…as always, let us know what you think in the comments section. Julie Marsh is an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research organization, and visiting associate professor…
…child provides would help determine a two-pronged question: do these middle-schoolers know about the formation of democracy in ancient Greece? And how well do they know it? But that’s not…
…(one is featured in the book) who think it’s quite possible to teach children to control themselves — and that this is the greatest gift parents can give their children….
…going to get misdirected into a … little baby (Jobs’ parents must’ve felt that way as well. Like father, like son). But people change, mature, grow up. Eventually Jobs became…
…languages, it might look like this. A young child says, “I am hungry.” The parent replies, “Wait! Before saying am, you first must learn to conjugate to be in all…
…to ask a doctor: “What would you do in my case if this was happening to you/your child/your parent?” –VBinNV A. This is an excellent question that patients frequently ask…
…reports that in the court of child support, officials are also taking a new approach to collecting payments: Officials reported collecting a record $731 million in child-support payments last year,…
…needs and less likely to put up a fight. But experiments like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone hint at the enormous impact that early educational support can have on lifetime…
…And on a cultural level, allowing men to pick up more of the burden of childcare without that being viewed as emasculating. I think we are likely to see changes…
In a Freakonomics Radio episode called “Misadventures in Baby-Making,” we looked at the unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy. A new paper (gated) in Science looks at the so-called…
…thrown out (almost as if I was making sure they stayed out of my present life? Retribution?). The second instinctive thought was to think how another child might use the…
As we’ve argued in Freakonomics and in a recent podcast, a child’s first name isn’t nearly as influential on that child’s outcome as many people would like to think. That…
…since the 1930s has measured children from shortly after birth until age 18. Most of the children come from the area near Dayton, Ohio, which is not a mirror of…
…and academic circles that early childhood interventions—like high quality pre-schools—were the most promising prospect for the next round of educational reforms. But testing the impact of an educational reform like…
It can be found here under “Editorial Reviews.” In case you don’t feel like clicking through: In one of the many wonderful moments in Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt…
Most Americans agree that racial discrimination has been, and remains, a big problem. But that is where the agreement ends.
…Levitt finds out what daily life is like in a silent monastery, why teens find it easier than adults to learn meditation, and what happy children can teach their parents….
Corporate Social Responsibility programs can attract better job applicants who’ll work for less money. But they also encourage employees to misbehave. Don’t laugh — you too probably engage in “moral…
…the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study demonstrates that neither having a stay-at-home mother nor visiting museums on a regular basis significantly improves a child’s performance in school. But, really, who I…
Mark Zuckerberg’s dentist dad was an early adopter of digital x-rays. Jack Welch blew the roof off a factory. Carol Bartz was a Wisconsin farm girl who got into computers….
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…
The restaurant business model is warped: kitchen wages are too low to hire cooks, while diners are put in charge of paying the waitstaff. So what happens if you eliminate…
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…
How a pain-in-the-neck girl from rural Virginia came to run the most powerful university in the world.
The restaurant business model is warped: kitchen wages are too low to hire cooks, while diners are put in charge of paying the waitstaff. So what happens if you eliminate…
A team of economists has been running the numbers on the U.N.’s development goals. They have a different view of how those billions of dollars should be spent.
Research shows that having a distinctively black name doesn’t affect your economic future. But what is the day-to-day reality of living with such a name? Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, a newly-minted…
It facilitates crime, bribery, and tax evasion – and yet some governments (including ours) are printing more cash than ever. Other countries, meanwhile, are ditching cash entirely. And if Star…
The debut of a live game show from Freakonomics Radio, with judges Malcolm Gladwell, Ana Gasteyer and David Paterson….
It may seem like winning a valuable diamond is an unalloyed victory. It’s not. It’s not even clear that a diamond is so valuable.
