Freakonomics

• Mothers and the Model T

  Number of comments: 3
  Last post I started a series on the different ways men and women travel. The disparities are many, and go back a long way; after all, Eve and not Adam took the first family grocery-shopping trip, and Noah, not his anonymous wife, built and drove the first recorded vehicle. In the [...]
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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 2:54pm EST
  by By ERIC A. MORRIS

• How Did Israel Become "Start-Up Nation"?

  Number of comments: 15
  Since the onset of the current financial crisis, political and economic pundits have loudly proclaimed the end of American economic dominance. U.S. policymakers are struggling to revive the economy, establish new industrial competencies, and remain globally competitive. Meanwhile, in a small, young, constantly embattled country across the globe, old-fashioned entrepreneurialism [...]
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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 12:33pm EST
  by By DWYER GUNN

• Cities, Before and After

  Number of comments: 1
  A site called Oobject features juxtaposed shots of cities before and after major events like war, natural disasters, and "property speculation."

  
  

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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 10:57am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Monetizing Frustration

  Number of comments: 15
  When I'm upset about the minor annoyances of life, I sometimes find it helpful to think of the price I'd charge for enduring the annoyance. For example, when my wallet was stolen, I wondered how many dollars would someone have had to pay me to consent to the taking.

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  Posted: December 04, 2009, 9:54am EST
  by By IAN AYRES

• Community Pirating

  After jump-starting the economies of Somali fishing towns, local pirates are taking their local business further by setting up "stock exchanges" that host 72 pirate gangs or "maritime companies," a Reuters article reports.

  
  

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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 2:30pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• ClimateGate as Rorschach Test

  In the 10 days since we first blogged about "ClimateGate" - the unauthorized release of e-mails and other material from the Climate Research Unit (C.R.U.) at East Anglia University in Norwich, England - it's become strikingly clear that one's view of the issue is deeply colored by his or her [...]
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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 1:53pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Chicken Eggs and Swine Flu

  Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made - including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days before being removed.

  
  

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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 11:39am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Quotes Uncovered: Finally, the Whole Nine Yards

  Today I will give my long-awaited response to the many questions about the leading phraseological enigma of our time, namely the origin of the phrase "the whole nine yards." I am sorry to disappoint by having no definitive answer, but the reality is that many of the major etymological riddles [...]
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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 11:23am EST
  by By FRED SHAPIRO

• Can Gerbils Read Maps?

  National borders may sometimes seem like arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but a new study from the University of Haifa reveals that those borders mean something to the resident animal populations.

  
  

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  Posted: December 03, 2009, 9:51am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Uncertainty and the Fed

  Number of comments: 15
  There's a strange view out there that with unemployment above ten percent, and inflation nascent, the Fed should be thinking about raising interest rates. Yesterday Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser attempted to explain his view:

  
  

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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 2:30pm EST
  by By JUSTIN WOLFERS

• Looking for a Biological Basis for Violence

  Number of comments: 8
  Gautam Naik provides an interesting and cleverly written piece on the search for a biological basis of violent behavior.

  
  

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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 12:39pm EST
  by By STEVEN D. LEVITT

• Is the Paradox of Choice Not So Paradoxical After All?

  Number of comments: 15
  The psychologist Barry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice (here's his TED talk on the topic) was, for me at least, very persuasive. It made a compelling if counterintuitive argument: even though many people (economists especially) argue that more choice is almost always a good thing, Schwartz argued that too [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 10:58am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• No Need to Reinvent the Nudge

  Number of comments: 4
  A Boston Globe article explains how "positive deviance" - a way to change behavior by using "nudges" that already exist in a community, rather than imposing them from the outside - substantially decreased malnutrition in a Vienamese village: researchers observed children who looked more nourished than others, found that their [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 9:43am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• When the Weather Puts Food on Your Table

  A lot of industries are obviously weather-dependent - agriculture, tourism, etc. - but I hadn't known that the traditional production of roofing slate in the U.K. was also at the mercy of the weather. Here is but one of many fascinating things you can learn from Simon Winchester's excellent book [...]
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 2:00pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• The Dangers of a Live Twitter Feed

  It seems to make all the sense in the world. You are WPMI-TV, the NBC affiliate that covers southern Alabama and some of the Florida Panhandle, and you rent a big electronic billboard to promote your nightly news and weather team.

  
  

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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 1:17pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Sudhir Venkatesh Answers Your Prostitution Questions

  Number of comments: 15
  Last week we opened up the questioning for Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist whose fieldwork on street prostitutes in Chicago is the foundation of a long section of our first chapter. Here are his replies. Thanks to Sudhir and all of you for participating.

