Search the Site

Freakonomics Blog

The Myth of Multitasking

If you think your multitasking skills are improving your productivity, think again. Consistent with other multitasking research, a new working paper (ungated version) by Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico analyzes a sample of Italian judges with different caseloads and finds that “task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs.”


Why Are the Roofs of School Buses Painted White?

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of school buses that are yellow everywhere except for the roof. I was perplexed as to why. According to this nearly 20-year-old New York Times article, the reason is that white tops are more reflective, lowering the temperature inside the bus by an average of 10 degrees during the summer. The source of that statistic is a very non-scientific sounding North Carolina pilot study.


Yet One More Way in Which D.C. Is Like High School?

Happy Election Day, everyone! Please don’t read this before you vote.
And then don’t read this either. It’s a paper by Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy, both of Harvard Business School, and it’s called “Friends in High Places.”


When the Rolling Stones Hit the Laffer Curve

A recent interview with the Rolling Stones reveals some of their business and wealth-protection strategies. “The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws,” said Keith Richards. “It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. [This may sound like an exaggeration, but likely isn’t.] We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all. I don’t want to screw anybody out of anything, least of all the governments that I work with. We put 30% in holding until we sort it out.”


What Do Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears and Christine O'Donnell Have in Common?

A few weeks back, I revealed myself to be the humorless, politically-correct parent that I am, complaining about the gender roles represented by Lego’s new line of Minifigures. My complaint: Of the sixteen Minifigures, the only two that were women were a Cheerleader and a Nurse. Ever the earnest parent, I hope my daughter can imagine herself creating a life beyond these stereotypical roles.


John Brenkus Answers Your Peak-Performance Questions

We recently solicited your questions for John Brenkus, author of The Perfection Point, a book about the limits of athletic achievements. Read on for Brenkus’s thoughts on those special swimsuits at the Beijing Olympics and the most surprising perfection point he encountered in his research. Thanks to everyone, especially John, for participating.


FREAK Shots: Call-and-Response Advertising

This is not the first time we’ve seen such call-and-response advertising from India. I am guessing this practice exists in the U.S., especially on the local-advertising front, but it is probably rarer.


Are We Social Even in the Womb?

Humans are social creatures, or so the psychologists tell us. But when does that social behavior start? Is it biological or cultural?


A Flight-Delay Excuse I'd Never Heard Before

I have heard a lot of reasons for planes being delayed, but this was a new one. My Delta flight out of JFK was just about to push back from the gate when the captain made an announcement. He explained that there is a wheelchair on board every flight, and the one on this plane had had a malfunction – the handle broke, he said – which made it unusable. It didn’t seem to matter that no passengers on the flight had needed a wheelchair to board: the plane couldn’t take off, he said, until a replacement was brought on board.


Brother, Can You Spare a Trill?

Economists Mark J. Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller propose a new tool for government financing: “trills” — i.e., shares in U.S. GDP.


Predicting the Midterm Elections: A Freakonomics Quorum

This year’s midterm elections promise to be a bit more eventful than usual, with predictions of seismic change in Congress and in many statehouses, most of it in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next?


What's Your Econ 101 Professor Worth?

The Texas A&M University system has embarked on a new accountability program. For every department – indeed, for every professor – revenue generated and cost incurred are calculated; and profit – the difference – is reported. Each professor is presumably supposed to have a marginal revenue product above his/her compensation.


How Obama Moves Markets (But Not the Obama You Think)

Barack Obama may be under fire for failing to jump-start the economy, but a feature in the Harvard Business Review points out that Michelle Obama is doing her part to rejuvenate the fashion industry – at least the part of the fashion industry she likes.


Quotes Uncovered: The Top 10

As the calendar marches on, the pressure is mounting on me to produce my annual list of the top 10 quotations of the year. In addition to politics, economics, and sports, I need to consider the outstanding (or, more accurately, the most famous or most revealing) quotations of 2010 uttered by celebrities.


At Microsoft, Two Views on a New Tax

In Washington State, high-income residents and corporations are coming together to battle I-1098, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on “income above $400,000 per couple and a 9% levy on income above $1 million per couple.”


What's Derek Jeter Worth? A Freakonomics Quorum

While the New York Yankees’ 2010 season came to a disappointing close, it would still appear inevitable that the team will want to re-sign Derek Jeter, their franchise shortstop. But it appears just as inevitable that his on-field performance isn’t worth nearly as much as he will likely want to be paid.


Game Strategy in Biblical Times

Genesis 20:1-18 tells of Abraham visiting Avimelech and offering him Sarah (who, so Abraham tells Avimelech, is his sister, when she is also his wife).


Announcing SuperFreakonomics: The Illustrated Edition

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book: SuperFreakonomics: The Illustrated Edition. It’s a large-format book built around the original text of SuperFreakonomics, with hundreds of new visual elements and quite a bit of new text as well.


Detecting Political Momentum Is Harder Than You Think

Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver has a post attempting to debunk the idea that there is momentum in political campaigns. But I think he’s wrong. And his post provides a fun opportunity for a simple statistics lesson on the difficulty of discovering momentum.


Homer Simpson: A True Catholic?

This just in from the Vatican’s daily broadsheet: “Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J. Simpson is a Catholic.”


Pesticide Politics

Pesticides freak us out – and understandably so. The idea of otherwise healthy fruits and vegetables marred by residual poison unnerves us because, generally speaking, we’re clueless. We’re totally removed from the process of production. We don’t know what was sprayed, we can’t see the trace pesticides, we can’t measure them on our own, and, let’s face it, the vast majority of us don’t remotely understand how these agents work. The upshot is that we’re left to trust outside interpreters to assess the risk for us.