Today, you’ll recall, is Election Day. Which means that one year from now, we will be electing a new president (as if it really matters). The race is starting to heat up, as candidates shed their friendly veneers and start getting nasty with their rivals. (For what it’s worth, on the Republican side, Ron Paul — whom we’ve discussed before . . .
I have a favorite thought exercise: look at an issue that’s important, complex, and interesting — something like healthcare, education, or electoral politics — and pretend that you could rebuild the system from scratch, without the convoluted histories and incentives that currently exist. What would the new system look like? How differently would you think about key issues if there . . .
This week’s New Yorker features an interesting article by Hendrik Hertzberg about American presidential dynasties. He quotes an A.P. article by Nancy Benac which states that “[f]orty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.” Really? That’s amazing. Hertzberg quotes Benac further in the next paragraph: “Talk of Bush-Clinton . . .
I caught a lot of flak a few months back when I speculated about why terrorists don’t carry out a wide array of simple but devastating terrorist plots. (For fear of another flood of hate mail, I don’t dare link to those earlier posts, but if you are interested you can easily find them.) I’m pretty sure that forest fires . . .
You may remember Paul Feldman as the Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics. You may also remember that he was an economist before he got into bagels, with an interest in agricultural, medical, and military issues. He recently wrote to us about an environmental issue he’s been looking into: the abundance of underground coal fires in abandoned mines and . . .
A British economist and journalist, Philippe Legrain has served as special adviser to the director-general of the World Trade Organization and worked as the trade and economics correspondent for the Economist. For his latest book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, he spent over six months interviewing immigrants across the globe and researching immigration policies in wealthy countries. (Click here for . . .
At a Nobel press conference yesterday, a reporter asked Roger Myerson to name the next important thing he had on his agenda. Myerson responded that he had to give a speech for Gary Becker‘s workshop the next day — i.e., today. The paper he is presenting is not your typical economics paper, especially for someone who just won the Nobel . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about airline travel over the past couple of years, covering everything from the future of pilotless airplanes to security snafus to the likelihood of an all-business-class U.S. airline. I don’t think this reflects our overwhelming curiosity about the subject as much as the fact that we both happen to be on planes a lot. That . . .
Despite Fred Thompson‘s so-so performance in his first presidential debate, and despite his serious lag on InTrade (Giuliani, 39; Romney, 24; Thompson, 19.5), the blogger Noele Kensut is calling for Thompson to win the White House. Why? Because he has blue eyes. Eye color is one trait, Kensut writes at Mijka Samora‘s Reality Journal, that every president since Richard Nixon . . .
I first met Liz Seymour some 20 years ago. She lived then in the same house where she now lives, in Greensboro, N.C. She was (and still is) roughly ten years older than me, a Smith grad with a bohemian streak who wrote freelance articles for national magazines and newspapers, often about the home furnishings industry that had a strong . . .
Do people consider social concerns when making economic decisions? Found a wallet on the street? Be careful, you may be on film. Woman found liable for $222K in damages in file-sharing suit. (Earlier) Organizations for wounded soldiers offer free handbook for injured vets. (Earlier)
A few months back I met a remarkable man named Gene Sit. He is a money manager in Minneapolis, with more than $6 billion under management, but that is not what makes him remarkable. He was born to a wealthy family in late 1930s China and, in the lawless years after World War II, was kidnapped and held for ransom . . .
The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum in Florence, Colorado, widely known as the “Supermax” prison, houses many of the nation’s most notorious and violent criminals. But you probably haven’t read any interviews with any of those prisoners — including Sammy Gravano, John Walker Lindh, and Ramzi Yousef — in the last several years. Why not? According to this article by Alan . . .
In the wake of changes in airport security technology, Levitt lists his own ideas for a fear-maximizing terror plot, and solicits other ideas from readers as a means of bringing possible scenarios into discussion before they actually happen.
The introduction of new pay-by-weight trash charges in Ireland seems to have produced a strange and troubling effect: an increase in burn victims at St. James Hospital in Dublin. Huh? The theory is that people wanted to avoid having to pay for all their trash so instead they burned it in their backyards. Gary Finnegan, editor of Irish Medical News, . . .
The job of I.R.S. commissioner has been filled — Mark Everson, who left to take over the American Red Cross, has been replaced by deputy Kevin Brown — but there’s still room for more at the I.R.S. Now you can nominate yourself (or a loved one) for a three-year volunteer membership on the agency’s Information Reporting Program Advisory Committee, which . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about prediction markets. Now, some very prominent economists (including four Nobel prize winners) have come together to release a joint statement asking the U.S. government to make it easier for researchers to create them. While the statement argues the merits of prediction markets extremely cogently, and while I’m completely in favor of prediction markets and . . .
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois is apparently not much of a Freakonomics fan, or maybe he thinks it’s something that it’s not. He trashed our good (ha!) name the other day during a Senate Appropriation Committee hearing that was probing the budget of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Here’s the story, as covered by OMB . . .
Last April, we wrote a column about tax cheating. It included a passage about the I.R.S.’s National Research Program, “a three-year study during which 46,000 randomly selected 2001 tax returns were intensively reviewed.” The goal was to determine some of the specifics of tax cheating: what kind of incentives work and don’t work, what kind of people are more likely . . .
Congress has taken note of the shortage of donated organs, and has proposed an incentive to increase donation: a commemorative medal to honor organ donors. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution sums it up thusly: “Millions for medals but not a cent for compensation.” I am sure the congressmen and senators mean well, and we here at Freakonomics are firm believers . . .
A Texas State Senator has been ridiculed for his proposal to pay women $500 if they show up at an abortion clinic, elect not to have an abortion, and then give the baby up for adoption. Honestly, though, is it really such a bad idea? What if he left out the part about visiting an abortion clinic? Does it make . . .
Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana, posts his daily appointment schedule on his website for all the world to see. According to this A.P. article by Mary Clare Jalonick, such transparency is “fulfilling a promise the Democrat made in his campaign against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns last year. Burns attracted heat for his relationship with Washington interests — most . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
The April 2, 2006, Freakonomics column is about tax cheating. This blog post supplies additional research material.
I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved close to where I work. So whenever I do, the incivility on the roads leaps out at me. People do things in cars they would never do in other settings. Honking. Swearing. Cutting to the front of the line. And that is just my wife. The other drivers are far meaner. One . . .
While 2005 is an off year for Presidential and Congressional elections, Tuesday is still Election Day, and in its honor, we got to wondering: why the heck do people bother to vote? That is the subject of our latest Freakonomics column in the New York Times Magazine. As always, we’ve posted a page elsewhere on this website with ancillary information. . . .
Everywhere I go, people are asking me what I think of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. I know Bernanke pretty well because he was Chairman of the Princeton Economics department at a time when I was very seriously thinking of moving there, but ended up turning down offers on multiple occasions (which rightfully aggravated Bernanke to . . .
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 . . .