I was reading People magazine the other day, and it got me thinking about the following question: Why would an expectant mother have amniocentesis performed? Far and away, the most important reason for doing amniocentesis must be that knowing there are abnormalities early provides the option to get an abortion. The reason I was thinking about this question is that . . .
What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white? In a recent paper I co-authored with Roland Fryer, Lisa Kahn, and Jorg Spenkuch, we look at data to try to answer that question. Here is what we find: 1) Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to . . .
Many teachers believe that a “few bad apples” can spoil a whole classroom, reducing the learning of everyone in the room. While this is part of the folk wisdom of teaching, it has been surprisingly difficult to find these effects in the data. But a very convincing new paper, by Scott Carrell of U.C. Davis and Mark Hoekstra of U.Pitt, . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings An $11 billion seasonal industry has just gotten underway: summer camp. This morning, my wife and I sent our kids off to their first-ever day of camp. They are too young for sleep-away camp, so they’re going to a day camp that’s a short bus ride away. All over the city of New York, the summer-camp rhythm . . .
Photo by Steven Stewart of his son. The essence of a free market is exchange — you and I raise our utility voluntarily by exchanging things with which we are endowed. I wonder how early people learn this idea in a free-market economy. My five-year-old grandson had a Mylar helium-filled balloon, and his two-year-old brother had another one. They were . . .
Ebonya Washington, an economist at Yale, has a great paper that was just published in the American Economic Review called “Female Socialization: How Daughters Affect Their Legislator Fathers’ Voting on Women’s Issues.” She looks at members in the House of Representatives and looks to see whether their voting patterns change. She provides interesting evidence that, “conditional on total number of . . .
Photo: Pamela Klaffke Yeah, zoos are fun. So are cartoons. And I certainly see the appeal of a teddy bear. But why are kids so over-the-top crazy about animals? I am especially struck by the fact that some of the most popular cartoon and children’s-book animals are among the least appealing animals in real life. Mice, for instance. And pigs . . .
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that some of the best posts are written by readers, not by us. For instance, we recently received the following e-mail from Steven Goldstein of New York City: I read your book when it came out. My 12-year-old son saw it lying around last spring and asked what it was . . .
Is nuclear energy seeing a resurgence worldwide? (HT: Daniel Lippman) How much does it cost to raise kids in the U.S.? (Earlier) What factors lower the dropout rate the most? (Earlier) Investing firm tries their luck with celebrity memorabilia (HT: Amit Ghosh)
We wrote in Freakonomics about our views on parenting. Mostly, we were skeptical of how much parents could do to improve their kids’ futures. One can clearly be a terrible parent through neglect or abuse. The tougher question is whether being an “obsessive” parent who drags children to a never-ending procession of soccer practices, museums, and acting classes is better . . .
A while back, I solicited your suggestions for great children’s books, and you responded mightily, with more than 270 comments. Your answers made me realize how many children’s books we already own, which is probably a good thing, at least according to these guys. But you also suggested a lot of books we’ve never read, and you made them sound . . .
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on “acting white,” i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers. Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase “acting white.” The kids laughed at him and said, . . .
I hadn’t worn a Halloween costume in many years until last night, when my kids — Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and a man-eating shark, respectively — encouraged me to do so. I tried to think of something that would take almost no time, effort, or money. The idea came to me in a flash. With my kids, I . . .
Huge percentage of world’s births & deaths go undocumented. Making your baby smarter: the myths continue. (Earlier) Should paying line-standers to hold seats at Congressional hearings be banned? Happiness levels linked to race. (Earlier)
Nobel Laureate James Watson got into trouble recently for expressing the opinion that blacks are less intelligent than whites. If you look at almost all existing data from standardized tests in the United States, there is indeed a sizable black-white test score gap. Whether the gap is due to genetic differences is a hotly debated academic question. Roland Fryer and . . .
My son’s first-grade teacher recently held an open house to tell the parents what their kids will be learning this year, and how they’ll be going about it. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. My favorite part had to do with turning the kids into first-grade (if not first-rate) empiricists. The teacher, a wonderful veteran from Texas named . . .
Decades of research has convinced just about everyone that a child with a single parent is, on average, more likely to have worse outcomes in life than a child with two parents. These outcomes are seen in a variety of channels: education, income, health, and crime. But what are the mechanisms that actually produce a worse outcome? Exactly how, in . . .
I am scheduled to appear on Good Morning America tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 3), at about 8:30 a.m. E.D.T., to talk about my new kids’ book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons. I have no delusions about my chances of success as a children’s author. (They are slim.) Nor do I have any delusions about why I, a first-time kids’-book author, . . .
I first became a published writer at age 11, when a poem that I wrote for school (“The Possum”) appeared in Highlights magazine. While I have since written about thieves, terrorists, and even economists, I guess it is fitting that I have finally written a children’s book. It’s called The Boy With Two Belly Buttons, with illustrations by the remarkable . . .
From research by economists J.J. Prescott and Jonah Rockoff, here are a few current statistics on sex offenses reported to the police: 1) 25 percent of victims are 10-14 years old; 23 percent are nine or younger. 2) 22.5 percent of the offenders are family members. Only 8 percent are strangers. 3) 25 percent of sex offenses reported to the . . .