When Data Tell the Story
…best journalism always tries hard to incorporate data if it’s relevant and reliable. This morning, my paper copy of The Times included a replica of the paper’s special section on…
…best journalism always tries hard to incorporate data if it’s relevant and reliable. This morning, my paper copy of The Times included a replica of the paper’s special section on…
…being. 2. Some of those organs must inevitably come from cadavers: i.e., you can’t give your heart to someone else and still live. But some transplanted organs can come from…
…recipients could be in a position to keep more of the funds they receive.” In the U.S., meanwhile, mobile banking hasn’t gained much traction yet; but investors are hopeful. [%comments]…
…Committee (Housing Subcommittee) will soon hold a hearing to explore the competitive (or anti-competitive) practices of the brokerage industry. “This is significant,” explains my source, “because this is the first…
…I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you…
…by me. Dozens responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a couple per week. Jeffrey asked: How about “It is better to be thought a…
…wonders if the ivory decision may have been politically motivated. Do any Freakonomics readers have a novel way of eliminating government ivory stockpiles without encouraging poaching? (HT: Eric M. Jones)[%comments]…
…of how willing others are to respond to you.? Compare, for example, this complimentary chart concerning male senders: Graph: OkTrends White men may be pickier about responding to messages that…
…of charge. Via Bloomberg.com: While the athletes have been busy training for the Pan Am Games in Rio De Janeiro (July 13-29), the city’s prostitutes have also been preparing for…
Figuring out which patients to hospitalize and which to safely send home can be tricky. Is there a way to make this decision easier for doctors — and get better…
…activist, and Survivor winner. Steve asks Yul why he’s so altruistic, how Google and Apple are helping track Covid-19, and whether the best way to pick a president might be…
…might have had from reversing his finding far outweighs the value of one friendship at the margin). I have examined several other natural experiments and found similar results. For example,…
There’s some debate about whether the economy has begun to recover. The consensus among professional forecasters is that the trough occurred sometime in the second half of 2009. But it…
…DUH-da) first names are much more common than iambic (e.g., da-DUH) names. This is bad news for bar-RACK hus-SEIN o-BAM-a, a treble iambic, and it’s good news for HIL-lary CLIN-ton….
…tongue-in-cheek (but only half). I guess the last step is by definition the hardest, i.e. “having had an awakening … try[ing] to carry this message and to practice these principles…
He was handed the keys to the global economy just as it started heading off a cliff. Fortunately, he’d seen this movie before.
The state-by-state rollout of legalized weed has given economists a perfect natural experiment to measure its effects. Here’s what we know so far — and don’t know — about the…
…story. The maligned straw-man algorithm, by contrast, would have correctly identified 495 of 500 terrorists. I don’t understand how Gelman-Fung conclude that we “[kept] under wraps the rate at which…
Bapu Jena talks with a barber and a pharmacist whose study brought healthcare to Black men in Los Angeles who were getting haircuts. They discuss its impact on high blood…
In a comment to our last post, Keg277 wrote: Now, I’ve got a question…whether it classifies as one that can be Freakonomically answered, I don’t know. I was watching a…
…a rookie,” he says, “we didn’t have anything like this [symposium]. I had to learn it the hard way. Don’t use me as an example of what you can get…
Has our culture’s obsession with innovation led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of?
…the assistance of a professional akin to a civil law notary. … In Germany, for example, the civil law notary is a trained legal professional who reads aloud and interprets…
Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. His past posts can be found here and here. In a recent post, I mentioned that when…
Do you think public bathrooms are too small, smartphones are too big, and public transit just wasn’t made for you? Then you’re probably a woman. In her book Invisible Women:…
The takeaways from our “Church of ‘Scionology’” radio program were as follows: + Economists have found that family firms that pass the company down to the next generation perform worse…
…As part of our attempt to figure out where best to invest our design dollars, we hired some professional car thieves to provide a more hands-on perspective than us engineers…
There’s a nasty secret about hot-button topics like global warming — knowledge is not always power.
…When a drug dealer sells to an addict, both are happy to have carried out the transaction. I’ve never really understood why I personally come down on one side or…
