We’ll be spending a couple of days this week in Washington, D.C. It’ll be my kids’ first trip. Am looking for non-obvious things to do and good things to eat as well. Best suggestion wins a piece of Freakonomics swag!
Things have been rough in the journalism business of late — so rough that one veteran sportswriter felt he had to pursue an alternate career. An award-winning sportswriter for a paper in New Hampshire, has pleaded guilty to running a prostitution ring.
A Forbes.com article by Jeff Bercovici discusses the New York Times‘s plan to shut down a rogue Twitter feed called FreeNYTimes, which is meant to circumvent the Times‘s upcoming metered model (some people call it a paywall). As Bercovici writes: It’s clever, but it’s not kosher. “We have asked Twitter to disable this feed as it is in violation of . . .
A Freakonomics reader (we’ll call her “Sugar Baby”) is documenting her two-week experiment with online “Sugar Daddy Dating”: “beautiful women post pictures while wealthy men post their income and voilà! – the perfect Darwinian couple is created. Because the expectation is short term, it’s flirting with the title of an escort service, or worse, prostitution.”
I like Family Guy and I like watching TV with my kids, but I do not like watching Family Guy with my kids. What are your bad combinations?
From a loss-of-life standpoint, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami may well be at least five times more severe than 9/11. While natural disasters in the past have claimed more lives, it’s extremely rare for a developed country to suffer this kind of catastrophe. While the economic losses no doubt take a distant back seat to the human suffering, nonetheless there are many important economic questions to be answered. I can’t think of a better pair of people to do so than Anil Kashyap and Takeo Hoshi.
My mom passed away recently, and we’re planning a memorial service in her home city, where none of us three offspring lives. There are lots of expenses: the service; food afterwards; planes and hotels for all of the children, grandchildren and any great-grandchildren who can come.
What if a simple ‘nudge’ could massively increase the use of safe water in poor countries?
Today is World Water Day, a day to raise awareness for something we take for granted in America: clean water. Normally I yawn at Hallmark-meets-poverty-program type publicity stunts. Reminds me of many a microcredit “awareness” campaign that paraded superstar microentrepreneurs on a stage, ignoring the need for rigorous evidence to find out if microcredit actually works.
The marginal cost of accessing an academic journal article is pretty much zero. The research has been written, the type has been set, and the salaries have already been paid. So the socially optimal price is: free.
The Three Mile Island nuclear-power accident in 1979 coincided almost perfectly with the release of The China Syndrome, a Hollywood film about a nuclear meltdown. As we once wrote, this pairing helped gel American sentiment against nuclear power. Several other nations, meanwhile, kept on building nuclear-power plants, Japan among the leaders. Now, how will the earthquake/tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima . . .
In this second installment of my three BizIntelligence TV episodes, you can see my dog, Chebyshev (named after the mathematician who derived Chebyshev’s inequality), and learn what she has to do with Carrots and Sticks.
There are a growing number of churches in the U.S. that can no longer afford their upkeep, as costs are outpacing collections. In Europe, some churches have turned into techno-dance clubs. Would that work here?
More time with Mom can lead to lower high school drop out rates later on, particularly among children whose mothers do not have a lot of education themselves.
I stopped by a local fried chicken joint, Harold’s Chicken Shack, the other day. Just to give you a sense of what sort of restaurant this is, there is a layer of bulletproof glass separating the workers and the customers. They don’t cook the chicken until you order, so I had five or ten minutes to kill waiting for my food.
As dangerous levels of radiation thwart emergency work at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Japanese military fire trucks have reportedly resorted to spraying spent fuel rods with water in an effort to cool them.
Ah, lunch at Fortnum & Mason in London — without doubt, the most posh place we ever have lunch at. By the time we get to dessert, we only have enough stomach room to split a piece of chocolate torte.
Nate Silver has (another) truly insightful post demonstrating the possible perverse advantage of receiving an 11th seed instead of an 8th seed in the NCAA tournament.
He explains: “[An average] team like Arizona would have a considerably better chance — about two-and-a-half times better, in fact — of winning its second round game and advancing to the Round of 16 as a No. 12 seed than as a No. 8 or No. 9 seed. This, of course, is because it has not yet had to face the No. 1 seed.”
Today, I’m off at the spring meeting of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity. And for any serious student of the economy, it’s a great line-up of papers. (Full disclosure: David Romer and I are the editors. We commissioned the papers, so of course we love ‘em.) Rather than write about the papers, I figured it might make more sense . . .
A recent article in The New York Times offers a worrying application of street-fighting reasoning methods. The article describes the deterioration of the Lake Isabella Dam in California. This dam, the article reports, is one of 4,400 considered “susceptible to failure” (out of the 85,000 dams in the country). I’ll pass over lightly the statement early in the article that the repair costs would be “billions of dollars,” and note only that this figure seems like a massive underestimate.
This past weekend, Microsoft tried to do a little good (donate $100,000) and use that good to market Bing.
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.
In the wake of Japan’s tragic earthquake and tsunami, Felix Salmon argues against donating to the cause. Salmon cites concerns about the hobbling effects of earmarked funds, uncoordinated NGOs, and Japan’s wealth.
Back in January, on the day of one of the year’s particularly crippling blizzards, I was scheduled to travel to New York City to tape a segment of BizIntelligence TV with Bruno Aziza. The trains that day were running massively late, and I somewhat sheepishly called to cancel. For me, this was a non-discretionary snow day. But Bruno wouldn’t accept defeat. He heroically spent several hours with his camera crew and came to New Haven. They ended up taping three episodes at various places in my house.
If you’re the kind of sports stat-head who loves that the Bill James movement has become mainstream in baseball, and you wonder why basketball doesn’t pay more attention to analytics, you may be pleased to read this article and this one about the annual Sports Analytics Conference at MIT Sloan.
Up until now, the only way to take a course taught by Gary Becker was to be a student at the University of Chicago.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of three students –Dana Chandler, Salvador Navarro Lozano, and Jorge Garcia — that has changed.
Is our need to travel innate? Last time, I wrote about the intriguing theory of the universal Travel Time Budget (TTB), which states that humans have a built-in travel clock. Perhaps a product of some primeval need to balance exploration and conquest with hanging around the cave and vegging, the universal TTB is said to drive us all to spend about 1.1 hours per day on the go, regardless of nationality, culture, economic system, or era.
I sat down last week for a good chat with the smart folks who run the Planet Money podcast. The topic: Money and happiness.
That’s the question posed in a new working paper by Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. What would the mechanism/s be? “Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.”
Somali pirates are apparently getting more sophisticated in their business practices: “A group of Somali pirates announced Sunday that they’re cutting their asking prices for hostages by 20 percent — to speed up the negotiation process, make room for more hostages and take in more cash,” reports Wired.
A new study from psychologists Jamil Zaki, Jessica Schirmer, and Jason P. Mitchell relies on brain scans to evaluate the effects of peer influences. “Participants rated the attractiveness of faces and subsequently learned how their peers rated each face. Participants were then scanned using fMRI while they rated each face a second time,” explain the authors. “These second ratings were . . .