  
  

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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 11:37am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• The Global Warming Email We've All Been Waiting For

  Number of comments: 15
  I got a good chuckle out of this piece by George Monbiot in the Guardian about the recent global warming e-mail controversy. My view is that the emails aren't that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals?

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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 10:10am EST
  by By STEVEN D. LEVITT

• The Year's Top Thinkers

  Number of comments: 13
  Foreign Policy released its list of 2009's Top 100 Global Thinkers. The No. 1 spot goes to Ben Bernanke for "staving off a new Great Depression," while Obama takes No. 2 for "reimagining America's role in the world." A few of our old favorites also made the list.

  
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  Posted: December 01, 2009, 9:45am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Bagel Danger

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 3:30pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Bring Your Questions for N.F.L. Players Union Executive George Atallah

  Bring your questions for George Atallah, and follow him on Twitter at @gatallah. [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 1:26pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• A New Car or Ten Thousand Lattes?

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 11:57am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Why Don't Reputations and Salaries Rise Together?

  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! [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 10:39am EST
  by By DANIEL HAMERMESH

• More Money, More Fishing

  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.' [...]
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  Posted: November 30, 2009, 9:42am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• I Fought the Law and the Law Won: The Contest, Answered

  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?' [...]
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  Posted: November 25, 2009, 2:09pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Sex and the SUV: Men, Women, and Travel Behavior

  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.

  
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  Posted: November 25, 2009, 12:05pm EST
  by By ERIC A. MORRIS

• Some Turkey Facts to Consider, and Why You Don't Want Al Gore Doing the Roasting

  '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' [...]
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  Posted: November 25, 2009, 9:53am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Physician, Disinfect Thyself

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 2:18pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• The Spiked-Drink Myth

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 12:34pm EST
  by By RYAN HAGEN

• Today, I Am a Lawbreaker: A Freakonomics Contest

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 10:54am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Need to Know How Charitable You Are? There's an App for That

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 9:57am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Why California's Tuition Hike Might Be a Good Thing

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 24, 2009, 7:50am EST
  by By IAN AYRES

• Just in Time for Christmas: Free Autographed Bookplates

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 2:59pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• What's Your Best Externality?

  The last two years I've run an "externality" contest in my giant intro class, offering $5 to the student who comes up with the best example. ' [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 12:09pm EST
  by By DANIEL HAMERMESH

• Fixing Poverty

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 11:22am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• ClimateGate: The Very Ugly Side of Climate Science

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 23, 2009, 9:50am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Of God and Money

  A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into an economics lab. Which one is most likely to increase contributions to the public good?

  
  

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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 3:29pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• A Few Questions for Belle de Jour, Call Girl and Scientist

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 1:30pm EST
  by By RYAN HAGEN

• Why Do We Hate?

  "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' [...]
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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 12:21pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Introducing "Applied Freakonomics"

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 10:50am EST
  by By STEVEN D. LEVITT

• When Football Violence Turns Real

  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.

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  Posted: November 20, 2009, 9:42am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Quotes Uncovered: Who First Said "If You Can't Beat Em ... "

  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:

  
  

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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 3:00pm EST
  by By FRED SHAPIRO

• Nathan Myhrvold, Mad Chef

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 2:26pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Improving Well-Being in the Classroom

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 1:00pm EST
  by By DANIEL HAMERMESH

• What Are the Coming Decade's Most Overblown Fears?

  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

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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 11:10am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• The Latest in Naked Self-Promotion

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 10:35am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• A New Solution to Unemployment?

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 3:53pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Ask Sudhir Venkatesh About Street Prostitution

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 3:37pm EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• "Just Compensation" Can Lead to More Government Takings

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 1:11pm EST
  by By IAN AYRES

• King Condom

  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.

  
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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 11:02am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Birds Like You've Never Seen Them

  Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman's mind-blowing book - and totally engrossing website - Bird.

  
  

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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 9:55am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• What Do Women Want?

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 2:00pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Africa, Connected

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 11:51am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Shovel Ready or Ready to Shovel?

  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. ' [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 10:49am EST
  by By ERIC A. MORRIS

• Hugo Chavez, Rainmaker?

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 9:46am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Bill Belichick Is Great

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 3:02pm EST
  by By STEVEN D. LEVITT

• More Tax Breaks for the Rich?

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 1:16pm EST
  by By DANIEL HAMERMESH

• Make 10? Make 11? Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

  Can you decipher this first grader's math assignment? BoingBoing's Mark Frauenfelder wants a second opinion. [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 12:07pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• How to Streamline Drug Research?

