"Football Freakonomics": When Good Stats Go Bad
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project. What do Dan Marino, Jerry Rice, and MarTay Jenkins have in common? Yes, wise guy,…
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project. What do Dan Marino, Jerry Rice, and MarTay Jenkins have in common? Yes, wise guy,…
A reader named Kevin Cornwell, who has his own blog here, wrote us the other day about the forthcoming book The Baseball Economist. It’s by J.C. Bradbury, an economist at…
He was handed the keys to the global economy just as it started heading off a cliff. Fortunately, he’d seen this movie before.
More than 1 million people die worldwide each year from traffic accidents, but there’s never been a safer time to drive.
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
There ain’t no such thing as a free parking spot. Somebody has to pay for it — and that somebody is everybody.
Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, EatWith, and other companies in the “sharing economy” are practically daring government regulators to shut them down. The regulators are happy to comply.
It has been a good year for economist Esther Duflo, that’s for sure!? Last fall, she won a MacArthur genius grant.? Last Friday, she won the John Bates Clark medal,…
…for inflation to be in 2005 dollars). The bet was designed in the spirit of the famous bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich, which the economist Simon won when…
…I predict that the world will watch French cities light up in youth unrest in 2009, 2010 at the latest … 2011 for sure. I have been traveling to the…
…with a very low exemption in 2011). President-elect Obama will quickly push to abolish the repeal and instead freeze the exemption at $7 million for a couple, with a marginal…
…offset the recession. A significant part of the spending will not begin until 2010 and 2011 when most economists believe we will be into the next recovery. With unemployment rates…
In the spirit of its Big Mac Index, The Economist rolled out its Global Debt Clock, which features a running global-public-debt tally. It also provides specific data for different countries,…
…the business of football and we encourage them to step up and take responsibility with this in mind. Q. In the following Economist article, the author shows a graph of…
The second chapter of SuperFreakonomics, which is primarily about catching terrorists and running an emergency room, includes a few passages about the timing quirks of births and deaths. The birth…
…new policy “provides an incentive for individuals to agree to help each other.” The policy will be widely publicized and will take effect in January 2011. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]…
…be published in the July issue of the journal American Antiquity. The archaeology team also is finishing a book manuscript for University of Oklahoma Press to be released in 2011….
…too loaded with talent.? If LeBron won a championship in 2011 as a Laker, it wouldn’t be clear that he was the but-for cause.? I predict that he goes to…
…2011, and 70% of the workforces of the government,” says Zhang Yujing of the Beijing Federation of Trade Unions. “We want all state-owned enterprise workers to have restarted this routine…
…Martian-looking innovations. The players-who were, in an attention-getting wrinkle, mostly top junior stars eligible for the 2011 draft-road-tested everything from two-on-two overtime to shallower nets to having the second referee…
…efforts failed, but considerable evidence suggests that whatever success they’ve achieved has been conspicuously countered by a national waistband seemingly guided by the imperatives of Manifest Destiny. 68 percent of…
The Economist reports that the city of Shanghai has been auctioning car license plates. The average auction price has recently been $6,900, truly remarkable considering average family income in China,…
…a JaMarcus Russell). Am I missing a representative for future players? –Schantz A. I sound like an economist when I say this, but why would you blame the players for…
…in 2011. Currently, participants are fined $25 if they fail to follow the schedule in any given week, but Gym-Pact’s founders are still refining their model. “Zhang and [Geoff] Oberhofer…
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com> Date: February 14, 2011 2:50:11 PM EST To: Subject: Free Book Hello, i live in brazil and i would like to receive the book Freakonomics at no cost….
…2011 (my ultrasound was in 2005). Later in the article, the surgical cost is given: “Hospitals charge $5,000 to $6,000 for a needle biopsy, and double that for an open?[surgical]…
A local resident holds pictures he found in the tsunami-damaged city of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate prefecture on March 22, 2011. (Photo: NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images) From a loss-of-life standpoint, the Japanese…
Photo: Hemera Red Sox Nation came into the 2011 season confident they had a winner. Adding the bats of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez made Boston the off-season champs in…
…the longest hours, who shops the most, to who is most trusting of others. The annual report, titled “Society at a Glance 2011 – OECD Social Indicators,” is chock-full with…
…a fortune. Maybe. Someone actually yelled “Stop the Presses” in 2011. The real reason machines and the internet won’t replace secretaries. Space shuttle launch delay has a big price tag….
