The Transportation Stimulus: On the Right Road?
…many blanks yet to be filled in, that coming to grips with the totality of the initiative is quite challenging. “They often feed you a maddening diet of “it depends…
…many blanks yet to be filled in, that coming to grips with the totality of the initiative is quite challenging. “They often feed you a maddening diet of “it depends…
For all the speculation about the future, A.I. tools can be useful right now. Adam Davidson discovers what they can help us do, how we can get the most from…
Also: does multitasking actually increase productivity?…
How do you know when it’s the right time to retire? What does a “good” retirement look like? And will Stephen and Angela ever really hang up their hats?…
(Photo: Feed My Starving Children) The question of how best to deliver food aid is a controversial one. In recent years, economists like Dean Karlan and Ed Glaeser have suggested…
…of confidence, usually associated with a financial collapse. They both feed into each other: the financial collapse feeds into the loss of confidence, and the loss of confidence feeds into…
Aisle upon aisle of fresh produce, cheap meat, and sugary cereal — a delicious embodiment of free-market capitalism, right? Not quite. The supermarket was in fact the endpoint of the…
Thinking of Bitcoin as just a digital currency is like thinking about the Internet as just email. Its potential is much more exciting than that.
…family. But they don’t have to feed your family. You do. Once you care what others think, you’ve lost. Then you’ve just set up the same boundaries for yourself that…
The Freakonomics blog is now available on the New York Times‘s mobile site, which offers a full (yes, full) text feed of each day’s newspaper stories and blog posts in…
…situation needs help right now. TODAY. And you can help. It’s easy to find these situations. Look in any local paper. Papers feed on pain. There’s always someone today in…
Steve shows a different side of himself in very personal interviews with his two oldest daughters. Amanda talks about growing up with social anxiety and her decision not to go…
Need help accessing your private RSS feeds? Simply add them to your favorite podcast app via your Account Page. 1 Go to https://freakonomics.com/content. If you are not automatically recognized, enter…
We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we…
…a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.” Nobel Prize winning physiologist, Albert Szent-Gyorgi had a related observation: “I am deeply moved if I see one man suffering and would…
…the lines of “How dare you use the tragedy of an earthquake to help promote Bing.” Six hours later, they sent the following tweet: We apologize the tweet was negatively…
…he’s made it his mission to help the public understand statistics and hosts the podcast Cautionary Tales. In their conversation, Steve gives Tim some feedback on his new book, The…
The director of the Hayden Planetarium is one of the best science communicators of our time. He and Steve talk about his role in reclassifying Pluto, bad teachers, and why…
Also: are the most memorable stories less likely to be true?
Beyond the immediate casualties, school shootings have costs — for survivors, and for the rest of us….
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?
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.)…
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…
An interview with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose younger brother turned him in — and what it says about the Boston bombers.
How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to the market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on “dream patients” who aren’t representative of…
There are more than twice as many suicides as murders in the U.S., but suicide attracts far less scrutiny. Freakonomics Radio digs through the numbers and finds all kinds of…
…power, money, farce, and tragedy mix… Read more Amazon does a lot of mailings of this sort where they look for commonalities in purchasing patterns among customers. I bought some…
We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a three-part series, we…
There are more than twice as many suicides as murders in the U.S., but suicide attracts far less scrutiny. Freakonomics Radio digs through the numbers and finds all kinds of…
Who’s greedier — gamblers or casinos? What’s the difference between betting on sports and entering a charity raffle? And does Angela know the name of her city’s football team? Take…
