Putting Together a "World Baby"
Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws.
Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws.
It’s final exam time, and my office is packed with a few of the 520 students in my bigger class. Although I’m pleased by their interest, I ask why they’re spending so much time on my course. The answer is that it’s the only final exam they have.
Google’s recent reported $6 billion bid for Groupon — rebuffed, for now — took observers by surprise and worried the company’s investors. James Surowiecki analyzes the deal and Groupon’s business model.
… Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy, by Viviana A. Zelizer, an economic sociologist at Princeton: Suppose for a moment that this is the year 2096. Let’s take a look at American families: although by now money often takes postelectronic forms unfamiliar to the twentieth century, in the “traditional” home, “housewives” and “househusbands” receive monthly stipulated sums of money as salaries from their wage-earning spouses.
A number of Freakonomics readers have alerted us to yet another novel lottery idea. As Wired reports, Kevin Richardson won Volkswagen’s Fun Theory contest for his idea.
Not long ago, we made a Freakonomics Radio podcast asking whether the NFL might someday sell ad space on its jersey fronts, as soccer teams around the world already do. In European soccer in particular, the revenue can be substantial.
What’s a more effective development intervention when it comes to raising income: Microfinance? Deworming? Conditional cash transfer programs? None of them work as well as New Zealand’s new seasonal worker program, which John Gibson and David McKenzie evaluate in a new paper.
U.S. auto sales are looking a bit better this year. Trucks in particular are doing well. But one category is moving in the opposite direction. Why? Some blame has to go to the fall in gas prices from a peak of more than $4 a gallon. That’s right: it’s the tiny, gas-stingy cars that aren’t moving off the lot.
I’ve written here before about my research with Betsey Stevenson showing that economic development is associated with rising life satisfaction. Some people find this result surprising, but it’s the cleanest interpretation of the available data. Yet over the past few days, I’ve received calls from several journalists asking whether Richard Easterlin had somehow debunked these findings. He tried. But he failed.
A reader named Gerald Andriole writes in with a small but interesting puzzle.
Cathal Morrow, who’s in the midst of a year without unhappiness following his year without lying, has a new project: “Me Me Me Plc, a company he plans to float on the London Stock Exchange by selling shares in himself. It’s ?10 a share, which gets you a photograph of Cathal in lieu of a share certificate.”
My Michigan-dwelling grandson will be 15 soon and will start learning to drive. He can’t get a full license until he’s 17, though, as the state wants to limit times and amounts of teen driving, presumably for safety reasons. That’s sensible – teen drivers are more likely to get into accidents. Despite this, the state prevents insurance companies from requiring people to purchase additional coverage for the teenager, even though between ages 16 and 17 the boy will be driving on his own.
On the football field, as in nearly every arena in life, the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime.
James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers has become the poster child for the NFL’s crackdown on dangerous tackling. And he has paid the price in fines. His teammate Troy Polamalu has defended him, but Harrison’s reputation as a dirty player is growing. (As a Steelers fan, I do not subscribe to this view.)
A few years ago, Wharton economist and Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers, along with co-author Joseph Price, published a paper alleging implicit bias among NBA referees. The paper kicked up a strong controversy, prompting fierce denials from the NBA. With this month’s publication of the paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Henry Abbott revisits both the paper’s conclusions and the NBA’s response.
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.
Two economists from the University of Toronto have taken a closer look at who uses Twitter in the U.S. Congress. While generating followers is an obvious motivation for politicians to tweet, Feng Chi and Nathan Yang found that geography and party lines play a part too.
A lot of meat and poultry gets eaten during the holiday season. Did you ever find yourself wondering: Hmm, what’s the trend line over the past 100 years for U.S. per-capita consumption of beef vs. chicken vs. pork vs. turkey?
Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin comment on African poverty, disputing the popular view that African growth is driven only by oil and natural resources.
I was talking to an economics Ph.D. student the other day. Presumably hoping to generate some goodwill, he told me how much he enjoys the Freakonomics podcasts.
I asked him what he liked best about them. He gave an answer that I never would have guessed, and that would likely only come from a Ph.D. type.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in transportation to demonstrate that you go someplace because you want to get there. But it definitely helps to have a Ph.D. if you want to demonstrate that you get someplace because you want to go. This far less intuitive hypothesis has been explored by Patricia L. Mokhtarian of the University of California at Davis, one of my favorite transportation thinkers, and her collaborators.
Truth on the Market is hosting an online forum on behavioral law and economics, the “Free to Choose?” symposium. So far, people like David Levine, Ronald Mann and Christopher Sprigman have taken their turns.
I spent three nights recently in the guest house at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Very pleasant – and it was priced at $20/night (obviously heavily subsidized). In addition, however, there was a one-time $16 charge for cleaning at the end of my stay.
What’s a big-enough incentive for an Ivy League student to allegedly start selling narcotics? The best people to answer that question would seem to be Chris Coles, Harrison David, Adam Klein, Jose Stephan Perez, and Michael Wymbs, five Columbia University students who were busted yesterday for being part of a campus drug ring.
We recently released a two-part podcast about Prize-Linked Savings, which are typically bank accounts or government bonds that shave a bit of interest off the top and pool together that interest to award regular big cash prizes to random account holders. The idea is to offer the thrill of the lottery with the principal-retaining properties of a savings or bond account.
James Alcock of The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry responds to Cornell professor Darryl Bern’s controversial recent research on psi effects.
I remember as a kid growing up watching TV, every once in a while someone at the station would make a mistake and start the wrong commercial. It would run for a second or two, and then the person in charge would realize the mistake and immediately cut to some other commercial or to the actual show.
Meantime, over the past two quarters, the number of U.S. households that subscribe to cable and other paid TV services fell for the first time since the dawn of cable – by about 335,000 households out of about 100 million, according to data provider SNL Kagan.
Diehard baseball fans know that the season doesn’t really end with the World Series. It just downshifts a bit, as J.C. Bradbury explains in his new book Hot Stove Economics: “The final out of the World Series marks the beginning of baseball’s second season, when teams court free agents and orchestrate trades with the hope of building a championship contender. The real and anticipated transactions generate excitement among fans who discuss the merit of moves in the arena informally known as the ‘hot stove league.'”