The July 10, 2005, Freakonomics column, “The Seat-Belt Solution: How Much Good Do Car Seats Do?” is about the efficacy of child car seats versus plain old seat belts. This blog post supplies additional research material.
Things move quickly in the modern world. Within two hours of posting my academic paper on car seats vs. seat belts on the Freakonomics web page (the first time this paper had seen light of day), another economist found the paper and tested its hypotheses on a very different data set and reported back the results. The economist is Paul . . .
Several weeks ago, in the interest of full transparency, we posted some negative reviews of our book. The time has come again. It’s not that we are masochists; in fact, positive reviews have regularly been posted on this site as well. Like this one and this one and this one and this one. (The last one goes a bit too . . .
I’m not the only one saying nice things about Pat Robertson these days. Sarah Vowell, frequent NPR contributor, the author of the recent book “Assassination Vacation,” and the voice of Violet in the movie “The Incredibles” wrote recently on the New York Times op-ed page: Until recently, about the nicest thing I would have said about this televangelist is that . . .
On Sunday, July 10, our second Freakonomics column appears in the New York Times Magazine. Questions and comments will follow here.
We thought we had somehow gotten away without doing a book tour for Freakonomics. (As most writers can tell you, the typical book tour inevitably lands you in Milwaukee on a Tuesday night, reading to four people, three of whom are your relatives.) But our vigilant publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, decided that Freakonomics has not yet bloomed in California as fully . . .
Since the publication of Freakonomics, a lot of readers have written to comment upon or ask about “the Roe Effect,” the theory put forth by James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal. The Roe Effect posits that among the many unintended consequences of Roe v. Wade was a significant change in voting patterns. Although Taranto himself acknowledges many nuances and . . .
July is shaping up to be Contemporary Christian Month in Freakonomics land. First, Levitt was interviewed by Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. Now, in a Village Voice article called “Music for the Megachurch,” Josh Langhoff writes the following: If you’ve skipped ahead to the abortion chapter in Steven Levitt’s ‘Freakonomics’, you know his controversial argument that Roe v. Wade . . .
Morgan Reynolds was chief economist for the Department of Labor in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. He was in the economics department at Texas A&M (now retired), and he has published in the top economics journals like JPE, AER, and QJE. Now he’s traveling a slightly different road: From a United Press International report in the . . .
Should we be surprised? This article comes from a website called InsideHigherEd.com. (I only posted part of the article here, follow the link to see the whole thing. Thanks to Patrick McCusker for providing the link to me.) Cheating Scandal at Virginia An ‘alarmingly large fraction” of the first-year class of economics graduate students at the University of Virginia were . . .
A little quiz: Which celebrity interviewer closed his interview with me by saying: “Steven Levitt, thank you for the work you are doing. I hope you write more like this. This is a tremendous read. If you want to have some fun this summer, read Freakonomics.” a) Jon Stewart b) Charlie Rose c) Matt Lauer d) Aaron Brown e) Pat . . .
In a very engaging discussion on WSJ.com, Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan, a pair of economists at George Mason University, show that Freakonomics is hardly the only place to find creative applications of economic research.
In the Freakonomics chapter about real estate agents’ informational advantage, we discussed the different terms that agents use in want ads, and those terms’ correlation with higher or lower sales prices. Alas, there was one kind of information — whether or not a murder was committed in the house, for instance — that didn’t make the dataset. Here, however, from . . .
I appeared on the 700 Club this morning with Pat Robertson, in an interview that a blogger anticipated would be the “must-Tivo event of the summer.” Conventional wisdom suggested this would be a bloodbath – that the Freakonomics perspective on the abortion question would enrage Robertson and a shouting match would ensue. (Indeed, my publicist was planning on turning down . . .
In my last post, I talked about how Chicago police have begun posting pictures on the internet of johns caught soliciting prostitutes. Based on the numbers given in a Chicago Tribune article, it seemed the chance of arrest for a john, per solicitation, was 1 in 10,000. So I’m perusing the list of pictures on that web page and as . . .
