Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home last year, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn't include bagels eaten at work, where a not-completely-insignificant number are delivered by bagel economist Paul Feldman). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, 1,979 people cut their' [...]
At Big Think, Dan Ariely discusses ways to think about money so you splurge less - like equating expensive wine with gallons of milk and making paying hurt a little more. [...]
Our new study poses a conundrum: in a professional market (for economists), having more scholars pay attention to your research raises your reputation and your salary. Conditional on that attention, though, writing more papers lowers your reputation - but it raises your salary! [...]
The island of Kiribati began to subsidize coconut harvesting in the hopes of encouraging fishermen to switch to the coconut trade and thereby help preserve Kiribati's reefs from the ravages of overfishing.' [...]
In a post yesterday, I posed the following riddle:
Yesterday, and for much of the past year, I regularly did something that was perfectly legal.
Starting today, if I do the same thing, I am breaking a New York State law.
What is it that I'm doing?' [...]
Indeed, the conclusion of the slogan "you've come a long way, baby" ironically demonstrates that women had not come quite as long a way as they might have hoped. Even now, important gender differences persist, and they show up quite clearly in the realm of transportation.
'Tis the season for turkey shopping, and the price is right. According to this Wall Street Journal squib, the price of whole frozen turkeys has fallen from 94 cents per pound last year to just 66 cents per pound, with Wal-Mart leading the way, selling turkeys for just 40 cents' [...]
We spend a good bit of time in SuperFreakonomics writing about doctors' hand hygiene: specifically, how important good hand hygiene is in order to cut down on hospital-acquired infections and yet how historically it has proven difficult to enforce.
Drinking alcohol puts people at high risk for all kinds of misfortunes. Exposure to date-rape drugs, however, doesn't seem to be one of them.
In a study published in the British Journal of Criminology, more than half of the 200 university students surveyed said they knew someone whose drink had been' [...]
Yesterday, and for much of the past year, I regularly did something that was perfectly legal.
Starting today, if I do the same thing, I am breaking a New York State law.
What is it that I'm doing?
The first correct answer earns a signed copy of SuperFreakonomics or a piece of Freakonomics' [...]
Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics, called "Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism," takes a look at the research of John List (the Univ. of Chicago economist, not the notorious murderer of the same same - although the same chapter does cast a new light on a famous murder as well). List's' [...]
Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents "to raise undergraduate fees - the equivalent of tuition - 32 percent next fall." But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity. As Aaron [...]
If you'd like to turn your garden-variety copy of SuperFreakonomics (or Freakonomics) into a nifty autographed copy that suddenly seems much more gift-appropriate, you can sign up here for a free bookplate that is hand-signed by Levitt and Dubner. If all goes well, the Freakonomics elves will dispatch your bookplate' [...]
Daron Acemoglu describes what makes a nation rich in a new article for Esquire. According to Acemoglu, experts who believe geography or the weather or technology are to blame for persistent poverty are missing a much simpler economic explanation: people respond to incentives.
When we think about "scientists," most of us probably envision people toiling away in the lab or the field, accumulating and analyzing data in order to test theories, leaving their personal biases at home, scrupulously considering any confounding data or theories and willfully distancing themselves from the political implications of [...]
In 2003, a young American woman in London studying for her PhD. ran into money trouble. To support herself while writing her thesis, she joined an escort service. Under the assumed name Belle de Jour, she started to blog her experiences. That blog led to a series of successful, jaunty [...]
"What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?" These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University's Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in' [...]
When blog reader Kyle contacted us with his story of how thinking "freakonomically" first netted - then lost - him significant amounts of incremental income, we had what we'd call an "aha moment," if Oprah hadn't apparently patented that phrase.
Here's Kyle's story - and if you have a tale of [...]
It's well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive contract between family members.
Each week, I've been inviting readers to submit quotations for which they want me to try to trace the origin, using The Yale Book of Quotations and my own research. Here is the latest round:
Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitchen you've' [...]
Four of the 26 students in my Economics of Life class proposed delaying submitting their draft term project reports by one week. I emailed the whole class and gave them one day to let me know if they disapproved of this postponement.
The question was how heavily to weight the [...]
Number of comments: 12 Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium's first decade. My favorite section to date is the "Overblown Fears" list. Here they are, in order:
1. Y2K
2. Shoe Bombs
3. Vaccines Cause Autism
4. Immigrants
5. Bloggers
6. SARS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu
7. Web Predators
8. Teen Oral Sex Epidemic
9. Anthrax
10. Globalization
If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC's piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron' [...]
We've blogged extensively about the serious organ-doner shortage in the U.S. and the debate over establishing a market for organs. Now it seems the recession has uncovered some unexpected potential participants in the organ market: unemployed white collar Americans.
In the first installment of our virtual book club, Emily Oster answered your questions about her research (co-authored with Rob Jensen) which argues that the lives of rural women in India improved on several dimensions thanks to the widespread adoption of television.
