The experts generally fall into two camps when it comes to alleviating global poverty: those who believe we simply need to spend more money in more places; and those who think that too many billions have already been spent too inefficiently and ineffectively, requiring a new and smarter approach to aid.
New York City Dept. of Education has been savaged over reports that it stows bad teachers in ‘rubber rooms’ rather than simply firing them. A new report says that many of those teachers are being returned to the classroom after having paid a fine.
A new working paper attempts to assign a dollar amount to the cost of combat-induced PTSD as a result of the War on Terror. The answer? As much as $2.7 billion.
Turns out, toking the green isn’t all that green. A new report from the Dept. of Energy uncovers the massive carbon footprint of the indoor marijuana industry. Smoking one joint is equivalent to 2 pounds of CO2 emissions.
A marketing first? A Montana RadioShack is offering customers who sign up for a Dish Network package a coupon for a either a pistol or a shotgun from a local sporting goods store.
More than any other economist, Nobel laureate Gary Becker has inspired and shaped the work of Steven Levitt. Here’s your chance to submit a question for Stephen Dubner to ask Becker when they sit down for an upcoming video chat. Fire away in the comments section.
Our most recent podcast is about a pair of economists giving out free eye glasses to kids in China. Between 10 and 15 percent of kids needed glasses; but of those, only two percent had them. Turns out, this is a problem in New York City too.
Economists usually assume that doubling output more than doubles costs; or as textbooks say, there are increasing marginal costs. So economists naturally expect twins to be more than double the effort, stress, and out-of-pocket cost of a singleton.
Fans of the New York Times Sunday crossword might have come across a Freak-y clue this weekend. Check out clue 102 “Across”: 102. Steven who co-wrote “Freakonomics” The letters of Levitt’s name were used to spell the following “Down” words: 93. Sword lilies, for short : GLADS 94. Send, as a check : REMIT 95. Trump who wrote “The Best . . .
There’s a crime wave at London Zoo. We’ve blogged in the past about monkeys that can do amazing things: use money, be rational actors, even learn grammar. Add to that list baby Bolivian monkeys who have taken to stealing sunglasses from visitors. But, say their keepers, the monkeys’ motives have nothing to do profit-maximizing.
You can buy almost anything online these days — hotel reservations, books, movies, etc. — but how much does reviewer quality matter to online shoppers? A lot, according to research from Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. In a previous paper, the pair noticed that “demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.” In a more recent paper, Ghose and Ipeirotis find similar trends for products on Amazon.com.
According to the official Google blog, it’s a recent $168 million investment in a solar-power plant:
We’ve invested $168 million in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert in California. Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will generate 392 gross MW of clean, solar energy. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 90,000 cars off the road over the lifetime of the plant, projected to be more than 25 years. The investment makes business sense and will help ensure that one of the world’s largest solar energy projects is completed.
Last week’s post about Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy, and his face-off against Piers Morgan and PETA over hunting elephants in Zimbabwe generated a lot of comments. Dean Karlan offers a follow-up, choosing a winner for the best comment, and delving further into the debate on whether elephants in Zimbabwe are endangered or if their population needs culling.
Using alogrithms that weight values for more than three million facts including historical events, birthdays of significant people, etc, a sophisticated computer program has determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in human history.
Adoption and twin researchers have spent the last forty years measuring the effect of parenting on every major outcome that parents care about. Their findings surprise almost everyone. Health, intelligence, happiness, success, character, values, appreciation – they all run in families. But with a few exceptions, research shows that nature overpowers nurture, especially in the long-run.
Evidence indicates that as national wealth rises, so does auto ownership. So what is going to happen when those in poor nations start buying cars at rich world levels? Can the world afford to have every Chinese and Indian driving a car?
A new paper stipulates that robbers are unusually ugly. That finding makes sense—ugliness might intimidate victims and make the crime easier to commit. So too perhaps for police ugliness intimidating crooks.
The consequences of a donor kidney market, Libyan Revolution graffiti, and what were the odds at the Masters as of Friday night?
From a reader named Laura Brown:
I recently joined a gym in a low-income part of Baltimore. For $10 a month, a person has unlimited access to the equipment — including treadmills that have individual televisions with about 20 different channels. For $19.99 a month, they have unlimited access as well as unlimited guest privileges. I’ve only been to the gym twice since I signed up, but both times (in the evening), the gym has been almost to capacity. However, despite the fact that it is almost impossible to find an open treadmill, many patrons don’t seem to be there to workout — most of them are obese, and the majority of the treadmills seem to run on the minimum speed settings — .5 mph — not fast enough for anyone to even break a sweat. I was pondering this yesterday during my jog, and it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that many of these people are using a gym membership (and the subsequent treadmill-television access) as a substitute for cable.
A new study finds that unemployment “increases the risk of premature mortality by 63 percent.” Eran Shor, one of the study’s authors, believes there’s a causal relationship: “In past research on the topic, Shor said it was hard to distinguish whether pre-existing health conditions, such as diabetes or heart problems, or behaviors such as smoking, drinking or drug use, lead to both unemployment and a greater risk of death. In the new study, controls were included to account for those factors.”
I am fascinated by how we can improve our thinking and problem solving and enjoy learning about and from masters of those arts. My interest was therefore caught by the advice on thinking given in a review of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. The reviewer, George Johnson, writes:
This triumph came early in his [Feynman’s] career. His later thinking (about solid-state physics, for example, or quantum cosmology) was just as original. Maybe sometimes too original, Krauss suggests. Science usually proceeds by building on what came before. The maverick in Feynman kept him from accepting even the most established ideas until he had torn them apart and reassembled the pieces. That led to a deeper understanding, but his time might have been better spent at the cutting edge…“He continued to push physics forward as few modern scientists have,” Krauss [the biographer] writes, “but he tended to lead from the rear or, at best, from a side flank.”
Okay, so hitch-hiking has plainly faded away — at least for human beings. But what about for cargo? German trucking companies are facing a big problem, according to ScienceDaily: “Around 20 percent of trucks on German roads are traveling empty, at a huge cost to the transportation companies concerned.”
Is America’s back-seat role in Libya evidence that the age of its uni-polar power structure is over? And if so, what comes next?
The Chronicle of Higher Education is running the second installment of an interesting two-part essay on the declining expectations and level of learning taking place among college undergrads.
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research.
Smashley asked:
I heard recently that the quote, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” usually attributed to Mark Twain, is not actually by him. Which is delightfully ironic, if true.
The contest question was pretty simple:
I was in California the other day and saw someone doing something that I haven’t seen done in a good while. I used to do it myself quite a bit, when I was in college, largely out of necessity. What was it?
Should we all be Yankees fans? The S&P has averaged a double-digit annual gain every year following a Yankees’ championship. Not bad considering they’re won 27.