The FREAK-est Links
Lowenstein on Bernanke (Earlier) (More here) Which company insiders are buying a lot of their own stock? How does pregnancy affect memory? What’s the value of melancholia?
Lowenstein on Bernanke (Earlier) (More here) Which company insiders are buying a lot of their own stock? How does pregnancy affect memory? What’s the value of melancholia?
What percentage of Americans believe what they read in the news? (HT: Romenesko) Prague brothel tries new Web-based business model. (Earlier) The latest in incentives to beat chronic oversleeping. Is there a “happiness” quotient to measuring economic benefits?
We wrote in Freakonomics about our views on parenting. Mostly, we were skeptical of how much parents could do to improve their kids’ futures. One can clearly be a terrible parent through neglect or abuse. The tougher question is whether being an “obsessive” parent who drags children to a never-ending procession of soccer practices, museums, and acting classes is better . . .
Huge percentage of world’s births & deaths go undocumented. Making your baby smarter: the myths continue. (Earlier) Should paying line-standers to hold seats at Congressional hearings be banned? Happiness levels linked to race. (Earlier)
I blogged a few days back about the interesting new paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers analyzing trends in happiness by gender, and finding statistically significant reductions in how happy women are relative to men. Elsewhere on the Internet, the paper has drawn the ire of a number of bloggers. Stevenson and Wolfers have fired back on Marginal Revolution, . . .
I saw Justin Wolfers a few weeks back, and I joked with him that it had been months since I’d seen his research in the headlines. It didn’t take him long to fix that — he and his partner in life and economics, Betsey Stevenson, made the news twice last week. The first time was in the form of an . . .
Women falling behind men in levels of happiness. (Earlier) Recyclable trash now a theft-worthy commodity. Are annual physicals really necessary? A Fed-to-English translation manual.
Levitt and Dubner have blogged quite a bit about the growing literature on happiness studies. Meanwhile, the media has been abuzz recently over the relationship (or possible lack thereof) between happiness and wealth. Enter Angus Deaton, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton. Deaton has a published new paper, “Income, Aging, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence . . .
Over the past several weeks, we’ve hosted discussions on obesity, street charity, real estate, and environmental conservation. Here now is a quorum that lets people relive the just-about-gone summer. The participants below were asked the following question: What’s your idea of a nightmare family vacation? Here are their responses. Feel free to give yours as well. Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychology . . .
This kid better have a great life, or he’s got a lot to answer for: a boy named Jack Falkner was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisc., on Saturday, 7/7/07, and he weighed 7 pounds, 7 ounces. That, at least, is what the hospital says. But think about it: if you were the person looking at Baby Jack’s scale, mightn’t you . . .
We’ve written quite a bit about the science of happiness. Now a study by Nattavudh Powdthavee, a research officer at the University of London’s Institute of Education, has taken the debate a step further, assigning monetary values to intangibles like good health and better relationships. He argues that more time with loved ones merits a $179,000 happiness-equivalent raise, while marriage . . .
A new study from decision scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the RAND Corp. suggests that quality of life may be directly related to decision-making ability (a point further dissected in Dan Gilbert‘s Stumbling on Happiness, which Levitt has discussed before). From the San Francisco Chronicle: A study by credit- and fraud-reporting agency Fair Isaac Corp. reveals that Internet advertisers . . .
On the first day of class, I tell my undergraduates that if they only learn one thing in my course, I hope that it will be to recognize and appreciate the difference between correlation and causality. Most of the students laugh smugly, thinking they already know the difference. It never ceases to amaze me, however, when a cleverly designed exam . . .