That story appeared in our book's introduction. Now we're [...]
We are trapped in a world with far too few IRS audits. Law abiding tax payers hate being audited and their representatives in Congress have heard the message loud and clear - strangling the ability of the IRS to conduct field examinations. The problem with the current state of affairs [...]
Police in Hunan province, China, raided a workshop said to be producing counterfeit condoms. According to the (U.K.) Times:
Bare-chested employees were found using vegetable oil to lubricate the condoms to make them smooth and shiny before placing them directly in fiber bags without bothering with sterilization.
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman's mind-blowing book - and totally engrossing website - Bird.
Number of comments: 15 In recent years, replacing your car with a Schwinn has become a popular idea for reducing your carbon footprint. However, not everyone has rushed to their local bike store: fewer than 2 percent of the population relies on bikes for transportation. [...]
Number of comments: 4 The folks at Appfrica have put together some interesting infographs on infrastructure investment and Internet connectivity in Africa. The graphs provide information on internet penetration and network readiness by country, and the various infrastructure development projects that are rapidly transforming Internet connectivity in Africa. [...]
Number of comments: 15 Remember the transportation stimulus package? Whatever happened to that money? I'm pretty sure it got allocated, but weightier transportation stories like hot-air-balloon fraud seem to have bumped highway spending off the front page. To catch you up, here are some recent numbers that are worth mulling over.
' [...]
Number of comments: 15 SuperFreakonomics briefly considers the possibility of a rogue leader like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deciding to unilaterally try geoengineering the planet. Who'd have thought Chavez would actually try some geoengineering with his own hands? According to this Reuters report, Chavez recently asked a team of Cuban scientists to seed clouds' [...]
I respect Bill Belichick more today than I ever have.
Last night he made a decision in the final minutes that led his team the New England Patriots to defeat. It will likely go down as one of the most criticized decisions any coach has ever made. With his team leading [...]
I was talking with some folks at LSU who were working on a proposal to exempt textbooks from sales taxes in Baton Rouge, currently a whopping 9%. I'm all in favor of cutting sales taxes, which are generally not progressive; but textbooks are a luxury good-college education is disproportionately undertaken' [...]
We all know that information is valuable, and that more information is generally better than less.
But in the realm of pharmaceutical research (as in others, to be sure), there's a troubling paradox: while successes are widely publicized, and while the results of clinical trials are usually published, the research from' [...]
Dubner will be appearing on the public-radio show The Takeaway every morning this week to talk about SuperFreakonomics. His past appearances can be found here, including this one about kidney donation and this one about climate change.
Over the last decade, the number of syphilis cases in China increased tenfold, according to this Associated Press report, because more migrant workers have been able to afford to hire prostitutes.
Malcolm Gladwell explains Christmas, as imagined by Craig Brown for Vanity Fair: "In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying" [...]
So while environmentalists may find the very notion of geoengineering repugnant, the fact is that geoengineering is already with us, and will likely be put to use whether we like it or not.
Unhappy with the clutter in your life? You don't need to get organizized; you just need to ditch your extraneous stuff. The Happiness Project's Gretchen Rubin punctures eleven myths of would-be clutter slayers. [...]
Number of comments: 15 Since last week's posting elicited many helpful comments, let me repeat it this week in hope of getting even more input:
I'm starting to think about my annual list, run by the Associated Press, of the top 10 most notable quotations of the year. [...]
Number of comments: 2 If you've never really gotten a good look at Mars, here's your chance: The Big Picture has collected 35 striking photographs from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and photographing the planet since 2006. [...]
Number of comments: 15 If you ever find yourself in a room full of pig farmers and want to start a fight, just ask about farrowing crates. A farrowing crate is a cage that confines a lactating sow. Its dimensions are tight - a typical crate enables a mother pig to move a few [...]
Number of comments: 2 Levitt and Dubner are scheduled to appear on the Charlie Rose show tonight, talking about the importance of applying economics to "trivial" subjects; how Levitt learned to stop fearing death; and about SuperFreakonomics in general. The show airs on PBS at 11 p.m. in most cities, but check your [...]
Number of comments: 15 One of the heroes of SuperFreakonomics is Ignatz Semmelweis - who crunched numbers in the 1840's to champion the benefits of doctors washing their hands.
Number of comments: 15 There's at least one unexpected benefit of rising unemployment. More people are staying home during working hours, and going out less often at night. That means there's less chance they'll be burglarized.
Number of comments: 15 When does transit fare policy treat people unequally? When it treats them exactly the same.
Why?
At the risk of overgeneralization, there are two major constituencies for mass transit. First are wealthier workers who commute to jobs in city centers where parking is expensive. The other group consists of the very poor. [...]
Number of comments: 8 We've blogged several times about Roland Fryer's research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem [...]
Number of comments: 15 Because we are so short of faculty, I have a section of 30 honors students in my lecture class along with the 500 regular students. Although the 30 also have a recitation with some additional assignments, five-sixths of their grade is based on the same tests, quizzes, and short essay [...]
