Yesterday, I posted a short piece called “Should We Just Let the Tour de France Dopers Dope Away?” It wasn’t an outright call for legalization of sports doping, but I wanted to put the idea on the table. Well, Joe Lindsey, a contributing writer for Bicycling magazine, wrote in to say that there are a lot of compelling reasons to . . .
The economist Justin Wolfers, who has turned up on this blog more than a few times, has an interesting OpEd in today’s New York Times about the N.B.A. referee-gambling scandal. Wolfers is a sensible choice since he wrote a widely discussed paper about point-shaving in NCAA basketball and an even more widely discussed paper about racial bias among NBA referees. . . .
Now that virtually every cyclist in the Tour de France has been booted for doping, is it time to consider a radical rethinking of the doping issue? Is it time, perhaps, to come up with a pre-approved list of performance-enhancing agents and procedures, require the riders to accept full responsibility for whatever long-term physical and emotional damage these agents and . . .
News reports yesterday say the FBI is investigating an NBA referee who allegedly bet on games that he was calling. This is a perfect problem for an economist to answer with data, and the obvious man for the job is Justin Wolfers, who has written papers on NBA referees and on point shaving in basketball! Message to Justin: Freakonomics blog . . .
After Dubner’s questioning of libraries, Folksonomy.com interviews Greg Boesel, co-founder and CEO of Swaptree, a Netflix-esque online trading site for books, DVDs, CDs, and video games — that’s also free of charge. Via Bloomberg.com: While the athletes have been busy training for the Pan Am Games in Rio De Janeiro (July 13-29), the city’s prostitutes have also been preparing for . . .
While at this celebrity golf tournament, I met a lot of stars, from Kevin Nealon to Gale Sayers. None of them were as friendly as Super Bowl MVP Mark Rypien. He and I don’t have much in common. The one thing we share, I wish we didn’t. Just like us, he lost a young son named Andrew. The Rypien Foundation . . .
If you can’t figure out the answer to that question, you need some serious help. Thanks to the kindness of Jonathan Thomas, Martha Miller, and all the other fine folks at American Century Investments, I got the chance to play golf with Emmitt Smith, winner of Dancing with the Stars. Before that, he had some success in football as well. . . .
As far as I know, American Indians did not invent casino gambling. They did, however, invent lacrosse, a sport more typically associated these days with the likes of young men at Johns Hopkins and Duke. But in a fitting and culturally resonant reallocation of resources, Indian tribes in upstate New York are now pouring profits from their specially licensed casinos . . .
Every once in a while I do something really stupid. In this case, it was to accept my friend Jeff Thomas‘ invitation to play in a celebrity-amateur golf tournament. (Just to be clear, I’m the amateur; Emmitt Smith is the celebrity in our foursome.) “It is totally relaxed,” Jeff said. “The celebrities play in a televised NBC tournament on the . . .
There was an interesting article in the New York Times sports section the other day about how the All England Club has kept the Wimbledon tournament free of pigeons since 1999 by employing a man named Wayne Davis to bring in his small flock of peregrine falcons. Until Davis came along, the pigeons were a real nuisance. “In the old, . . .
The wheels seem to have come off the Tour de France. This year’s race, with a ceremonial start in London, is of course absent the retired Lance Armstrong, whom Americans learned to love and the French grew to hate in seemingly direct proportion. But the race this year is also missing Floyd Landis, last year’s disgraced winner, as well as . . .
Via Marginal Revolution: In his quest to explain the male-female wage gap in business, academia, and other fields, the economist M. Daniele Paserman studied the role that gender plays in competitive environments. Where’d he get his data? From professional tennis matches. Paserman argues that male athletes are generally more adept at handling high-pressure situations. With iPhone frenzy reaching a peak, . . .
An article in the current Sports Illustrated about the underappreciated San Antonio Spurs, by Jack McCallum, includes a brief profile of the Spurs’ principal owner, Peter Holt. A son of privilege, he was a drinker and a hell-raiser who joined the Army to straighten himself out and was sent to Vietnam in 1967. He tells McCallum about walking through the . . .
In addition to their growing overlap with the laws and regulations of the physical world, virtual worlds are providing psychologists with new data sources and research for theories like Transformed Social Interaction, self-perception theory, and the Proteus Effect. Via TheStreet: In the wake of the Paris Hilton prison fiasco, financial blogger Eddy Elfenbein at Crossing Wall Street tracks the (continually . . .
