Me a Celebrity? Let’s Test That with an Experiment.
…if it is less than $100) to any stranger who identifies me spontaneously in the next 30 days without some obvious clue (e.g me wearing a name tag or signing…
Whether you’re mapping the universe, hosting a late-night talk show, or running a meeting, there are a lot of ways to up your idea game. Plus: the truth about brainstorming….
What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for…
The public has almost no chance to buy good tickets to the best events. Ticket brokers, meanwhile, make huge profits on the secondary markets. Here’s the story of how this…
What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for…
Also: how does a cook become a chef? With Gabrielle Hamilton.
Also: how do phone cameras affect the way we experience live events?…
Studies by men published in scientific journals are more likely to include glowing, hyperbolic terms. Bapu talks about this “groundbreaking” research (see what we did there?) in a wide-ranging discussion…
Delaware is beloved by corporations, bankruptcy lawyers, tax avoiders, and money launderers. Critics say the Delaware “franchise” is undemocratic and corrupt. Insiders say it’s wildly efficient. We say: they’re both…
What’s the difference between being introverted and being shy? What are extroverts so cheerful about? And does Angela’s social battery ever run out? Take the Big Five inventory: freakonomics.com/bigfive…
Until recently, Delaware was almost universally agreed to be the best place for companies to incorporate. Now, with Elon Musk leading a corporate stampede out of the First State, we…
We speak with a governor, a former C.D.C. director, a pandemic forecaster, a hard-charging pharmacist, and a pair of economists — who say it’s all about the incentives. (Pandemillions, anyone?)
…if it is less than $100) to any stranger who identifies me spontaneously in the next 30 days without some obvious clue (e.g me wearing a name tag or signing…
…— that small is the new big, and that top-down political power is losing out to grass-roots organizers. That belief is apparently what informed his surprising prediction the other day…
The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a guest OpEd columnist in the N.Y. Times, has an interesting piece today (subscription required) about W.E.B. DuBois’s famous prediction that the problem of the…
…political markets, with the goal described as follows: “If a single prediction market is wiser than the pundits and the polls, imagine how wise all the prediction markets are together.”…
…spend tonight watching the ticker from political prediction markets a lot more closely than I’ll be watching the talking heads. Think of the market as distributed computing: Traders around the…
…one hand, pessimism and cynicism are almost too easy. The prediction “this won’t end well” has very little predictive value without a time scale attached, because eventually there are bound…
…federal health authorities. One short-term goal is to identify, and rectify, the root causes of bottlenecks in the existing system. Longer term, the ambition is to create new prediction models,…
…book?Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done to the commenter who posts (before Oct. 1) the best prediction of what the winning bid will end…
In this special crossover episode, People I (Mostly) Admire host Steve Levitt admits to No Stupid Questions co-host Angela Duckworth that he knows almost nothing about psychology. But once Angela…
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…
In 2016, David Cameron held a referendum on whether the U.K. should stay in the European Union. A longtime Euroskeptic, he nevertheless led the Remain campaign. So what did Cameron…
He’s a world-renowned magician who’s been performing since he was seven-years-old. But Joshua Jay is also an author, toymaker, and consultant for film and television. Steve Levitt talks to him…
He’s a law professor with a Ph.D. in economics and a tendency for getting into fervid academic debates. Over 20 years ago, he and Steve began studying the impact of…
Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains the thinking behind the controversial new Republican tax package — and why its critics are wrong. (Next week, we’ll hear…
The U.S. president is often called the “leader of the free world.” But if you ask an economist or a Constitutional scholar how much the occupant of the Oval Office…
Steve Levitt talks about why the center cannot hold in penalty kicks, why a running track hurts home-field advantage, and why the World Cup is an economist’s dream.
She’s the author of the bestselling book Grit, and a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology — a field Steve says he knows nothing about. But once Angela gives Steve…
