Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not . . .
The parties who are suffering from the subprime crisis are vast and varied, as well as in the newspapers every day. One reason the crisis has gotten so much attention, in fact, is because these parties are so vast and varied. The typical financial crisis has one or two big villains (think Enron) and a vague coterie of victims (think . . .
Hannah Montana is the hottest thing going. Her concerts are all sold out and scalpers are netting thousands of dollars for her tickets, according to media reports. What is an economist who wants to see a Hannah Montana show to do? Here is the true story of one such escapade. (The economist in question has asked me to keep his . . .
There’s been plenty of talk in recent weeks that a recession is coming (or that we are already in recession). Indeed, the latest reading from InTrade.com suggests that there is about a 70 percent chance of a recession – defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth – in 2008. It is an interesting story, but today’s pessimism does . . .
When I tell my non-economist friends that I do research on the “economics of the family,” they often look puzzled. (The funniest response comes from those who think that this is the same as “home economics“; as Betsey Stevenson will tell you, I surely would have failed home ec.) But Tim Harford is a lifesaver, and his new book provides . . .
My family has a tradition of reading the “I Have a Dream” speech on Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday. We pass it around, with each person reading one sentence. So in honor of today’s holiday, here’s a question about the speech: what is the second-most-used figure of speech or metaphor in the speech itself (“I Have a Dream” being the . . .
Fertility has become a big business in the U.S., with Americans spending up to $3 billion a year on treatments, drugs, and methods aimed at enabling couples to conceive. Discussions of modern infertility have focused on cultural factors like the rising average age of marriage and the influx of women in the workforce, with studies linking it to environmental and . . .
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw recently posted this chart depicting an InTrade contract on the probability of a U.S. recession in 2008, with the following commentary: In online betting, the probability of recession is now about two-thirds, compared to about one-half a few weeks ago. Evidence pointing toward a recession is certainly present, as Larry Summers and others have noted. Still, . . .
Apparently a lot of people do, or at least the people working at newspapers and blogs. The annual American Economic Association meeting was held over the weekend in New Orleans, and there’s been a virtual flood of press coverage: 1. A report on a new paper about Google’s internal prediction markets (which Justin Wolfers, one of its authors, previewed here); . . .
In recent days, we’ve introduced a pair of regular guest bloggers, Ian Ayres and Sudhir Venkatesh. We are happy and proud to now introduce a third, a terrific addition and no stranger to readers of this blog: Justin Wolfers, an economist at Wharton and a great explorer of everything from racial bias in N.B.A. refereeing to the decline in women’s . . .
What does it mean to use “the economic approach” to thinking about the world? In the old days, if you asked 100 people this question, I bet at least 80 of them would have given some kind of answer having to do with dollars and cents, supply and demand, etc. Over the past few decades, however, “the economic approach” has . . .
Controversy over corporate media consolidation has been brewing for decades. In 1975, the Federal Communications Commission enacted a rule prohibiting a single media company from owning both a newspaper and radio or TV station in the same city. Twenty-eight years later, the issue drew national attention when former FCC Chairman Michael Powell introduced a plan to overturn the ban. His . . .
A few years back, the economist David Romer wrote an academic paper suggesting that teams in the N.F.L. should punt less frequently. While the league’s coaches mostly dismissed his findings, I suspect that teams are a bit more likely to go for it on fourth down in marginal situations today than they were before he wrote the article. N.F.L. coaches . . .
Half of N.Y.U. students say they would sell their right to vote for $1 million, according to a poll published yesterday by the Washington Square News. Sixty-six percent said they would trade their voting rights for a free four-year ride at N.Y.U. (roughly $160,000, including room and board). Twenty percent would give up the vote for an iPod Touch (value: . . .
Online education is seriously on the rise, garnering praise from congressmen and even gaining share among elementary school students. In the realm of higher education, more and more schools are offering online degree programs as an alternative to in-class courses, with some schools creating online-only engineering and law degrees as well as bachelors’. But have you ever wondered who’s on . . .
