Training to Save in Ghana
(Photo: Stella Benezra) Freakonomics fans will already know that financial literacy is a hot issue for researchers – it’s in everybody’s best interest to get people making better financial decisions,…
(Photo: Stella Benezra) Freakonomics fans will already know that financial literacy is a hot issue for researchers – it’s in everybody’s best interest to get people making better financial decisions,…
It’s time to do away with feel-good stories, gut hunches, and magical thinking.
…about the risks of climate change, and reports the surprising finding that higher levels of scientific knowledge are correlated with greater polarization on the issue: Greater scientific literacy and numeracy…
A 19th-century Georgia land lottery may have something to teach us about today’s income inequality.
There’s a nasty secret about hot-button topics like global warming — knowledge is not always power.
The gist: in our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens — at home.
We’re working on a new Freakonomics Radio podcast about financial illiteracy, a topic we’ve visited a few times on this blog. Two guests you’ll hear from in the episode have…
…Using individual-level census data, he finds that getting rid of malaria led to higher wages and literacy rates for children who grew up post-eradication. Wages rose 10 to 40 percent…
Is it enough to toss a soda can in the recycling? Why is Maria obsessed with Nobel Prize lectures? And wait — is that a news alert or a tiger?…
Annamaria Lusardi, whose ground-breaking research on financial literacy has been featured here several times, has put out a new working paper (with co-authors Pierre-Carl Michaud and Olivia S. Mitchell) that…
Labor exploitation! Corporate profiteering! Government corruption! The 21st century can look a lot like the 18th. In the final episode of a series, we turn to “the father of economics”…
Who makes the stacks of fake cash used in movies — and how do they stay clear of counterfeit law? Zachary Crockett follows the fake money….
We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as…
We explore votes for English, Indonesian and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve…
Also: is a little knowledge truly a dangerous thing?
How did a nation of immigrants come to hate immigration? We start at the beginning, sort through the evidence, and explain why your grandfather was lying about Ellis Island. (Part…
Also: why do we habituate to life’s greatest pleasures?
…last few decades. In 1980, the youth literacy rate (ages 15-24) in Egypt was 52 percent. By 2008, (according to UNICEF) 88 percent of males aged 15 to 24 were…
…consider adequate financial literacy. A: Whatever the percentage, it is woefully low; but entirely predictable too. It’s hard to be literate in a subject you receive no education or training…
James Surowiecki writes about one of this blog’s frequent topics of interest: financial illiteracy. Surowiecki includes insights from Annamaria Lusardi‘s research and Gary Rivlin‘s new book, Broke, USA. He proposes…
Why do so many promising solutions — in education, medicine, criminal justice, etc. — fail to scale up into great policy? And can a new breed of “implementation scientists” crack…
According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we’re also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on “uncertainty…
Freakonomics asks a dozen smart people for their best ideas. Get ready for a fat tax, a sugar ban, and a calorie-chomping tapeworm.
Who’s greedier — gamblers or casinos? What’s the difference between betting on sports and entering a charity raffle? And does Angela know the name of her city’s football team? Take…
Levitt and Dubner answer your FREAK-quently Asked Questions about junk food, insurance, and how to make an economist happy.
It isn’t easy to separate the guilty from the innocent, but a clever bit of game theory can help.
Linguist and social commentator John McWhorter explains how good intentions may be hurting Black America — and where the word “motherf*cker” comes from….
…be learned. Preschool teachers also need to be embedding important early math and pre-literacy skills in age appropriate play. Lots of talking, rhyming, singing, clapping out beats of words in…
Evidence from Nazi Germany and 1940s America (and pretty much everywhere else) shows that discrimination is incredibly costly — to the victims, of course, but also the perpetrators. One modern…
The mathematician and author sees mathematical patterns everywhere — from DNA to fireflies to social connections….
