Harvard Shuts Down its Nobel Prize Pool
Last week we posted about Harvard’s Nobel Prize Pool, where people could place bets predicting this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for $1 per entry. The Harvard…
Last week we posted about Harvard’s Nobel Prize Pool, where people could place bets predicting this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for $1 per entry. The Harvard…
Why do Hall of Fame inductees, Oscar winners, and Nobel laureates outlive their peers?
Should you become an artist or an accountant? Did Sylvia Plath have to be depressed to write The Bell Jar? And what can Napoleon Dynamite teach us about the creative…
…be under consideration. So that leaves 34 names that possibly could have won the prize to date. Since 2005, seven of the twelve Nobel Prize winners were drawn from this…
How do TV producers decide how much money to give away? A little psychology and a lot of math. Zachary Crockett phones a friend….
Claudia Goldin is the newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. We spoke with her in 2016 about why women earn so much less than men — and how…
John Mackey, the C.E.O. of Whole Foods, has learned the perils of speaking his mind. But he still says what he thinks about everything from “conscious leadership” to the behavioral…
For many economists — Steve Levitt included — there is perhaps no greater inspiration than Paul Romer, the now-Nobel laureate who at a young age redefined the discipline and has…
Government and the private sector often feel far apart. One is filled with compliance-driven bureaucracy. The other, with market-fueled innovation. But something is changing in a multi-billion-dollar corner of the…
…time to throw the box out. After all, it has been more than 15 years and the box has never once been opened. Thomas Schelling winning the Nobel prize in…
…economist Dan McFadden has scored a rare double: first a Nobel Prize and then a vote for the Heisman Trophy. It turns out it is a joke. Reading this, though,…
(Photo: Andrew Skudder) The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was recently awarded for symmetry breaking and its consequence, the Higgs boson—a particle so well known that, according to the president…
…was delighted to see that Peter Diamond shared the Nobel Prize today with two other economists (Mortensen and Pissarides, whom I don’t know personally but are very highly respected). Diamond’s…
Chemist Jack Szostak wants to understand how the first life forms came into being on Earth. He and Steve discuss the danger of “mirror bacteria,” the origin of biology in…
Are highly effective people quicker to share credit? What does poverty do to your brain? And how did Stephen’s mother teach him about opportunity costs? Plus: an announcement about the…
Daron Acemoglu was just awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics. Earlier this year, he and Steve talked about his groundbreaking research on what makes countries succeed or fail….
The Nobel laureate and pioneering behavioral economist spars with Steve over what makes a nudge a nudge, and admits that even economists have plenty of blind spots….
(Illustrator: Niklas Elmehed, Copyright: Nobel Media AB) Hearty congratulations to Harvard economist Al Roth (now at Stanford), whose work has been featured on many occasions here at the Freakonomics blog!…
Claudia Goldin is the newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Steve spoke to her in 2021 about how inflexible jobs and family responsibilities make it harder for women…
When the uncelebrated Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League, it wasn’t just the biggest underdog story in recent history. It was a sign of changing economics —…
Also: how can we stop confusing correlation with causation?
Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and Steve talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how…
It’s the banking tool that got millions of people around the world to stop wasting money on the lottery. So why won’t state and federal officials in the U.S. give…
The director of the Hayden Planetarium is one of the best science communicators of our time. He and Steve talk about his role in reclassifying Pluto, bad teachers, and why…
Does anyone ever win the giant teddy bear? Zachary Crockett steps right up….
Does anyone ever win the giant teddy bear? Zachary Crockett steps right up….
Dubner and his Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt answer your questions about crime, traffic, real-estate agents, the Ph.D. glut, and how to not get eaten by a bear.
Also: how can we stop confusing correlation with causation?
The economist Joseph Stiglitz has devoted his life to exposing the limits of markets. He tells Steve about winning an argument with fellow Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, why small governments…
