My Mom, the Psychic
…a graduate student at MIT, I put a prediction in one of my early papers. My mentor Jim Poterba made me take it out. “Nothing good ever comes of predictions,”…
…a graduate student at MIT, I put a prediction in one of my early papers. My mentor Jim Poterba made me take it out. “Nothing good ever comes of predictions,”…
Photo: Peter Batty Dubner and I have been thinking a lot these days about pundits who make predictions. The incentives surrounding predictions are completely skewed. If I make a wild…
…date and site come back with predictions about the probability of cancellation and delay for different airlines serving the route. For example, here are the results for a trip from…
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…
As the Supreme Court considers overturning Roe v. Wade, we look back at Steve Levitt’s controversial research on an unintended consequence of the 1973 ruling….
The controversial theory linking Roe v. Wade to a massive crime drop is back in the spotlight as several states introduce abortion restrictions. Steve Levitt and John Donohue discuss their…
In this special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt speaks with the palliative physician B.J. Miller about modern medicine’s goal of “protecting a pulse at all costs.” Is…
Palliative physician B.J. Miller asks: Is there a better way to think about dying? And can death be beautiful?…
…they have to vastly change our life through customization, and perhaps satisfy our demand for predictions with some robust results. One of the first things that comes to mind when…
Well, at least the folks at the PopSci Predictions Exchange listen. Last week Dubner blogged about Jatropha, a weed that could spearhead a biofuel revolution. At the end of his…
We recently solicited your questions for Nate Silver regarding his new book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t. Not too surprisingly, a…
…Mexico To get this kind of wild flexibility in what can be predicted, we need what are called combinatorial prediction markets, or markets where predictions are composed by combining different…
…was predicted by almost all journalists and government officials to be a brewing traffic nightmare of unprecedented dimensions. Only a day before the event I was reading predictions by our…
…listen to our Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Predictions,” to find out where we stand on the whole notion of predictions. So Freakonomics readers, who are you betting on?…
…science that led the way in terms of making very precise, testable predictions that could be compared with the real world to see if they held up. That is why…
…shown in this article (based on pre 1995 data): It shouldn’t be insurmountable to give player-specific probabilities conditional on distance to the hole or even real time predictions that take…
…of experts’ predictions for the coming season and you’ll see that their success rate is lower than that of the average monkey with a dartboard. But for anyone looking to…
…home-country advantage. In the past six Olympics, his model has a correlation of 93 percent between predictions and actual medal counts, and 85 percent for gold medals. For the Games…
…famous wrong predictions that are in fact apocryphal later inventions put into the mouth of the supposed authors. Can anyone suggest examples of famous wrong predictions — from technology, politics,…
…don’t think it will stick.) My initial sample of two people (my wife and myself) did not seem to fit with these predictions. So, in the interest of collecting more…
Economists love to make predictions about the Summer Olympics, but the Winter Games generally attract less attention. One economist, however, does have some predictions for this year’s Games. Daniel Johnson…
He’s a pioneer of using randomized control experiments in economics — studying the long-term benefits of a $1 health intervention in Africa. Steve asks Edward, a Berkeley professor, about Africa’s…
Whether it’s a giant infrastructure plan or a humble kitchen renovation, it’ll inevitably take way too long and cost way too much. That’s because you suffer from “the planning fallacy.”…
Are things as dire as they seem? How big is your moral circle? And should Angela spend time with her kids or answer her emails?…
Whether it’s a giant infrastructure plan or a humble kitchen renovation, it’ll inevitably take way too long and cost way too much. That’s because you suffer from “the planning fallacy.”…
Whether it’s a giant infrastructure plan or a humble kitchen renovation, it’ll inevitably take way too long and cost way too much. That’s because you suffer from “the planning fallacy.”…
Game theorist Barry Nalebuff explains how he used basic economics to build Honest Tea into a multimillion-dollar business, and shares his innovative approach to negotiation.
The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. The greatest accidental experiment in the history of labor has lessons…
When the world went into lockdown, experts predicted a rise in intimate-partner assaults. What actually happened was more complicated….
…job? . . . “Entrepreneurs of error” . . . Why measuring cause-and-effect is so hard . . . The folly of prediction . . . Are your predictions better…