By the time you read this, the Nobel Prize in economics will likely have been awarded, though as I write this, the winners have yet to be announced. A few random thoughts: 1) I guarantee you that the economist(s) who win it will be much better sports than Doris Lessing, who seemed put off that the award had disturbed her . . .
There were two fascinating page-one articles in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that reinforce why it is so hard to predict the future. “U.S. Farmers Rediscover the Allure of Tobacco,” by Lauren Etter, is about how tobacco farming has spiked in the U.S. in the three years since federal tobacco subsidies ended. Although the U.S. tobacco/cigarette industry has taken a few . . .
Alan Greenspan has a new book out. I haven’t seen it yet, since I am in London for a few days and it isn’t available here. Economist Brad DeLong talks about the book (among other things) in this podcast. Over at MarginalRevolution, Tyler Cowen offers a set of links as well. So here is my economic forecast for the book: . . .
Nathan Nunn, an economist at the University of British Columbia, has written an interesting working paper called “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trade.” His abstract sums it up well: Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct . . .
A few days back I posed the question “Why are we eating so much shrimp?” Between 1980 and 2005, the amount of shrimp consumed per person in the U.S. has nearly tripled. I didn’t expect more than 1,000 responses! I asked the question because Shane Frederick, a marketing professor at MIT’s Sloan School, had contacted me with an intriguing hypothesis. . . .
I always love it when I see a paper that only an economist could write. An ingenious new study by Stefano DellaVigna and Eliana La Ferrara definitely fits that description. The issue they tackled is detection of illegal arms trades that defy United Nations embargoes. Their idea was to use the information embedded in stock markets to tease out indirect . . .
Levitt commends U.S. News and World Reports writer James Pethokoukis for his analysis of the faulty economics used by the Democratic Presidential candidates during their televised debate.
Organ donation is heading from a bogus reality show to the big screen: An A.P. article reports that Paris Hilton has landed a role in the movie Repo! The Genetic Opera, a so-called “horror rock” musical that’s “set in a plague-ravaged future where people can purchase new organs on the installment plan from a corporation called Geneco.” Hilton will play . . .
Sin in the Second City, a new book by Karen Abbott, offers an in-depth look at the prostitution trade in turn-of-the-century Chicago. In particular, Abbott focuses on the Everleigh sisters, two madams who ran a high-class brothel on South Dearborn Street that earned them extraordinary wealth and international fame. Abbott agreed to answer our questions about her book. Q: Could . . .
We’ve written often — most recently here — about the fact that just because two things are correlated, it does not necessarily follow that one causes the other. For instance: campaign spending and electoral success; “culture cramming” and childhood test scores; the use of child car seats and the decline in auto fatalities. So it was interesting to see, on . . .
We’ve written in the past about the life-like struggles for resources and justice in online roleplaying games and universes. Now comes word that EVE Online, a sci-fi MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), has hired a full-time economist, Eyjólfur Guðmundsson, to help manage the game’s virtual economy. Insert your own joke. (Hat tip: Derek Guder)
Over at the very, very compelling Strange Maps site (warning: do not click unless you have an hour to kill) is a map of the U.S. with each state renamed for a country with a similar GDP. In case you’re wondering where the really big countries are, here’s another map, in which Japan gobbles up our entire midsection and New . . .
I blogged a few weeks back about a piece in The New Republic last month that claimed I was ruining economics. At that time, there wasn’t a full version of the article online to link to, so there did not seem to be much point in saying much about the piece. Now, you can read the full article here. If . . .
There’s an article in today’s New York Times about “Deal or No Deal.” (See previous posts here, here and here.) From the headline — “A Game Show for the Probabilities Theorist in All of Us” — it sounds like it might be heading into a nifty theoretical realm but, alas, it is really a TV review at heart.