"Football Freakonomics": Incentives
Four Vince Lombardi trophies belonging to the Dallas Cowboys. (Photo: Brandi Korte) The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project. Today’s question on…
Also: should we all have personal mission statements?
What is the purpose of negative emotions? Why do we engage with things we know will upset us? And how does Angie deal with rejection?
What’s more stressful, divorce or jail? Are you in the middle of a “lifequake”? And should we all be taking notes from Martha Stewart?
What happens when a public health researcher deep in coal country argues that mountaintop mining endangers the entire community? Hint: it doesn’t go very well.
Are things as dire as they seem? How big is your moral circle? And should Angela spend time with her kids or answer her emails?…
Should you visualize success or failure? How do you bounce back from a mistake? And will Maria hustle Angela into a poker game?…
If you’re frustrated with your family, should you cut ties with them? Who’s more likely to break with relatives over politics, liberals or conservatives? And what would it take for…
How well do you know the people in your life, really? Are you stuck having surface-level conversations? And should we all be in couples therapy?…
A conversation with 2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Hidden Side of Sports.”…
Family environments and “diversifying experiences” (including the early death of a parent); intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations; schools that value assessments, but don’t assess the things we value. All these elements…
Tom Dart is transforming Cook County’s jail, reforming evictions, and, with Steve Levitt, trying a new approach to electronic monitoring….
Should you become an artist or an accountant? Did Sylvia Plath have to be depressed to write The Bell Jar? And what can Napoleon Dynamite teach us about the creative…
Four Vince Lombardi trophies belonging to the Dallas Cowboys. (Photo: Brandi Korte) The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project. Today’s question on…
In many ways, the gender gap is closing. In others, not so much. And that’s not always a bad thing.
Dollar-wise, the sports industry is surprisingly small, about the same size as the cardboard-box industry. So why does it make so much noise? Because it reflects — and often amplifies…
Experts and pundits are notoriously bad at forecasting, in part because they aren’t punished for bad predictions. Also, they tend to be deeply unscientific. The psychologist Philip Tetlock is finally…
…to send Bapu your questions, and this week he tries to answer them. We’d love to get to the bottom of even more topics. Send your voice memos to bapu@freakonomics.com…
What’s the best way to carry out random acts of kindness? What’s wrong with making an “Irish exit”? And why is Mike secretly buying lottery tickets?…
What makes a con succeed? Does snake oil actually work? And just how gullible is Angela?…
How a pain-in-the-neck girl from rural Virginia came to run the most powerful university in the world.
…latest book, the 2010 Football Outsiders Almanac is billed as “The Essential Guide to the 2010 NFL and College Football Seasons.” If it’s truly essential, it can even predict the…
…death in the NFL.” This isn’t completely true — there has been one, I remember it from when I was a kid. A player for the Detroit Lions named Chuck…
A look at whether spite pays — and if it even exists.
A look at whether spite pays — and if it even exists.
In this episode from 2013, we look at whether spite pays — and if it even exists….
…and increased interest costs by nearly $3 trillion between 2001 and 2011. In 2011, Federal tax receipts amounted to just 14.4 percent of GDP, far below the postwar average of…
Seth Berkley used to run the world’s largest vaccine funding organization. He and Steve talk about the incredible value of vaccines, the economics of immunizing the developing world, and the…
…Life of a C.E.O.” 2/25/18 55:13 Extra: David Rubenstein Full Interview Stephen Dubner’s conversation with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the most storied private-equity firms in…
Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?
Do more expensive wines taste better? And: what does one little rodent in a salad say about a restaurant’s future? This is a “mashupdate” of “Do More Expensive Wines Taste…