In Freakonomics, we talk about how some of the most powerful incentives are social, not financial. One example we give is posting the pictures of people caught soliciting prostitutes on the web. How appropriate that the following story appeared recently in the Chicago Tribune: (It was long, so I edited out parts. You can see the whole article here at . . .
A friend passed along this amusing post from the “Missed Connections” section of Craig’s List in New York. It’s cute but I don’t buy it for a minute. If the guy really wanted to meet the girl so badly, would he have really run off to buy “Freakonomics” as a conversation starter for the next time he saw her?
To “St. Cheryl,” who posted below about real-estate agents: what on earth did you mean about the sketchy practices of veterinarians? Please tell more, either here or by e-mail (levittdubner@freakonomics.com). Thanks.
A friend writes: What you should know about me: I’m a neurotic Manhattan mom. I swore I wouldn’t become one of those, but lo and behold, the kid comes out and you have absolutely no choice. How does this play out? As an example, when my eldest child was applying to pre-school, I had my mother’s cousin, a prominent child . . .
All economists love markets. Most economists hate gambling. So I don’t know whether or not to be surprised by the fact that my friends at tradesports are offering a line on which economist will be the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve. (At Tradesports, go to the trading screen and search under “Current Events – Federal Reserve.” Consistent with the . . .
Here is a little creative application of freakonomics to address the music-downloading mess.
I guess the National Association of Realtors was not so pleased with our latest visit to the Today show. The letter below is posted on the front page of their web site. I’ve taken the liberty of interspersing a few comments in italics. NAR Responds to Erroneous Statements Made on Today Show(June 17, 2005) — On June 16, guests on . . .
I had my 20 year high school reunion last weekend. There were three highlights for me: 1) I got to see all three of my prom dates — roughly the only three dates I had in high school. 2) My old high school quiz bowl team reunited and showed we still had the right stuff, handily beating the school’s highly . . .
Levitt and Dubner revisited The Today Show on Thursday, June 16. Here’s a transcript: Copyright 2005 National Broadcasting Co. Inc. HEADLINE: Today’s Real Estate; Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt ANCHORS: MATT LAUER MATT LAUER, co-host: This morning on TODAY’s REAL ESTATE, is your agent looking out for you when he or she sells your home? You might think your real . . .
Book publishing is rife with conventional wisdoms that are vigorously doubted but seldom overturned. That’s partly because book data is treated like some kind of family secret. This is changing a little bit with the recent advent of Bookscan, a subscriber service that provides industry-wide sales figures; in the past, publishers and bookstores and distributors did not feel compelled to . . .
My colleague Chad Syverson passed along the following news clipping, although as a native North Dakotan, he swears this sort of thing would never happen in North Dakota (only in Moorhead, Minnesota which is right across the state line): Former Realtor ordered to pay fine for attempted theft By Amy Dalrymple The Forum – 06/10/2005 A former real estate agent . . .
A few days ago, in an online Q&A with the Washington Post, someone asked this question: Annapolis, Md.: Have you explored why some people vote against their own economic interest? And I gave the following answer: No. But it’s not that surprising, since one vote is really worth very very little. It probably comes down to the fact that most . . .
My Preakness picks were not as terrible as usual – I correctly had Afleet Alex to win, but missed my exactas. I guess they were good enough that some readers wanted my Belmont picks. Well, actually only one reader, but I’ll take that as a mandate. Anyway, I like Afleet Alex. I think he will be an odds-on favorite, like . . .
Steve Levitt will be appearing on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Co.” today (Friday, June 10) at about 5:45 p.m. EDT. Stephen Dubner will be appearing on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Monday (June 13), sometime between 7 and 9 a.m. EDT.
I’ve been thinking a little about terrorism lately and how to fight it. Some clues might be in this how-to manual seized in England and used as evidence in the trials for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, according to thesmokinggun.com. It includes chapter titles such as “Assassinations using poisons and cold steel,” and “Explosives.” The bomb-making instructions . . .