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Freakonomics Blog

Insights From the Fall Meeting of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity

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.


Steven Johnson Answers Your Innovation Questions

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.”)


Green Noise

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.


Where Did All the Runs Go in Major League Baseball?

  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 . . .


Harnessing the Volcano

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.”


Making It Easier to Be Honest

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.


Time for That LCD TV?

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.


Stumbling Toward a Market for Health Care in the U.K.

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.?


The Return of Freakonomics Radio

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.


Congratulations Fran Blau!

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.


Explosive Climate-Change Video a Bit Too Explosive

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.


Look Who Just Decriminalized Prostitution

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.


Fix Medicare's Bizarre Auction Program

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.


Algorithm Needed; $25,000 Reward

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.


Quotes Uncovered: Wit and Wisdom from Economics and Finance

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.


The Downside of Reusable Grocery Bags

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.


Adrian Grenier Answers Your Questions

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.


Are Greeting Cards a Thing of the Past?

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.


How to Avoid a Bad Apartment in New York City

One example was real-estate transactions. The more a customer can learn via the Internet about, say, a property for sale and similar properties, the less likely she is to make bad decisions. That said, there is still a lot of room for improvement. A reader named Sam Bauch describes his encounter with one particular area of information asymmetry in real-estate, and what he’s doing to stop it.


Selling My Addiction

An unusual auction began late yesterday on eBay. I’m selling my “right to regain weight.” Why would anyone in their right mind be willing to pay me cash to buy this right? What does this even mean?


Unscrambling the Egg Disaster

If there’s a winner in the recent recall of 550 million eggs potentially infected with salmonella enteritidis, it’s your local egg farmer. Under the assumption that eggs sourced from small, organic, free-range farms are less likely to be contaminated with salmonella, consumers are flocking to farmers’ markets and backyard coops in a panicked quest to avoid industrially produced eggs. According to one newspaper account, shoppers are increasingly willing to pay up to $3.50 for a dozen eggs in order to have “a direct link to their food.” But I wonder: does this make any sense?


FREAK Shots: Mispriced Hot Dogs

Tom Glickman sent us this photo at a Nathan’s restaurant. One hot dog will cost you $1.99. But two will cost you $3.99 — and four will cost you $5.99. As Tom writes: “Not the most egregious mistake in pricing, but most curious that one is overcharged by a penny for every additional hot dog you purchase.”