We ran Part 1 of our Q&A with Mark Cuban yesterday; here is Part 2. Thanks again to all of you for the good questions and to Mark for the great answers. Q: I loved your early bet on HD entertainment – it was spot-on. What industries do you see on the horizon that offer similarly explosive potential? A: If . . .
My guess is that Mark Cuban doesn’t sleep very much. In addition to his various entrepreneurial activities, including an attempt to start up a new pro football league, he also managed to respond to a great many of the questions you all posed on our superfreako user-generated Q&A. (The only thing missing is a question about who he wants to . . .
A lot of you asked really good questions of Mark Cuban, which he will now pick through and answer. As it turns out, he’s in the news today for the very topic that several of you raised: his plans to start a new football league to compete with the NFL. Here are a couple of relevant passages: “It’s a pretty . . .
Turns out the “CSI” effect on the criminal justice system may not be quite as severe as we thought. Michigan Circuit Judge and Eastern Michigan University criminology professor Donald E. Shelton has published a paper indicating that the TV show’s effects on jurors may be exaggerated. The data, consisting of a survey of 1,027 jurors called for duty in a . . .
If you’ve ever looked at his blog, you know that Mark Cuban is perhaps the most accessible (and interesting) sports team owner/ media maven/ technology entrepreneur in history. So it was nice to see him stop by our blog to comment on a recent post about why N.B.A. sportswriters get to sit so near the court. Here was Cuban’s comment: . . .
On his CNBC blog, sports-business wizard Darren Rovell calculates how much the first overall N.B.A. draft pick is actually worth, at least in terms of his first year, measured by increased wins and increased attendance. The answer? Quite a bit. Rovell shows that in the past 11 years, the team with the No. 1 pick had an average attendance increase . . .
Take all your winnings from the Kentucky Derby and play an exacta box on Hard Spun and Circular Quay. Of course, if you followed my picks for the Kentucky Derby, you won’t have any winnings.
At this moment, a boycott of the Beijing Olympics would seem pretty unlikely. It took a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for the U.S. and other countries to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics. (The Soviets repaid the favor in 1984, staying home from the Los Angeles games.) On the other hand, a lot of people around the world harbor feelings of . . .
From an Associated Press report out of Rome: Giro d’Italia champion Ivan Basso admitted involvement in the Spanish doping scandal and is cooperating with sports authorities. It is hard to overestimate the value of a cooperating witness. Think of the damage, e.g., that Sammy Gravano did to John Gotti and the rest of the Gambino crime family. If someone of . . .
Greetings, Freakonomics community! This is your friendly neighborhood web editor, Melissa. Starting today, while Steven and Stephen will continue to post the same high-brow discussions of crack dealing, cheating, gold-digging and online poker that have long graced this site, I’ll also be posting under the eponymous apple/orange. So keep sending your good ideas to levittdubner (at) freakonomics (dot) com. The . . .
Blog reader Peter Bergman tells me that John Hollinger has an interesting analysis of the NBA racial bias piece at ESPN.com, although you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing. I haven’t actually read it because I’m not a subscriber, but Hollinger apparently does a nice job of putting the magnitude of the bias into perspective: The . . .
Levitt blogged a few minutes ago about today’s N.Y. Times piece by Alan Schwarz about possible racial bias among N.B.A. referees. The piece is based on a draft academic paper by Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers. I have two quick things to add to Levitt’s post, and then a separate but related question. 1. Never in the history of the . . .
I’ve blogged before about my friend Justin Wolfers’ research on point shaving in college basketball and the death penalty. Now Justin is back stirring up more controversy with a paper that claims that there is racial bias on the part of NBA referees, written up in the New York Times by Allen Schwarz. The claim of the paper is that . . .
Like everything else Michael Lewis does, his recent article which discusses the move towards tradable securities in pro athletes is beautifully written and very interesting. My friends (and relatives actually) at ProTrade.com are right at the heart of this new trend. (hat tip to Chris Thayer)
Levitt and I are off to give a lecture this afternoon at Colgate University. I know that Colgate is a very fine school but I have to admit that I always think of it as the alma mater of the athlete/ humanitarian/ democracy-lover Adonal Foyle, whom I’ve been reading about in the New York Times for years. He has always . . .
The National Football League’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, has just made it a lot more expensive to be a thug. Goodell suspended the Titans’ Pacman Jones without pay for the upcoming season (a loss of $1.29 million in base salary) and the Bengals’ Chris Henry for the first half of the season (surrendering as much as $230,000 in base pay). Jones . . .