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 10:14am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• Freak Week on The Takeaway

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 16, 2009, 9:49am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• When More Money = More Syphilis

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 2:31pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• What the Reindeer Saw

  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" [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 1:07pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• With Geoengineering Outlawed, Will Only Outlaws Have Geoengineering?

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 10:45am EST
  by By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

• The Organization Myth

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 9:53am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Give Me More of Your Notable Quotations

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 2:08pm EST
  by By FRED SHAPIRO

• Sand Dunes on Mars

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 12:28pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Crate Expectations

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 12, 2009, 10:18am EST
  by By JAMES MCWILLIAMS

• Overconsumption in Your DNA?

  Number of comments: 15
  Could half of Americans be carrying genes that predispose them to going into debt? At least one team of researchers thinks so.

  
  

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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 3:31pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Tonight on Charlie Rose

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 3:11pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Let Me See You Wash Your Hands!

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 1:37pm EST
  by By IAN AYRES

• The Burglary Recession

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 12:22pm EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• Fare's Fair?

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 10:37am EST
  by By ERIC A. MORRIS

• Closing the Gap

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 11, 2009, 9:47am EST
  by By FREAKONOMICS

• When You Have Honors Students in the Classroom

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 2:11pm EST
  by By Daniel Hamermesh

• Home Is ...

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 11:46am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• On the Prevalance of H1N1

  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?

  
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  Posted: November 10, 2009, 10:03am EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Maps: Fighting Disease and Skewing Borders

  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, [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 2:58pm EST
  by By Annika Mengisen

• Happiness in Australia

  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.

  
  

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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:47am EST
  by By Justin Wolfers

• Is Jaywalking in the Eye of the Beholder?

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:37am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• Is Ford Once Again Leading the Way in Auto Safety?

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:34am EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Was the 20th Century Unusually Calm?

  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). [...]
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  Posted: November 09, 2009, 9:51am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• What Are the Most Notable Quotes From 2009?

  Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred solicits your nominations for most notable quote of 2009. [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 2:43pm EST
  by By Fred Shapiro

• A Different Kind of Organ Market?

  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...

  
  

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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 2:00pm EST
  by By Freakonomics

• Charity Won't Contain This Secondary Market

  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...

  
  

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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 12:20pm EST
  by By Daniel Hamermesh

• Do Earmarks Matter?

  Making fun of earmarked Congressional spending is easy, feel-good entertainment. But is it a distraction from the bigger problem?

  
  

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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 11:31am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• SuperFreakonomics Book Club: Emily Oster Answers Your Questions

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 10:34am EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• London Calling

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 06, 2009, 10:05am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• A Great Answer From a Flight Attendant

  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:

  
  

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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 3:43pm EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Unfree Enterprise

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 1:06pm EST
  by By Eric A. Morris

• Women for Polygamy

  Number of comments: 15
  What can polygamy on the outskirts of Russia tell us about the effects of the financial crisis in less remote locales?

  
  

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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 11:55am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• Is Climate-Change Belief a Religion?

  Number of comments: 15
  Actually, yes, at least if you live in the United Kingdom.

  
  

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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 10:30am EST
  by By Steven D. Levitt

• Newspapers Not as Dead as You Think

  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. [...]
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  Posted: November 05, 2009, 9:57am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• Ken Caldeira's Carbon Solution

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 3:33pm EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• The Winner of the SuperFreakonomics Counting Contest

  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.' [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 2:35pm EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Guess What the Initials NADA Stand For

  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.' [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 1:21pm EST
  by By Steven D. Levitt

• Do You - *Achoo* - Support Health Care Reform?

  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.' [...]
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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 11:33am EST
  by By Freakonomics

• The State of Geoengineering Research

  Number of comments: 4
  As noted earlier, Congress today is holding its first-ever hearings on geoengineering as a potential means to fight global warming.

  
  

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  Posted: November 04, 2009, 10:38am EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Is the Ban on Selling Bone Marrow Unconstitutional?

  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' [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 2:49pm EST
  by By Ian Ayres

• Phones But No Food

  We've blogged before about the growing role of mobile phones in economic development; now the phones will be used to deliver food aid as well.

  
  

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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 1:09pm EST
  by By Freakonomics

• Why Does Driving Bring Out the Worst in People?

  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 [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 10:25am EST
  by By Stephen J. Dubner

• Food for Grooming

  Among these monkeys, grooming is a hot commodity and is viewed by scientists as a form of "payment" for services.

  
  

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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 9:37am EST
  by By Freakonomics