We launched this website back in March, just before Freakonomics was published. It was meant as little more than a place to summarize the book, provide some contact information, and maybe a little feedback. But we became more fond of it — and of you — than we planned, and now here we are, still blogging away seven months later, . . .
I have no idea what this means, but now a bunch of kind readers have sent me a link to the following website which purports to tell you what your blog is worth. The answer for the Freakonomics Blog, at least when I looked, was $996,413.10. Hmmm. That seems just a bit high. I talked to Dubner and we agreed . . .
A few days ago, we blogged about a college kid who got kicked out of class for citing Freakonomics. Now comes even worse news — from a reader who claims that he was asked to leave the premises of a job for simply owning the book. I’m somewhat skeptical of the verity of this story; judge for yourselves: Mr. Levitt . . .
In the chapter of Freakonomics called “What Makes a Perfect Parent?”, we analyze the data from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and argue that many things that modern parents do to make their kids “smarter” (i.e. culture cramming), doesn’t have any effect on early childhood test scores. Apparently we’re not the only ones who think this . . .
A few days ago, we asked whether blogging is perhaps dangerous to professors seeking tenure. Here is proof that citing Freakonomics can be dangerous to your academic health as well. A reader sent in this e-mail the other day, which we now reprint in full — minus the young man’s name and college, for obvious reasons. Dr. Levitt: I was . . .
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in the first Quill Book Awards. As promised, the oh-so-glamorous Oscars of the book world will be broadcast on select NBC stations on Saturday, October 22nd. The show is on at 7pm in all locations, and is only an hour, so it’s hard to know if the awarding of Best Business . . .
We have changed platforms for our blog, so if you have this page bookmarked — and have been wondering where the heck we’ve been — you should change your bookmark to this page. We haven’t been writing much there, either; but we’re getting caught up, and eventually we’ll move the archives there as well. One difference: you need to register . . .
Thomas Sowell wrote this about us recently: “Economist Steven Levitt’s best-selling book “Freakonomics” is not really about economics. It is about applying systematic reasoning to all sorts of social problems. Systematic reasoning is needed even more than economics.” I think it is supposed to be a compliment, but I’m not sure.
In recent weeks, we asked you to consider voting for Freakonomics as Best Business Book in the inaugural Quill Awards. (We know, we know: it’s not a business book, but it apparently didn’t fit any other category.) Well, the event was held a couple of nights ago and … we won. So to all of you who voted, or who . . .
Bill Bennett, apparently. Or was it Good Morning America? Or World News Tonight? Or an ad in USA Today? Causality is not always easy to identify. The following chart, kindly supplied by Bill Tancer from www.hitwise.com, documents Freakonomics’ share of the web traffic from the millions of internet users that Hitwise tracks (and for fun, Bill Bennett’s too): Last week . . .
Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem . . .
On Friday, Sept. 30, ABC’s “World News Tonight” (6:30 p.m. Eastern) will feature a segment on Freakonomics, the first of what may be several such segments. The ABC website goes so far as to declare today “Freakonomics Friday.” Linda Jines, who is Steve Levitt’s sister and who came up with the title Freakonomics, should feel especially proud of herself today.
Bill Bennett and I have a fair amount in common. We’ve both written about crime (his “superpredator” theory gets a quick discussion in Freakonomics), we have both thought a lot about illegal drugs and education (he was the original “drug czar” and is a former Secretary of Education), and we both love to gamble (although it seems I do it . . .
Levitt and I are scheduled to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America tomorrow (Thu., Sept. 29), somewhere around 7:30 a.m. EDT, to talk about Freakonomics. We do have a pretty dismal record of getting bumped by breaking news, so maybe we’ll never actually appear on the airwaves chatting face-to-face with the splendid Diane Sawyer — but by God, that’s what . . .
March 5, 2021: These bookplates are no longer available. We’re sorry for the inconvenience. A few days ago, we made this offer to send a signed bookplate, free, to anyone who wants one. The good news is that a whole lot of people took us up on the offer. The less-good news is that, because of the volume, it’ll take . . .
… to come hear me (Dubner) give a non-Freakonomics reading, on Mon., Sept. 26, 7:00 p.m., at the Half King. It’s an event to celebrate the publication of The Best American Crime Writing 2005, an anthology that includes a New Yorker article I wrote about a cunning silver thief. (Oops: I just showed you the free version of the article . . .
A while back, there was discussion, only half in jest, that Levitt might make a good Supreme Court Justice. Now things have gotten even crazier: he has been nominated (again, only half in jest) by the BBC to help rule the world: click here for the opening page, then the “click to start” tab and then “Economists.” (It is telling . . .
Freakonomics has been nominated for the inaugural Quill Awards and we would really appreciate your vote.* Click here to cast your ballot (and be prepared to wade through several screens before finding Freakonomics in the “Best Business” category). You can actually vote for it twice: as “Best Business” book and also “Book of the Year.” Be warned, however, that the . . .
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: . . .
We haven’t had all that much contact with our British publishers, Penguin U.K. But they seem startlingly proactive. First there was the billboard campaign in the London tube. Now there’s an online Freakonomics quiz. It’s true that the quiz plays pretty fast and loose with the material in our book but it would be churlish (for us at least) to . . .
Peter Maass wrote the NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on “Peak Oil” that I have been blogging about recently. He was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the course of the interview, he defended Matthew Simmons, saying, “Matt Simmons, he is not some kind of wild environmentalist, or kind of rogue economist, or anything like that…” Phew, we already have . . .
I got this e-mail from a fan yesterday:I read Freakonomics and was — to say the least — floored. You are a brilliant thinker and honestly, you remind me of me.
As surprised as we have been by the success of Freakonomics in the U.S., we are doubly surprised by its success in the U.K., where it has been at or near the top of the non-fiction charts. (Last I saw, the only other American book on the charts was Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War — retitled in the U.K. as . . .
Levitt and I don’t have all that many disagreements, at least not in public. But this one’s a little close to home. It began with this post, in which I wondered aloud if the tour was worth the publisher’s money. Steve followed recently with this post, which detailed why, from his perspective, the tour was a waste of his time. . . .
The answer is, that just like real estate agents and their clients, our incentives as authors are not perfectly aligned with the incentives of our publisher, William Morrow. As a consequence, we take actions that benefit ourselves and screw the publisher, just like real estate agents screw their clients. Every extra copy of Freakonomics that is sold earns the publishers . . .
It’s true that we’ve discussed in this very space the futility of a single vote. But when that single vote is going toward you (or, more precisely, a book you’ve written) — well hell, there’s no such thing as a futile vote. As it turns out, Freakonomics has been nominated for the inaugural Quill Awards. Described as a “new book . . .
Here’s what I wrote a few weeks ago, just as we embarked on a short California book tour: Earlier in this space we asked if book ads work; now we are led to the next obvious question: how about the author’s tour? Can it possibly be worth all the money and time it takes to fly two people across the . . .
The last stop on our recent California tour was at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Ca. This appearance had come about kind of casually, so we hadn’t thought about it much beforehand. The Google folks asked us to blog about our impressions, to be posted on the Google blog, and we did. Here’s what we had to say. To: All . . .