Freakonomics

Kyle Busch Answers Your NASCAR Questions

Stephen J. Dubner — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:58:13 -0500

Kyle Busch The Sunday after we lined up NASCAR driver Kyle Busch to do this Q&A, he won his first career road-course race, the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon. We wondered if Freakonomics luck had something to do with it. Then last week, as your questions were coming in, he snagged the No. 1 spot in [...]

Common Sense Health Care: A Guest Post

Stephen J. Dubner — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:56:05 -0500

Earlier this week, we ran a Q&A with Julie Salamon, author of the new book Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids. Given the richness of her book and the primacy of healthcare as a topic of interest, we've asked Julie to guest post here, [...]

FREAK-Shots: Your Dangerous Habits Are Cool

Freakonomics — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:13:39 -0500

Cigarette advertisers generally don't mention cancer, although Silk Cut seemed to use it (in the form of an alligator) to tell smokers they're cool for tempting death. Playing up your product's risk isn't a new strategy. This whiskey ad from the 1990's, sent in by Freakonomics reader Douglas Kysar, makes vice look pretty sexy. Photo: [...]

Our Daily Bleg: What Are the Film Quotes of the Century?

Stephen J. Dubner — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:03:50 -0500

Our resident quote bleggar Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, is back with another request. If you have a bleg of your own, send it along here. Thanks again to all who contributed great suggestions of TV catchphrases, U.S. and British. Now I turn to film quotes, which have probably supplanted literary quotations [...]

Should You Be Allowed to Buy Plastic Fish Brake Lights?

Daniel Hamermesh — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:14:35 -0500

I am a firm believer in consumer choice - an individual's utility and society's economic welfare are maximized if people are free to buy whatever they want (so long as others are not forced to sell it to them). Nonetheless, an amazing number of egregiously nonsensical devices are marketed because people (for some reason) have preferences [...]

A Speech of Mine That Bombed

Steven D. Levitt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:06:33 -0500

A few months after Freakonomics was first released I was honored to be invited to speak at my first European TED conference, held in the United Kingdom. I wasn't sure what to talk about. At my first TED appearance a couple years earlier I had given a rather edgy talk about gangs that had [...]

The FREAK-est Links

Freakonomics — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:07:11 -0500

So where are all the bees? More ways to analyze your name. (HT: Jim Dahl) (Earlier) Can DJ's make you buy more drinks? (HT: Philip Oreopoulos) The video-game stimulus was sudden but fleeting. (Earlier)

A Netflix of Magazines?

Stephen J. Dubner — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:40:17 -0500

Folio reports that Time Inc. is starting a new magazine-subscription service called Maghound that sounds a bit like Netflix's movie model: Maghound.com allows consumers to choose titles from a variety of publishers for mix-and-match "subscriptions" where they pay one monthly fee and have the ability to switch titles at any time. Unlike traditional subscriptions, members aren't [...]

Fashion and the Market

Freakonomics — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:46:16 -0500

The global economic slowdown has had an upside for some people. First, it was debt consolidators and private security firms. Now, necktie companies are reporting a boost in sales as the unemployment rate rises, the Telegraph reports. The (questionable) theory is that employed men want to look sharp and thereby stay employed. To think - [...]

A Public-Goods Plague

Daniel Hamermesh — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:45:37 -0500

The public-goods and free-rider problems that plague many organizations are also common at universities. At the University of Texas, the co-op bookstore offers each major college $50,000 if its professors meet the co-op's deadline for book orders. My college (Liberal Arts) is the only one that can't do this, that can't manage to take [...]

Combat One Plague, Risk Another?

Freakonomics — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:35:56 -0500

Scientists have genetically engineered a malaria-resistant breed of mosquito that can out-compete non-modified mosquitoes in nature, the BBC reports. Releasing the mosquitoes into the wild could be a winning and cost-effective strategy to combat a disease that kills 1 million people worldwide each year and has dire financial consequences for countries where it is endemic. [...]

Can a Draft Regression Outpredict NBA Experts?

Ian Ayres — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:52:58 -0500

The NBA draft this year provides a vivid real world test of whether very simple regressions can out-predict experts on a central business decision - the NBA draft. Chris Doughty, a 2008 industrial and operations engineering graduate of the University of Michigan, pointed me to a cool regression analysis of the great John Hollinger. Using data [...]

When It Comes to Saving, Who Would You Listen to: My Wife or Milton Friedman?

Steven D. Levitt — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:02:25 -0500

My response when Money magazine asked for the best advice I had ever received about personal finance: When I was a first-year assistant professor at the University of Chicago, my friend and department chair, Jose Scheinkman, relayed the advice Milton Friedman had given him 20 years earlier, "Don't save too much." The logic was simple: An [...]

The Myths of Red and Blue States

Sudhir Venkatesh — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:41:36 -0500

Readers of this blog might be interested in a new book on electoral politics set to arrive in bookstores at the end of summer. Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State by Andrew Gelman - my colleague in Columbia University's political science department - explodes some well-trod myths about American voting behavior. Consider, for example, [...]

Political Prediction Markets: Webcast for the Uninitiated

Justin Wolfers — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:36:39 -0500

Very few readers of this blog are strangers to political prediction markets. But if you are new to this and interested in learning more, here's some help: A podcast of a talk I gave at the recent CFA Institute annual conference in Vancouver. Or if you prefer to see the video and slides as well, [...]