Why Use the Best Lumber in a House That Won’t Last?
…episode: It turns out that half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S. There is virtually no market for…
Many companies say they want to create more opportunities for Black Americans. One company is doing something concrete about it. We visit the South Side of Chicago to see how…
…episode: It turns out that half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S. There is virtually no market for…
A lot of the conventional wisdom in medicine is nothing more than hunch or wishful thinking. A new breed of data detectives is hoping to change that.
Broadway operates on a winner-take-most business model. A runaway hit like Stereophonic — which just won five Tony Awards — will create a few big winners. But even the stars…
How did Florida International University’s new football stadium come to be named after the rapper and singer Pitbull? Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong of The Indicator from Planet Money explain….
…the following questions: Will boxing ever again see a golden age in popularity, comparable to football and baseball today? Why are the 1920’s often referred to as a golden age…
Does the future of food lie in its past — or inside a tank of liquid nitrogen? Also: how anti-social can you be on a social network? This is a…
It’s an acutely haphazard way of paying workers, and yet it keeps expanding. We dig into the data to find out why.
She used to run a behavioral unit in the Obama administration, and now has a similar role at Google. Maya and Steve talk about the power (and limits) of behavioral…
…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…
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…
…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…
Artificial intelligence, we’ve been told, will destroy humankind. No, wait — it will usher in a new age of human flourishing! Guest host Adam Davidson (co-founder of Planet Money) sorts…
…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…
What’s the difference between people who preserve special things and people who devour them right away? Why do we love to binge-watch? And did Adam really eat an apple?
Behind almost every character you see displayed on a page or a screen, there’s a complex — and sometimes lucrative — web of licensing deals. Zachary Crockett is just your…
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…
How does an industry built on roadside pop-ups make billions of dollars in two weeks of the year? Zachary Crockett gets pyrotechnical….
