Cash Transfers: The Key to Keeping the World's Working Kids in School?
A new paper from Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady finds that cash transfer programs in developing countries may keep kids in school and out of the labor force. From…
A year ago, nobody was taking Andrew Yang very seriously. Now he is America’s favorite entrepre-nerd, with a candidacy that keeps gaining momentum. This episode includes our Jan. 2019 conversation…
Also: how can we stop confusing correlation with causation?
A new paper from Eric V. Edmonds and Norbert Schady finds that cash transfer programs in developing countries may keep kids in school and out of the labor force. From…
Can you ever really know how another person feels? What’s the best way to support a grieving person? And why doesn’t Hallmark sell empathy cards?
Kids in Abbottabad playing outside bin Laden’s compound ( AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) Life is all about incentives, as this paragraph from a New York Times article about Bin Laden makes…
…on what the other kids at the table are doing, others watch and learn gaming from each other. I have worked with these kids for an hour over the past…
If going to the library is a hassle and you don’t want to pay $20 for a children’s book, plop your kids in front of this website, which offers children’s…
The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg wrote his new book in an attempt to learn how to communicate better. Steve shares how the book helped him understand his own…
Artist Wendy MacNaughton knows the difficulty of sitting in silence and the power of having fun. She explains to Steve the lessons she’s gleaned from drawing hospice residents, working in…
Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades — in part because our…
…still paying school taxes for other people’s kids as well as the tuition for your own kids, with no tax break. (Here’s a primer on school vouchers.) Our tax code…
…Why do American kids know less than kids from Estonia? . . . Maybe it’s the parents’ fault! . . . The amazing true story of Takeru Kobayashi, hot-dog-eating champion…
Tax deadlines can stress us out. But do they also influence our conscious — and subconscious — behavior? Bapu Jena looks at why, with our health, timing is often everything….
…of those seven syllables is given millions to make a movie.?? This YouTube clip spoofs what would happen if pitching came to the family dinner table: My teenage kids love…
Photo: tomeppy The answer to that question is almost certainly “no,” but a new study that is getting lots of media attention does claim that there is a correlation between…
American high school students today take significantly fewer health risks than did their counterparts in the early 1990s, although they do slightly worse in terms of obesity, asthma, exercise, and…
Victoria Groce is one of the best trivia contestants on earth. She explains the structure of a good question, why she knits during competitions, and how to memorize 160,000 flashcards….
Celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli joins us to co-host an evening of delicious fact-finding: where a trillion oysters went, whether a soda tax can work, and how beer helped build an…
A new NBER working paper (PDF; abstract) by economists Scott E. Carrell and Bruce Sacerdote finds that educational incentives, even those that are offered to students late in their senior…
A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Eric V. Edmonds and Maheshwor Shrestha analyzes whether schooling incentives (in the form of conditional cash transfers) effectively reduce child labor, which is…
Here’s an interesting paper from the British Medical Journal which argues that children’s anti-social behavior can be significantly altered by training their parents to be better parents. (And here is…
Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future….
What does social media do to our self-esteem? How is envy affecting our politics? And should you go to your high school reunion? Take the Seven Deadly Sins survey: freakonomics.com/nsq-sins/…
How can you summon courage when you’re terrified? Is hiking more dangerous than skiing? And what is the stupidest thing that Mike has ever done?…
It’s hard enough to save for a house, tuition or retirement. So why are we willing to pay big fees for subpar investment returns? Enter the low-cost index fund. The…
What happens to your reputation when you’re no longer around to defend it?
For our latest podcast, “The Economist’s Guide to Parenting” (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player, or read a transcript here), we…
What happens to your reputation when you’re no longer around to defend it?
(Photo: Smabs Sputzer A new paper in JAMA Pediatrics finds that a small number of children are showing up in Colorado emergency rooms having unintentionally ingested marijuana. It seems they…
The answer is at least one. This morning I saw Barack Obama dropping off his child at nursery school. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois who exploded onto the…
