“Football Freakonomics”: Tebow Timing
…October 30, 2011. (Photo: One of the arguments both for and against Tim Tebow as a viable, long-term NFL starter is the idea that he should simply not be doing…
The U.S. immigration system is a massively complicated machine, with a lot of worn-out parts. How to fix it? Step one: Get hold of some actual facts and evidence. (We…
For decades, the great fear was overpopulation. Now it’s the opposite. How did this happen — and what’s being done about it? (Part one of a three-part series, “Cradle to…
Dubner and Levitt talk about fixing the post office, putting cameras in the classroom, and wearing hats.
Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, has big ambitions but knows he must first master the small stuff. He’s also a polymath who relies heavily on data and new…
Uri Simonsohn is a behavioral science professor who wants to improve standards in his field — so he’s made a sideline of investigating fraudulent academic research. He tells Steve Levitt,…
Also: how can we stop confusing correlation with causation?
It happens to just about everyone, whether you’re going for Olympic gold or giving a wedding toast. We hear from psychologists, economists, and the golfer who some say committed the…
Do economic sanctions work? Are big democracies any good at spreading democracy? What is the root cause of terrorism? It turns out that data analysis can help answer all these…
Critics — including President Obama — say short-term, high-interest loans are predatory, trapping borrowers in a cycle of debt. But some economists see them as a useful financial instrument for…
Also: why do we pad our speech with so much filler language?…
Is it better to be an egocentric navigator or an allocentric navigator? Was the New York City Department of Education wrong to ban ChatGPT? And did Mike get ripped off…
Every language has its taboo words (which many people use all the time). But the list of forbidden words is always changing — and those changes tell us some surprising…
He’s a Harvard physician and economist who just started a third job: host of the new podcast Freakonomics, M.D. He’s also Steve’s former student. The two discuss why medicine should…
Economists and politicians have turned him into a mascot for free-market ideology. Some on the left say the right has badly misread him. Prepare for a very Smithy tug of…
…October 30, 2011. (Photo: One of the arguments both for and against Tim Tebow as a viable, long-term NFL starter is the idea that he should simply not be doing…
…his or her heirs. But, with a scheduled resumption of the tax in 2011, such heirs would have surrendered more than $40 million if their parent had the temerity to…
…Oklahoma. The median value was $4.66/mile. In comparison, the standard federal reimbursement rate for fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile in 2011 was $0.51/mile. From 1997 to 2011,…
Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Last year, an astonishing 10,000 research papers were retracted. We talk to whistleblowers, reformers, and a…
Why does the U.S. use Fahrenheit when Celsius is better? Would you quit your job if a coin flip told you to? And how do you get an entire country…
Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Last year, an astonishing 10,000 research papers were retracted. In a series originally published in early…
…a blueprint of mathematical time. For example, I launch into a leap on the first count (or beat), float through the second and third counts, and land noiselessly on the…
…expression, “It”s not the vote that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” I’ve often heard it attributed to Stalin, but I’m not sure if I believe that. The YBQ has…
…score to 2064. I also tried searching only on surnames, and received roughly similar rankings (although the counts of Smith, Summers and Friedman were grossly inflated by?eponymous?authors). This exercise suggests…
…then things began to get out of hand. Readers Digest picked it up in ’62 and paid me five bucks. And when the Navy published ‘Farwell’s Rules of the Road,’…
…on six counts of securities fraud. The Chicago Maroon reports that undergraduate students in the University of Chicago’s economics department can take a class with Tourre this spring: With spring…
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…
Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is proof of that argument. Just in time for the Super Bowl, here’s…
…end to all that. As far as I can see, there are no downsides to peace. Unless one thinks that it’s a good idea to control population size by machine-gunning…
When the uncelebrated Leicester City Football Club won the English Premier League, it wasn’t just the biggest underdog story in recent history. It was a sign of changing economics —…
Kate Marvel spends her days playing with climate models, which she says are “like a very expensive version of The Sims.” As a physicist she gets tired of being asked…
