There are plenty of dire predictions about what will happen to our cities if the worst predictions about global warming were to come true: flooding, droughts, famine, chaos and massive death. But Matthew Kahn, an economist at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, sees a different future. He tells that story in his new book Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future.
Recent research on willpower suggests that it’s a limited resource that can be depleted. Now there’s evidence that something else affects willpower: women’s menstrual cycles.
While speculation is rising about just who will win this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics (to be announced on Monday), it’s probably worth pointing out that the far more important Ig Nobel Prizes for the year have already been announced.
Continuing with my requests for famous quotations and sayings that might make it into the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations, I’d like now to ask for memorable recent (or not-so-recent) words of wit or wisdom from the sports world.
Seems that nearly everyone – even Nobel prize-winning economists who perhaps should know better – procrastinates. As James Surowiecki writes in The New Yorker, procrastination may well be a basic human impulse.
The Brookings Panel on Economic Activity is pretty much my favorite conference each year. (It better be! I took over running the Panel with David Romer in early ’09.) I’ve found that the best way to keep growing as an economist is to embrace any opportunity to be the dopiest guy in a very smart room, and this latest meeting was no disappointment. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a couple of weeks, but time kept getting away from me. So I decided to try something different-I popped into the video studio to chat about some of the new findings presented at the Panel. Here are the highlights.
Last week, we solicited your questions for Steven Johnson, the author of Where Do Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Your questions were very good, as are his answers, which you’ll find below. (My favorite excerpt: “Governments are teeming with information that’s useful to our lives: information about services they offer, and information that they collect about society at large. But these public institutions are generally terrible at coming up with innovative ways of sharing that information and making it more relevant to people.”)
What is a public good? An article today describes a house fire in Tennessee, where the firefighters refused to extinguish the fire because the owners hadn’t paid the annual voluntary fee for fire protection.
Reusable grocery bags may be unsanitary but at least they’re quiet. The same cannot be said for Frito Lay’s new environmentally friendly SunChips bag. The bag is so noisy that the company, after lots of consumer backlash (including Facebook campaigns), is ditching the effort.
The Year of the Pitcher? One of the ongoing stories of this baseball season has been a mysterious decline in runs scored. Major League Baseball teams are scoring an average of 4.4 runs per game, the lowest mark since 1992 and a drop of more than 1,000 runs since last year alone. As offense has declined, pitching performances have . . .
Here’s an energy source you probably haven’t thought about: volcanoes. “Ormat Technologies (ORA) has tapped into the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala,” reports Stockerblog (citing a Reuters article). “The country’s goal is to have 60 percent of its energy generated from volcanoes, along with hydro power.”
I was a little scared to get on the scale this morning. I had eaten copious amounts this weekend – including a quarter pounder at McDonalds. But my fear was heightened because I knew that my weight would be automatically tweeted at twitter.com/ianweight.
A recent article from the Chicago Tribune reported “an enormous surplus of LCD panels that has accumulated over the first nine months of the year.” This surplus arose partly because prices of flat-screen TVs had not fallen throughout much of the year-and the quantity demanded had accordingly been constant.
Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between “a complete waste of time” and “actually making the situation worse.” Will the Conservative Party do better with health-care reform in the U.K.?
A new study (summarized here) casts doubt on the popular notion that exposure to sex in the media is linked to earlier sexual activity.
Back in February, we started a podcast. It was generally well-received, but there were a lot of complaints, mainly about its frequency. Now, what began as a lark has become a real thing, thanks to New York Public Radio, American Public Media, and The New York Times.
Fran Blau is one of my favorite labor economists in the world: She’s smart, savvy, tackles important problems, and also incredibly generous in helping younger scholars and colleagues with their own research. She is now also the winner of this year’s IZA Prize in Labor Economics.
Very interesting essay by James Collins in the New York Times Book Review about forgetting what you read.
The British environmental group 10:10, devoted to cutting carbon emissions 10 percent each year, created a message video that was a bit too explosive for its own good. The gist: any poor sap who fails to go along with the 10 percent cut, be it a schoolchild or a soccer star, is blown to smithereens.
The record label Asthmatic Kitty is taking an interesting approach to the sale of Sufjan Steven’s newest album.
What kinds of environments and societies give rise to good ideas? Author Steven Johnson takes your questions.
Last post, I asked you to regale us with your most memorable air travel stories, good, bad or just plain weird. Here are the semifinalists.
A Superior Court justice gutted the federal prostitution law in Ontario on Tuesday. This means that prostitution might become decriminalized throughout Canada, although it might not.
Harry Truman once quipped, “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, ‘On the one hand, on the other'” Often even a lone economist has difficulty making a recommendation. While true on certain matters, there are many issues where economists do agree about the right and wrong course of action. A case in point is competitive bidding for Medicare supplies.
It’s not quite the Netflix Prize — which paid $1 million to whoever could improve that company’s Cinematch recommendation algorithm by 10 percent — but there’s a new competition designed to predict magazine sales at newsstands.
Continuing with my requests for famous quotations and sayings that might make it into the next edition of The Yale Book of Quotations, I’d like now to ask for memorable recent (or not-so-recent) words of wit or wisdom from the realms of economics and finance.
Heartbreaking facts: “2.7 million children have a parent behind bars-1 in every 28 children (3.6 percent) has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses.”
You know those reusable cloth bags that environmentally-conscious shoppers proudly tote to the grocery store? It turns out they may be making you sick.
Last week, we solicited your questions for the actor and director Adrian Grenier, whose new documentary film, Teenage Paparazzo, just made its HBO debut. His answers touch on everything from paparazzi methods to the role of the consumer in media culture. Thanks to all, especially Adrian, for playing along.
This year, we emailed an electronic letter reporting on our family events and offering best wishes to all the friends and relations to whom in the past we had snail-mailed Jewish New Year greeting cards. We felt guilty about switching away from the time-intensive activity of buying, signing and addressing snail-mail cards, and worried that the email would signal others that we viewed our time as too valuable to spend on a card. We don’t.