SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Allie the Escort Answers Your Questions
…for myself. Q. Have you ever ‘fallen in love’ with a customer? – David Chowes A. Yes. Q. Do you feel that the inelasticity of demand for your services was…
…for myself. Q. Have you ever ‘fallen in love’ with a customer? – David Chowes A. Yes. Q. Do you feel that the inelasticity of demand for your services was…
…rejuvenate the fashion industry – at least the part of the fashion industry she likes. Recent research by David Yermack indicates that the First Lady has the power to move…
Also: why do we habituate to life’s greatest pleasures?
…to the right, and you’ll find them). FWIW, here are a couple of passages that caught my eye in an appreciation of Friedman by David J. Craig, published in the…
…Freddie Kronenberg, David Eisenberg, Mark Hyman, and Andy Weill, are devising new approaches to this important issue. Q: The medical industry seems to make most of its profits from illness…
Couples get divorced for all kinds of reasons. Is having kids one of them? Bapu talks about research that investigates what happens to parents who unexpectedly have twins. Plus, an…
(iStockphoto) A new article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review written by marketing professors Wendy W. Moe, David A. Schweidel and Michael Trusov sheds some light on how people use the…
There are 7,000 languages spoken on Earth. What are the costs — and benefits — of our modern-day Tower of Babel? (Part 3 of the “Earth 2.0” series.)…
Markets are hardly perfect, but the results can be ugly when you try to subvert them.
…by David Johnson, Jonathan Parker and Nicholas Souleles, American Economic Review, 96(5), December 2006. A nice summary from the N.B.E.R. Reporter is available here. This paper shows some real ingenuity:…
Where does sentimental value come from? Why did Angela throw out her childhood journals? And would Mike wear Hitler’s sweater?…
Playing notes on her piano, she demonstrates for Steve why whole numbers sound pleasing, why octaves are mathematically imperfect, and how math underlies musical composition. Sarah, a professor at the…
…Lantern also had a pretty interesting Jewish element. It has been said that its Guardians of the Universe were drawn (by Gil Kane, I believe) to resemble David Ben-Gurion, the…
(Photo: Ben Stanfield) A reader named David Stokes writes to say: Last night’s Raiders – Chargers game gave one team a unique opportunity to implement the no-punt strategy. With the…
Our co-host is comedian Christian Finnegan, and we learn: the difference between danger and fear; the role of clouds in climate change; and why (and when) politicians are bad at…
Educators and economists tell us all the reasons college enrollment has been dropping, especially for men, and how to stop the bleeding. (Part 4 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to…
…longer background document (with enough legalese to make any lawyer happy) is available here. More from David Pennock, here. And Vern Smith is the first to register a formal comment,…
John Urschel was the only player in the N.F.L. simultaneously getting a math Ph.D. at M.I.T. But after a new study came out linking football to brain damage, he abruptly…
Can a hit single from four decades ago still pay the bills? Zachary Crockett f-f-f-finds out.
Also: how can we stop confusing correlation with causation?
Our co-host is Grit author Angela Duckworth, and we learn fascinating, Freakonomical facts from a parade of guests. For instance: what we all get wrong about Darwin; what an iPod…
Photo: David De Lossy Last week I posted about Bob Parsons from GoDaddy and his elephant hunting/culling trip to Zimbabwe. Parsons went on a trip to Zimbabwe and killed an…
He’s an M.I.T. cosmologist, physicist, and machine-learning expert, and once upon a time, almost an economist. Max and Steve continue their conversation about the existential threats facing humanity, and what…
…recent research. George asked: How about the expression “pardon my french”? That’s another Larry David-related quotation (George Costanza claimed he invented it). Hope you read this! The Oxford English Dictionary…
Doctors, chefs and other experts are much more likely than the rest of us to buy store-brand products. What do they know that we don’t?
Also: why do we hoard? (Rebroadcast From Ep. 28)…
Why are humans so eager for magic-bullet solutions? Can you explain how a pen works? And how does Angela feel about being forever branded “the grit lady”?…
When are negative emotions enjoyable? Are we all a little masochistic? And do pigs like hot sauce?…
…this with David T. Ory) examined the extent to which people like to travel and why. Overall, most respondents possessed personality characteristics that we might hypothesize would contribute to a…
…the long run, but it still looks pretty bad. The first story is that NRG Energy, according to David Whitford at Fortune, “filed a license application to build two new…
