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Big Brown Looks Pretty Good

…with the other two horses. My final prediction: no horses get badly injured, although I would be more confident on this one if trainers gave this new technology a shot….




The Deadweight Loss of Brett Favre

…deep in the closet after the team loses. The market for used and new Favre jerseys would make a good case study for a young economist or psychologist. My prediction



The Price of Disability Law

…she’s not getting good care.” One can expect Brooks’s prediction to come true a bit more often in light of a recent lawsuit in which a New Jersey rheumatologist was…



Obamanomics

…Epstein says Obama “has never met a mandate that he would vote against.” Epstein then goes on to describe his prediction for the Obama economics team: Obama comes from the…




Thankfully, No One Pays Attention

Thankfully, no one pays attention to my annual Kentucky Derby picks, because if they did, they would have read this prediction that I made Friday: If I had to pick…



Is There a Market for "Conscious Capitalists"?

…like to see legalized prediction markets, so that more information on price trends is available to more people early on, thus reducing the scale and cost of the speculative bubbles….



What to Do for an Encore? My Preakness Picks

There is likely no prediction I can make for the Preakness that will generate as much entertainment value as my ill-fated Kentucky Derby picks. But here goes anyway. More or…




Markets Give Geithner a Vote of Confidence

Treasury Secretary Geithner‘s fears about unemployment appear to be disappearing fast. Or at least his personal fears. According to the prediction markets at Intrade.com, the chances that he departs his…



ClimateGate as Rorschach Test

…write about in some detail in SuperFreakonomics. Passages like the following have won us a few detractors in certain quadrants of the climate-research community: The current generation of climate-prediction models…



Why I Love Scientists

…“something” can be isolated, who knows how many different uses it might have. My prediction: the first humans to get their hands on that “something” will be professional bike racers….



Massachusetts Senate Race Update

In the last couple of hours, the InTrade prediction markets have moved sharply in favor of the Republican candidate Scott Brown to defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race….



An Economist's View of the New Oscar Voting

…to the new system, we can use this to start a conversation about the best way to elect the next President. And my tip?? Follow the prediction markets.? Right now,…



Should Fashion be Protected by Copyright Laws? A Guest Post

…2006, when Congressman Bob Goodlatte introduced the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (DPPA). Updating Rentner’s prediction of catastrophic job losses (Rentner predicted 500,000 lost), Goodlatte’s colleague, Rep. Bill Delahunt, declared that…




A March Surprise?

…leader David Cameron — the likely winner, per the prediction markets, in the yet-to-be called election — has just unleashed a doozy: his wife Samantha is expecting the couple’s fourth…



Copyrighting Porn: A Guest Post

…answer for the porn industry. But here’s a prediction: the porn-tube sites are here to stay, and yet many, many people and companies will continue to produce pornography – even…



Gambling on the Go

…lay down a few bets on those developments? Well, there’s an app for that: Intrade, one of our favorite prediction markets, has just released a free app. Given the general…



A Football Outsider Answers Your Questions

…from miracle turnarounds to the role of injuries to his own background. (I have a strong prediction as to which will be his least-popular answer; can you guess what I’m…



Let Google Decide for You

Google is developing a service that will tell you what you’re reading. The Prediction API uses your historical data and labels to perform text analysis. It can easily do simple…



What I've Been Thinking About

…not been able to convince them of the importance of careful analysis of observational data. Plus?there’s plenty more, on topics ranging from happiness to prediction markets, discrimination, inflation expectations and…



Exploring the Trust-Prosperity Link

…nicely with each other, they don’t have a lot of divisions.’” Zak’s prediction for China: “China, for example, has markedly high levels of trust, yet the market-oriented way in which…



One-Second Commercials

…if they strung 30 one-second commercials together in a row, but maybe it would.) My prediction: within five years, these one-second commercials will be commonplace. Have blog readers seen this…



Against (Discretionary) Snow Days

…going even further in killing some of the fun of anticipation.? My daughter pointed me to a Snow Day Prediction Widget that will calculate today the probability that your school…



Memo to Syria

Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that in 2005 I coauthored?an article with Jonathan Macey which made explicit predictions about the future of democratization in Egypt. In…




Are We Getting Better at Predicting Tornadoes?

prediction is Dr. Greg Forbes of the Weather Channel, whose recently developed Tornado Condition Index system, or TOR:CON, is widely seen as the most accurate at the moment. TOR:CON calculates…



"The Quarterback Quandary"

…very good at it. How do we know this? First of all, there’s this quote from Niels Bohr, the Nobel-winning physicist: “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” But…