China's Role in Worldwide Food Prices: A Guest Post
…book The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices. He explains the factors that lead to price increases and that may drive food prices in…
…book The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices. He explains the factors that lead to price increases and that may drive food prices in…
To get a lot of followers on Twitter, do you need to follow a lot of other Tweeps? And if not, why not?
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…
Is it better to be the best player on the worst team or the worst player on the best team? How did Angela cope with her extremely impressive freshman dorm-mates?…
…until 70,000 years ago — had probably been getting into the habit of working for each other, and specializing, by our sexual division of labor. Broadly speaking, men hunting and…
In this special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt speaks with the palliative physician B.J. Miller about modern medicine’s goal of “protecting a pulse at all costs.” Is…
Performing at a strip club can be lucrative, but it requires financial and psychological savvy — and an eye for social trends. Zachary Crockett takes a look….
It’s a powerful biological response that has preserved our species for millennia. But now it may be keeping us from pursuing strategies that would improve the environment, the economy, even…
The Berlin dance mecca Berghain is known for its eight-hour line and inscrutable door policy. PJ Vogt, host of the podcast Search Engine, joins us to crack the code. It…
It’s a powerful biological response that has preserved our species for millennia. But now it may be keeping us from pursuing strategies that would improve the environment, the economy, even…
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?
It’s hard to know whether the benefits of hiring a celebrity are worth the risk. We dig into one gruesome story of an endorsement gone wrong, and find a surprising…
Also: Where is the line between acronyms, initialisms and gibberish?
…“Substitution and Stigma: Evidence on Religious Competition from the Catholic Sex-Abuse Scandal,” by Notre Dame economist Daniel Hungerman, looks at whether other religious faiths gained from the Catholic Church sex…
…think: Out of the three basic dyadic sexual/romantic relationships — male-female, male-male, and female-female — which one has the lowest incidence of domestic violence? Male-male. Lesbian relationships experience domestic violence…
…unabashedly of kinky sex and spreading their gene pool. In addition to the cost angle, some women like the option of having their children know their fathers, which many sperm…
…to afford fine clothing; and two claimed they were ruined by drink. The Commission called oral sex “pervert methods,” and reported that it was on the increase in the higher-priced…
…sex trade in old- time Chicago . . . A survey like no other . . . The erosion of prostitute pay . . . Why did oral sex get…
…about smoking, sex, and career ambitions, among others — to a few current New York students. Here are their answers: Leah, 22, Senior, Anthropology, Brooklyn College Who’s paying for your…
…she sent me; in order to protect the potentially innocent, I will obscure their last names: Eric Wayne XXXXXX — sex charges Nathan Wayne XXXXXX — kidnapping and beating, homicide…
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…hope. Alcohol “impairs” sex, homework and conversation, putting “social costs” on the rest of us. Do Mad Mothers [i.e. MADD] want to prohibit drinking before sex, drinking while doing homework,…
Women hold fewer than one in 10 patents. Why? And what are we missing out on?
Boys and men are trending downward in education, employment, and mental health. Richard Reeves, author of the book Of Boys and Men, has some solutions that don’t come at the…
…to choose your child’s sex? The Wall Street Journal reports on a Los Angeles clinic that will soon let parents choose the sex of their unborn children. Their designer options…
…in demand. Her price hikes revealed another surprise: the more she charged, the less actual sex she was having. At $300 an hour, she had a string of one-hour appointments…
Stephen Dubner’s conversation with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, one of the most storied private-equity firms in history. We spoke with Rubenstein for the Freakonomics Radio series “The…
In this episode, we speculate what would happen if economists got to run the world. Hear from a high-end call girl; an Estonian who ran his country according to the…
…not know who they were playing with. They were observed by either someone of the same sex or opposite sex — two physically attractive volunteers, one man and one woman….
