Jim Yong Kim has an unorthodox background for a World Bank president — and his reign has been just as unorthodox. He has just announced he’s stepping down, well before…
More people than ever before are getting tattoos — but social media has flipped the trade’s business model on its head. Zachary Crockett dips into the ink.
The political debates over immigration can generate a lot of fuzzy facts. We wanted to test Americans’ knowledge — so, to wrap up our special series on immigration, we called…
Covid-19 has shocked our food-supply system like nothing in modern history. We examine the winners, the losers, the unintended consequences — and just how much toilet paper one household really…
People who sleep better earn more money. Now all we have to do is teach everyone to sleep better.
For all the progress made in fighting cancer, it still kills 10 million people a year, and some types remain especially hard to detect and treat. Pancreatic cancer, for instance,…
The debut of a live game show from Freakonomics Radio, with judges Malcolm Gladwell, Ana Gasteyer, and David Paterson….
The debut of a live game show from Freakonomics Radio, with judges Malcolm Gladwell, Ana Gasteyer and David Paterson….
People who sleep better earn more money. Now all we have to do is teach everyone to sleep better.
…find that roughly 30% to 40% of the foregone market work hours are allocated to increased home production. Additionally, 30% of the foregone hours are allocated to increased sleep time…
After Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Rajiv Shah headed the largest humanitarian effort in U.S. history. As chief economist of the Gates Foundation he tried to immunize almost a billion children. He…
In a special episode of The Economics of Everyday Things, host Zachary Crockett explains what millennials do to show they care, how corrugated cardboard keeps your food warm, and why…
As the cost of college skyrocketed, it created a debt burden that’s putting a drag on the economy. One possible solution: shifting the risk of debt away from students and…
Whether you’re mapping the universe, hosting a late-night talk show, or running a meeting, there are a lot of ways to up your idea game. Plus: the truth about brainstorming….
Innovation experts have long overlooked where a lot of innovation actually happens. The personal computer, the mountain bike, the artificial pancreas — none of these came from some big R&D…
What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for…
The public has almost no chance to buy good tickets to the best events. Ticket brokers, meanwhile, make huge profits on the secondary markets. Here’s the story of how this…
What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for…
How psychologist Dan Gilbert went from high school dropout to Harvard professor, found the secret of joy, and inspired Steve Levitt’s divorce….
How psychologist Dan Gilbert went from high school dropout to Harvard professor, found the secret of joy, and inspired Steve Levitt’s divorce….
…if it is less than $100) to any stranger who identifies me spontaneously in the next 30 days without some obvious clue (e.g me wearing a name tag or signing…
…— that small is the new big, and that top-down political power is losing out to grass-roots organizers. That belief is apparently what informed his surprising prediction the other day…
The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, a guest OpEd columnist in the N.Y. Times, has an interesting piece today (subscription required) about W.E.B. DuBois’s famous prediction that the problem of the…
…political markets, with the goal described as follows: “If a single prediction market is wiser than the pundits and the polls, imagine how wise all the prediction markets are together.”…
…spend tonight watching the ticker from political prediction markets a lot more closely than I’ll be watching the talking heads. Think of the market as distributed computing: Traders around the…
…one hand, pessimism and cynicism are almost too easy. The prediction “this won’t end well” has very little predictive value without a time scale attached, because eventually there are bound…
…federal health authorities. One short-term goal is to identify, and rectify, the root causes of bottlenecks in the existing system. Longer term, the ambition is to create new prediction models,…
…book?Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done to the commenter who posts (before Oct. 1) the best prediction of what the winning bid will end…
In this special crossover episode, People I (Mostly) Admire host Steve Levitt admits to No Stupid Questions co-host Angela Duckworth that he knows almost nothing about psychology. But once Angela…
The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. The greatest accidental experiment in the history of labor has lessons…