Number of comments: 3 Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in and photographing the slums of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Bendiksen's photos of family homes portray a reality that clashes with popular perception.
Number of comments: 15 In Seattle recently, I met a pulmonologist who said that the H1N1 virus has him busier than he's ever been, his hospital beds full of flu patients. The uptick hit particularly hard about 10 days ago, he said.
How has the flu been playing out across the country?
A while back, we blogged about a site called Strange Maps, which features all sorts of strange, fascinating, and even influential maps. (Maps in general have since come up on this blog quite a few times.)
Frank Jacobs, the London-based journalist and creator of Strange Maps, has now published a book, [...]
I'm currently back home in Australia for a couple of weeks, and just want to give a heads-up to the locals that I'll be giving a talk at ANU this Wednesday.
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to [...]
In SuperFreakonomics, we tell the story of how Robert Strange McNamara, an outsider at the Ford Motor Co., led the charge the put seat belts in automobiles at Ford. It was not a popular decision within the company nor with the public; pushing for a safety device in a car [...]
People worry that disasters have become more frequent and more damaging since the close of the 20th century. But the 19th century's natural disasters were plenty devastating; but there weren't nearly as many of us around to suffer the consequences (nor as much media to record it). [...]
Who gets bumped to the front of UCLA medical center's liver-transplant line? The godfather of the Japanese mafia, according to this 60 Minutes video...
Each year I receive about 10 introductory economics textbooks from publishers. The purpose is to induce me to adopt the book in my 500-student principles class...
Our first guest was University of Chicago economist Emily Oster, whose research, co-authored with Robert Jensen, formed the basis of the section where we discuss how the introduction of television turned out to be an unlikely boon for rural Indian women. (I should have also mentioned that we cite Emily's' [...]
Just announced: Levitt and Dubner's sold-out lecture at London's Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) will be webcast live on Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at 13:00 GMT (that's 8 a.m. Eastern -- or use this handy calculator to find the time where you' [...]
Number of comments: 15 A while back, I wondered why flight attendants don't get tipped. Here's a nice response from a reader named Barb, who retired after 36 years as a flight attendant with US Airways. Her suggestion sounds pretty perfect to me. I particularly liked her "schmuck" observation:
Number of comments: 15 Lately, the lot of the New York cabbie has improved a bit. But there are still some major systemic obstacles that keep drivers and their passengers from getting the conditions and service they deserve. One crucial issue is that the system for licensing cabs seems less a product of American [...]
Number of comments: 14 We've blogged about proposals to save ailing print newspapers. Despite shrinking circulation and falling ad revenue, Daniel Gross doesn't think print news is doing so badly. [...]
Number of comments: 15 There's been a brouhaha over whether we "misrepresented" the research and views of the climate scientist Ken Caldeira, whom we write about in the global-warming chapter of SuperFreakonomics. We've been in constant touch with him over the past few weeks, since we wanted to amend future printings of our book [...]
The closest guess to be submitted before the deadline was from Dave Benner, commenter No. 93, who guessed 666,666. Apparently the devil really is in the details. Congratulations to Dave; he's got some schwag coming his way.' [...]
If nothing else, getting an economics Ph.D. should teach someone how to complicate and obfuscate the issue so that it isn't so obvious to outsiders that the argument makes no sense.' [...]
Number of comments: 8 We know polling results are sensitive to the wording of questions. The delivery of those questions could be a factor, too. We'll know for sure when we see the first health care push-poll featuring sniffling, sneezing pollsters.' [...]
I've written a fair amount about organ transplantation in the past (for example, here and here). But it was only in reading SuperFreakonomics that I learned that "the Iranian government [pays] people to give up a kidney, roughly $1,200, with an additional sum paid by the kidney recipient." The book' [...]
How is a car like the Internet?
A reader named William Mack writes in with an interesting observation and question. It echoes a conversation I recently had with a friend who had been on the receiving end of some road rage -- in a New York City parking garage, of all [...]
There were many good guesses (Ashcroft, Bork, Corzine, etc.). There were also some really awful guesses, like my colleagues Robert Lucas and Gary Becker, who fit many of the criteria, but obviously I was not meeting for the first time last week.
I watched the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last night. It got me wondering what would happen to various economic outcomes if, like Brad Pitt's character, henceforth half of all men, but no women, were born and lived their lives backward from old age to infancy.
Welcome to the first installment of the SuperFreakonomics Book Club. We know you're all busy, and scattered around the globe too. So it wouldn't be convenient for all of us to regularly gather in someone's living room and talk about the book while sharing bean dip. So let's harness this [...]
Edmunds.com reports that its statistical analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program finds that the program generated only 125,000 extra new vehicle sales, meaning that the cost to the U.S. government was $24,000 for each of those new cars.
The random coin toss must be one of society's most frequently used decision-making mechanisms. We use the coin toss to choose which movie to see, to determine team positions in major sporting events, to divvy up household chores.
