Yesterday morning, I posed a challenging question for horse bettors: Is there ever a situation in a parimutuel betting system in which you would want to bet on a horse to win, even though you knew for sure that the horse would lose the race? Some clever folks came up with an answer involving “breakage.” That was not what I . . .
Here is a tough little Freakonomics quiz for people who like to bet the ponies: Is there ever a situation in a parimutuel betting system in which you would want to bet on a horse to win, even though you knew for sure that the horse would lose the race? This is a hard one. Had it simply been posed . . .
I recently blogged about how well the Coase Theorem does online. It predicts that, regardless of who is assigned property rights, the interested parties will strike a bargain to put the asset in the hands of the party that values it the most. Thus, despite the fact that more or less anyone can purchase a URL for a small amount . . .
That is the finding of our informal “Would You Rather” poll, asking if you’d rather be arrested for embezzlement or prostitution. By a measure of nearly 4-to-1, you chose prostitution. It’s amazing what you learn about people when you have a blog. As promised, a piece of Freakonomics schwag goes to someone who wrote a particularly entertaining reply. That someone . . .
Freakonomics schwag is up for offer at the end of this post. As such, it may actually be worth slogging through the brief economics lesson that follows. The Coase Theorem is a somewhat rare species of beast: an economic theory that is both completely counterintuitive and yet often right in practice. The idea is named after Ronald Coase, one of . . .
Portal? Or how about: A Confuser… the Screen … the Box … God … HAL … or how about Abra, short for “artificial brain.” These were among the many suggestions you wrote in response to our contest asking readers to rename the computer. Let me say it once again: our readership is awesomely creative, smart, and funny. Thanks for all . . .
Whenever we run a contest or quiz on this site, we offer the winner/s some kind of prize. Until now, we’ve never gotten around to showing what the prizes look like. So here, friends, is our current assortment of Freakonomics schwag. The T-shirt and yo-yo are, as they say, unavailable in any store. (So is Don King, as far as . . .
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, . . .
Two weeks ago, I blogged about my inability to recognize how new technologies would change my life for the better. I typically wait years to adopt things, then do so grudgingly, only to find within days that I don’t know how I ever lived without them. I asked our readers to offer suggestions about my next life-changing technology. The enticement: . . .
In Freakonomics, we make the argument that a child’s first name doesn’t affect his or her life outcome. I am guessing that most inanimate objects, too, are relatively unaffected by the names they happen to pick up — even if the names aren’t very good. It has always struck me that a lot of the things we do and use . . .
I’m a notoriously late adopter of technologies. It is not a conscious decision, and I don’t take any pride in it. I just do not have enough imagination to figure out ahead of time how much I will like things once I actually have them. E-mail is a good example. I couldn’t see how e-mail would be of much use . . .
Last week, I blogged about a magazine fact-checker named Paige Worthy and asked you to submit your best aptonyms. You responded mightily, with nearly 300 submissions. Judging from this sample, the dentists, proctologists, and eye doctors of America seem particularly prone to aptonymous behavior. Below you will find the best submissions. As promised, the readers who sent them will receive . . .
Can you beat the aptonym “Paige Worthy” for a magazine fact-checker? Come and try your luck in the Freakonomics “Aptonym-Off.”
The last quiz and the answer are below. My two further thoughts: 1) Many people outside of academia think that peer review is some sort of magical elixir that guarantees that papers that get published are right. This is simply not true. It is hard to do good research, and it is hard to read other people’s work and accurately . . .
The winner of the quiz goes by the tag KZ. If I can find out more about KZ, I will post that info. KZ recognized that there do not seem to be any controls for a time trend in the paper. While the authors control for all sorts of other factors like unemployment and seasonality, I think they have left . . .
Usually our quizzes are more on the whimsical side, but here is a serious one that requires a real investment of time. Some academics (at most one out of the three is an economist) in the United Kingdom recently published a paper in a journal called Applied Economics claiming that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer in . . .
I was on an airplane yesterday, and when I landed I saw that there were about 4 million e-mails on my Treo. This meant, I figured, that Levitt had run some kind of quiz on the blog. And indeed he had — this one, asking what his wife and LeBron James had in common. The airport I landed at was . . .
The winner of the quiz is Willy, who had the 64th guess, correctly noting that LeBron James and my wife are both studying mandarin. My wife and four kids are all studying Mandarin, in part because we have two daughters adopted from China. (I tried learning a while back, but I had no talent for it and gave up.) LeBron . . .
Nobody has even been close to giving the right answer to the quiz, so I added a clue to the original post which is directly below. If it is true that LeBron had a paper route and likes poker, then he does share that with my wife, but that is not what I had in mind.
We ran a little contest here the other day, asking you to guess the next selection of Oprah Winfrey’s book club. The selection, announced yesterday, was a big surprise: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. How surprising was this pick? Here’s how Tirdad Derakhshani summed it up in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: Remarkable by any standards sacred or profane, haute culture or . . .
According to this squib in the New York Times (fourth item down), the newest selection in Oprah Winfrey’s book club will be announced on Wednesday, March 28. Here is the book’s page on Amazon.com, which says that the book is published by Vintage Books (one of Random House’s paperback imprints) and is 304 pages long (although the page counts listed . . .
This morning’s quiz was almost aggressively simple: name the new non-fiction book that was so mesmerizing that I nearly missed my lunch date. Your answers were, as always, pretty sensible: The Audacity of Hope, Infidel, Wikinomics, Survival of the Sickest, Blind Side, Pistol, The Race Beat, US Guys, Oil on the Brain, Size Matters, Stumbling on Happiness. What really surprised . . .
I had a lunch meeting in midtown Manhattan the other day, scheduled for 1:00 p.m. When I got out of the subway at Columbus Circle, I realized that I had about 20 minutes to kill. So I went into a Borders bookstore. I picked up a book on the front table, a new non-fiction book, and became so engrossed in . . .
Levitt posted a quiz here, and then gave one hint, and then another. Nobody has come up with exactly the right answer yet, however. I’m not all that surprised: what the conference organizer did was indeed pretty tricky. A lot of you were close, or had different elements of the answer right, but not quite. Now Levitt has gotten on . . .
Tif177 was on the right trail when he/she offered the following guess: the speaker was actually a recorded speech/tape that the organizer played at a faster RPM than originally intended. I am getting on an airplane and will be out of action for the day, so if someone gets the right answer Dubner said he would post a blog entry.
As predicted, this truly is a hard quiz. Still no correct answers in the first 130 comments. Here is a hint: The organizer did something very clever and very devious.
About six months ago I was at a big conference. I was scheduled to present at 2 PM to an audience of 500 or 1,000 people. Another speaker was on from 1 to 2 PM. I told the organizer I would be back by 1:45 PM, leaving plenty of time before I had to hit the stage. At 1:30 I . . .
I’m curious who is standing out in Times Square asking people if they know who I am. I am even more skeptical than Dubner regarding the methodology in his post below. Four out of ten? Forget about it. Just for fun, how about we do an experiment. I will give $100 (or all the money I have in my wallet . . .
The winner of the New York Marathon last Sunday was Paul Tergat of Kenya. He ran a time of 2:09:30. The second place finisher, Hendrik Ramaala of South Africa finished 1 second behind in a time of 2:09:31. Over 26 miles and they were one stride apart. But that is not even the most amazing fact to me. It turns . . .
In a previous blog entry, we posted a pair of slapdash haikus, one written by each of us, and asked you to guess who wrote which one. Many of you played along, and nicely, and wisely. Some of you wrote excellent haiku response, though most of those were sent to us directly via e-mail. Anyway … here are the answers: . . .