolutionary. Or at least very entertaining. Here is some additional information about Roberts and his work. I first learned of Roberts from . . .
In a previous blog entry, we posted a pair of slapdash haikus, one written by each of us, and asked you to guess who wrote which one. Many of you played along, and nicely, and wisely. Some of you wrote excellent haiku response, though most of those were sent to us directly via e-mail. Anyway … here are the answers: . . .
Steve Levitt is such a big deal in Chicago that he has been asked to donate an original haiku (!) for a fund-raiser on Wed., Sept. 14. So he went ahead and wrote himself some haiku. Then he felt a little funny being the only haikuist in the Freakonomics family, so he asked me to write one too. And I . . .
As we wrote in Freakonomics, Realtors are incented to use proprietary information to the disadvantage of their customers. (Don’t be so smug: you probably would too if you were a Realtor.) The National Association of Realtors once yelled at us for discussing this situation on TV. Now the N.A.R. has a new and far more powerful enemy: the U.S. Department . . .
Read what Chris Lightfoot has to say about this question here. The origin of the idea for the analysis appears to be in this marginalrevolution post. The idea is that large differences in prices for one-way trips from Detroit to Las Vegas compared to one-way trips the other direction reflects differential migration. The answers aren’t so surprising: the flow tends . . .
Much has been made in the media recently of the untended corpses in New Orleans, left on the street for days on end. Aside from issues of dignity, it certainly makes you wonder about health concerns. Especially when you read this BBC report about a supposed link between human remains and mad cow disease. I have to admit that whenever . . .
Books on CD and cassette have quietly become a nice little profit center for book publishers. (So too have audio downloads, but that’s a subject for another day.) Even though audio versions sell, at best, perhaps 1 copy to every 10 copies of a hardcover book, their high price and low royalty rate enable publishers to make money. Most people . . .
My wife is a photographer who once lived and shot in Romania, Russia, Chechnya, Israel, and elsewhere. She often worked in harm’s way and almost always with the sort of reckless abandon a photographer needs in order to document tragedies and farces. So I’ve picked up a little bit about what it means to tell a story with a camera, . . .
An amazing website that the guys at Marginal Revolution blogged about. It is called www.scipionus.com. It is a map-based wiki where regular people can insert information geographically about the effects of the storm. There are thousands and thousands of entries. Surfing around, the devastation doesn’t seem as bad on the wiki as it does on TV. Houses a block or . . .
A while back, Dubner blogged about this website, which tracks moods of the populace. It has some updated information on how Hurricane Katrina made people feel. Wouldn’t it make sense for companies to build something like this into their internal networks? It would allow top managers to have up-to-the-minute information on the state of the employees’ mindset. Done anonymously, people . . .
Although it may sometimes seem that Dubner and I are attached at the hip, indeed we do have separate lives. And, in his non-Freakonomics existence, Dubner was recently honored by having a piece he wrote for the New Yorker reprinted in a book entitled “The Best American Crime Writing 2005.” The book comes out next week. Just by chance, it . . .
We haven’t had all that much contact with our British publishers, Penguin U.K. But they seem startlingly proactive. First there was the billboard campaign in the London tube. Now there’s an online Freakonomics quiz. It’s true that the quiz plays pretty fast and loose with the material in our book but it would be churlish (for us at least) to . . .
The readers of this blog seem to collectively know the answer to just about any question we can think to pose. So here are some questions: 1) How much of the damage/human toll is because of the hurricane per se versus the levees breaking? If we had perfect foresight, would 1,000 well-placed national guardsmen and some heavy machinery have been . . .
This e-mail reprinted below, which is circulating incredibly widely, may represent a new low in economic thinking. It declares September 1st “No Gas Day.” I got three copies today. Still, I wasn’t going to blog about it, until I went on the web-search engine technorati and saw that all sorts of bloggers seem to be embracing the concept. So here . . .
I’m undertaking a project on poker. I’ve set up a website, www.pokernomics.com, for people to download their hand histories. Using these hands, I hope to study what differentiates good and bad poker players. The response has been overwhelming. I think we’ve got over 7 million poker hands already. (For those of you who sent hands, but don’t have your Freakonomics . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
Peter Maass wrote the NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on “Peak Oil” that I have been blogging about recently. He was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the course of the interview, he defended Matthew Simmons, saying, “Matt Simmons, he is not some kind of wild environmentalist, or kind of rogue economist, or anything like that…” Phew, we already have . . .
John Tierney wrote a great New York Times column in response to the Maass article on Peak Oil in the Sunday NY Times Magazine that I criticized. Tierney and Matthew Simmons, who is the point man for the Peak Oil team, made a $10,000 bet as to whether in 2010 oil would be above or below $200 a barrel (adjusted . . .
I got this e-mail from a fan yesterday:I read Freakonomics and was — to say the least — floored. You are a brilliant thinker and honestly, you remind me of me.
As surprised as we have been by the success of Freakonomics in the U.S., we are doubly surprised by its success in the U.K., where it has been at or near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as . . .
I happen to be a member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (My son, like nearly every 5-year-old boy I know, is a dinosaur freak.) I just received an e-mail asking for feedback on a script for the AMNH’s new space show. I guess this is what life is like for museums after the Enola Gay/Smithsonian . . .
Levitt and I don’t have all that many disagreements, at least not in public. But this one’s a little close to home. It began with this post, in which I wondered aloud if the tour was worth the publisher’s money. Steve followed recently with this post, which detailed why, from his perspective, the tour was a waste of his time. . . .
The cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine written by Peter Maass is about “Peak Oil.” The idea behind “peak oil” is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices . . .
The answer is, that just like real estate agents and their clients, our incentives as authors are not perfectly aligned with the incentives of our publisher, William Morrow. As a consequence, we take actions that benefit ourselves and screw the publisher, just like real estate agents screw their clients. Every extra copy of Freakonomics that is sold earns the publishers . . .
On the surface, not much. The Kansas City Royals have lost 19 straight games and are threatening to break the all-time record for futility in major league baseball. My iPod, on the other hand, has quickly become one of my most beloved material possessions. So what do they have in common? They both can teach us a lesson about randomness. . . .
It’s true that we’ve discussed in this very space the futility of a single vote. But when that single vote is going toward you (or, more precisely, a book you’ve written) — well hell, there’s no such thing as a futile vote. As it turns out, Freakonomics has been nominated for the inaugural Quill Awards. Described as a “new book . . .
Here’s what I wrote a few weeks ago, just as we embarked on a short California book tour: Earlier in this space we asked if book ads work; now we are led to the next obvious question: how about the author’s tour? Can it possibly be worth all the money and time it takes to fly two people across the . . .
The last stop on our recent California tour was at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This appearance had come about kind of casually, so we hadn’t thought about it much beforehand. The Google folks asked us to blog about our impressions, to be posted on the Google blog, and we did. Here’s what we had to say. To: All . . .
If you believe a recent study, a good guess is 25%. At least that is the estimate for American adults overall. And over a lifetime, an estimated 46% of Americans will suffer from mental illness. There is an interesting post on the “Done as a Society” blog that applies Freakonomics-type thinking to this result. Some thoughts: 1) When I entered . . .