The creator of The Wire, The Deuce, and other shows is leading the Writers Guild on the picket lines. He and Steve break down the economics of TV writing, how…
Game theorist Barry Nalebuff explains how he used basic economics to build Honest Tea into a multimillion-dollar business, and shares his innovative approach to negotiation.
The debut of a live game show from Freakonomics Radio, with judges Malcolm Gladwell, Ana Gasteyer, and David Paterson….
…Psychological Association shows that synthetic fat substitutes used in low-calorie potato chips can backfire and contribute to weight gain more so than their fatty counterparts. How do we know? Researchers…
Starbucks, which may hope its new calorie listings will create demand amongst the calorie conscious, should love graphs like this one from HitWise: As you might expect, the chart shows…
…U.S. agricultural policy is to increase per capita calorie consumption by 1,952-4,771 calories per year, leading to a 0.56-1.36 pound annual increase in body weight. Without the policies, the typical…
(Photo: Håkan Dahlström) “Our findings suggest that increases in the real price of one calorie in food for home consumption and the real price of fast-food restaurant food lead to…
Also: should we all have personal mission statements?
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us? And is Google Search finally…
From domestic abusers to former child soldiers, there is increasing evidence that behavioral therapy can turn them around.
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…
In 2005, Raghuram Rajan said the financial system was at risk “of a catastrophic meltdown.” After stints at the I.M.F. and India’s central bank, he sees another potential crisis —…
Who decided that we’re fully mature at 18? Should 16-year-olds have the right to vote? And why are young people bringing their parents to job interviews?…
Also: Where is the line between acronyms, initialisms and gibberish?
…I’ve been asking myself lately whether an economist could bring anything useful to the study of these questions? So far I’m not sure what the answer is to that question….
More than two decades ago, Adam Riess’s Nobel Prize-winning work fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe. His new work is reshaping cosmology for a second time….
Stephen Dubner’s conversation with the former longtime C.E.O. of General Electric, recorded for the Freakonomics Radio series “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.”…
…31 Power Forward 0.331 Kawhi Leonard 25 Small Forward 0.257 Kevin Durant 27 Small Forward 0.200 James Harden 26 Shooting Guard 0.267 Paul George 26 Shooting Guard 0.202 Chris Paul…
…like my life back” and Christine O’Donnell‘s “I’m not a witch.” I would welcome suggestions of notable quotations from 2011, particularly ones from politics or popular culture or entertainment or…
…Christine O’Donnell‘s “I’m not a witch.” I would welcome suggestions of notable quotations from 2011, particularly ones from politics or popular culture or entertainment or sports or business or technology….
…of $125.9 million, while the Tampa Bay Rays had the lowest payroll in baseball, spending only $34.4 million. In 2011, the Yankees spent nearly $203 million on players. Meanwhile, Tampa…
In a word: networks. Once it embraced information as its main currency, New York was able to climb out of a deep fiscal (and psychic) pit. Will that magic trick…
What do gamblers and referees have in common? When do machines make better decisions than people? And has Stephen been replaced by a computer?
(Photo: momopeche) Dan Johnson, an economist at Colorado College, has been predicting Olympic medal counts for years with a model that uses metrics like population count, income per capita, and…
Humans, it has long been thought, are the only animal to engage in economic activity. But what if we’ve had it exactly backward?
Humans, it has long been thought, are the only animal to engage in economic activity. But what if we’ve had it exactly backward?…
It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us?…
…official population counts. And second, it produced a 1-in-20 sub-sample of these responses, which it made available for analysis by researchers. Just about every economist I know has used this…
