A bargain at $900,000
…$25 to the person who comes up with a great name for his baby due in a few weeks. We’ve got lots of great Freakonomics-approved baby names to give away….
…$25 to the person who comes up with a great name for his baby due in a few weeks. We’ve got lots of great Freakonomics-approved baby names to give away….
Levitt and I missed a terrific business opportunity. If we had even an ounce of entrepreneurship between us, we would have parlayed the Freakonomics chapter on baby names into a…
Want to be part of an episode of Freakonomics Radio? We’re working on a podcast about names and we want to hear from readers and listeners about their own names…
…product. But, just as women with “distinctively black” names wound up just as well off as women with more traditional names, will a “Kohler” really have much of an advantage…
…frequency of three names through time gives the main intuition of their result: Here you see the adoption curves, and later abandonment, of three names that were about as popular…
(Photo: Russ Morris) We should probably start a Strange Name Hall of Fame at some point to chronicle all the weird, wonderful, terrible names that readers have passed along to…
…the alphabet are faster at making buying decisions. Why? Kids with the A to I last names were always first in line, whereas kids with last names from R to…
…with AJ Jacobs (author of It’s All Relative) as real-time fact-checker. We filled this episode with insights about the true value of ground beef, sleeping in, company names, and more….
Why are humans so fascinated by coincidences? What do Carl Jung and an album by The Police have in common? And what did Stephen win in a bar mitzvah limbo…
In our continuing effort to bring you news of interesting first names from around the globe (see here and here and here and here), please consider this recent e-mail from…
Photo: surlygirl A social norm in Italy appears to be grandparents spending the day taking care of their pre-school grandchildren. Even grandfathers can be seen pushing infants around in carriages…
Via the U.K. Guardian: A team of Edinburgh University psychologists led by Christopher Bale and Peter Caryl conducted a survey of 266 women and 115 men on the use of…
Conspicuous conservation is about showing off your environmental bona fides. In other words, if you lean green, there’s extra value in being seen leaning green.
Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. Until recently, it looked as if Washington was about to change that. But then … Washington…
How many people read this blog? Who knows. Our hosting service says about 50,000 unique visitors come each day. That’s a lot of people — but when our traffic is…
Among O.E.C.D. nations, the U.S. has one of the highest rates of child poverty. How can that be? To find out, Stephen Dubner speaks with a Republican senator, a Democratic…
Hoping to harness new parents’ love of photographing their babies, researchers at the University of Washington have put together a computer program that tracks a child’s development in photos. With…
…in a tiny economy. That was a babysitting co-op on Capitol Hill, made famous in accounts by Paul Krugman. In the babysitting co-op, the recession was caused because the economy…
Also: how do phone cameras affect the way we experience live events?…
A reader named Gunjan Aggarwal writes: I came to the U.S. 7 years ago, worked in U.K./Switzerland/Netherlands/India prior to that. I work in human resources and have been fortunate to…
It may be a gag, but from the looks of this eBay page, someone just sold the naming rights for her unborn baby — and two pairs of Nike Air…
Whether you’re building a business or a cathedral, execution is everything. We ask artists, scientists, and inventors how they turned ideas into reality. And we find out why it’s so…
Is your favorite treat changing your brain? Why do so many snacks melt in your mouth? And why can’t Stephen replicate his favorite salad dressing? Take the Seven Deadly Sins…
…1,884 Bobs, Sanders [of the San Diego Chargers] is the only one still playing. We’ve written regularly about names and how some just go out of fashion. The fact is…
…surveyed associate “traditional” names with positive character traits and non-traditional names with weak performance and bad behavior. The name Kevin has particularly negative connotations; as one teacher wrote, “Kevin is…
Real tax reform may or may not ever happen. In the meantime, how about making the current system work a bit better?
…the names they happen to pick up — even if the names aren’t very good. It has always struck me that a lot of the things we do and use…
Aptonyms are the gifts that keep giving. You toss out one or two here on the blog, and readers keep coming back with more. This week’s aptonyms include: A home-schooling…
A while ago Levitt posed the question of whether the name of a street (such as “Pleasant Avenue” or “Massacre Lane”) could have an effect on the price of its…
