It’s been a busy few weeks, a combination of deadlines and vacation and various Freakonomics duties. So there are a variety of things that should be said on this here blog that haven’t yet been said. With any luck I’ll soon get caught up. Topics in the very near future will include: — Freakonomics is a finalist in the first . . .
Our last Freakonomics column was about the indirect approach that Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, Kevin Murphy, and I used to try to measure crack cocaine use across places and over time in U.S. cities and states. Read all about it here. Some researchers in Italy took a very different, very bizarre approach, as discussed in a British newspaper article reprinted . . .
If you were not fortunate enough to win a Freako t-shirt in the giveaway, they are now available for sale through our friends at yarnzilla.com. Click here for the link. On the way, we are told, are Freakonomics baseballs hats, mugs, and pocket protectors. (Just for the sake of full disclosure, Yarnzilla.com is run by Linda Jines. If you memorized . . .
We received this e-mail message today, from Klan buster Stetson Kennedy’s assistant: Thought you’d be proud to know that Stetson is reading your book every night as he soaks in the tub. Not all books he reads have the honor of being a “tub read.” Stetson turns 89 in early October. His website, well worth a visit, can be found . . .
Last week, we went to California. Our publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, had determined that Freakonomics wasn’t selling as well there as elsewhere. It may have been a simple case of late adoption — Levitt and I are based in Chicago and New York, respectively, two cities where the book started strong — but Harper was taking no chances. (For the record, . . .
Anyone who has tried to visit my home page at the University of Chicago to download copies of my academic papers recently will have noticed that it hasn’t been updated since 2003. Until today.It still looks the same as the old one, but now you can download just about all of my papers if you click on the “Curriculum Vitae . . .
A commenter on this blog finally asked a question about Freakonomics that, while seemingly obvious, has never really been asked. (This hasn’t kept a lot of people from commenting on the subject, but most of the commentary has turned out to be wrong). Here’s the question, from one “RJ”: I am curious. Mr. Dubner is not an Economist, but he . . .
Several weeks ago, in the interest of full transparency, we posted some negative reviews of our book. The time has come again. It’s not that we are masochists; in fact, positive reviews have regularly been posted on this site as well. Like this one and this one and this one and this one. (The last one goes a bit too . . .
We thought we had somehow gotten away without doing a book tour for Freakonomics. (As most writers can tell you, the typical book tour inevitably lands you in Milwaukee on a Tuesday night, reading to four people, three of whom are your relatives.) But our vigilant publisher, William Morrow/HarperCollins, decided that Freakonomics has not yet bloomed in California as fully . . .
July is shaping up to be Contemporary Christian Month in Freakonomics land. First, Levitt was interviewed by Pat Robertson on The 700 Club. Now, in a Village Voice article called “Music for the Megachurch,” Josh Langhoff writes the following: If you’ve skipped ahead to the abortion chapter in Steven Levitt’s ‘Freakonomics’, you know his controversial argument that Roe v. Wade . . .
A little quiz: Which celebrity interviewer closed his interview with me by saying: “Steven Levitt, thank you for the work you are doing. I hope you write more like this. This is a tremendous read. If you want to have some fun this summer, read Freakonomics.” a) Jon Stewart b) Charlie Rose c) Matt Lauer d) Aaron Brown e) Pat . . .
In a very engaging discussion on WSJ.com, Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan, a pair of economists at George Mason University, show that Freakonomics is hardly the only place to find creative applications of economic research.
I appeared on the 700 Club this morning with Pat Robertson, in an interview that a blogger anticipated would be the “must-Tivo event of the summer.” Conventional wisdom suggested this would be a bloodbath – that the Freakonomics perspective on the abortion question would enrage Robertson and a shouting match would ensue. (Indeed, my publicist was planning on turning down . . .
A friend passed along this amusing post from the “Missed Connections” section of Craig’s List in New York. It’s cute but I don’t buy it for a minute. If the guy really wanted to meet the girl so badly, would he have really run off to buy “Freakonomics” as a conversation starter for the next time he saw her?
A friend writes: What you should know about me: I’m a neurotic Manhattan mom. I swore I wouldn’t become one of those, but lo and behold, the kid comes out and you have absolutely no choice. How does this play out? As an example, when my eldest child was applying to pre-school, I had my mother’s cousin, a prominent child . . .
I guess the National Association of Realtors was not so pleased with our latest visit to the Today show. The letter below is posted on the front page of their web site. I’ve taken the liberty of interspersing a few comments in italics. NAR Responds to Erroneous Statements Made on Today Show(June 17, 2005) — On June 16, guests on . . .
Levitt and Dubner revisited The Today Show on Thursday, June 16. Here’s a transcript: Copyright 2005 National Broadcasting Co. Inc. HEADLINE: Today’s Real Estate; Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt ANCHORS: MATT LAUER MATT LAUER, co-host: This morning on TODAY’s REAL ESTATE, is your agent looking out for you when he or she sells your home? You might think your real . . .
Book publishing is rife with conventional wisdoms that are vigorously doubted but seldom overturned. That’s partly because book data is treated like some kind of family secret. This is changing a little bit with the recent advent of Bookscan, a subscriber service that provides industry-wide sales figures; in the past, publishers and bookstores and distributors did not feel compelled to . . .
Steve Levitt will be appearing on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Co.” today (Friday, June 10) at about 5:45 p.m. EDT. Stephen Dubner will be appearing on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” on Monday (June 13), sometime between 7 and 9 a.m. EDT.
Here is the beginning of our first “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine: Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind’s knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,” he wrote. “Nobody ever saw one animal . . .
The salutary effects of Freakonomics have by now been proven considerable. A reader from upstate New York sent this picture as proof that the right book can actually speed childbirth, and do away with the need for an epidural. (No word if she was merely shopping for a high-end baby name.) In other news: Levitt and I are writing a . . .
We loved an article, written by the columnist Debra Pickett of the Chicago Sun Times, discussing how she is using the ideas of Freakonomics to navigate her daily life just a little bit differently. Here is the text of the article: Outsmugging the smug: Don’t try this at home May 13, 2005 BY DEBRA PICKETT SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST I’ve been reading . . .
A few bloggers have pointed out that the cover of Freakonomics is, shall we say, quite similar to the cover of this book. To which we initially said: Yikes. Should we be embarrassed about this? We thought the cover of Freakonomics was brilliant the moment the publisher showed it to us. We had been suggesting something along similar lines — . . .