Freakonomics

Loneliness or Cheap Wine

By Daniel Hamermesh — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:17:56 PDT

I'm alone in Europe, living in an apartment and cooking for myself. I bought a bottle of decent red wine for the remarkably low price of €2.99 and am consuming about one-fourth of it with each dinner (instead of the one-fifth or one-sixth of a bottle I would drink with each dinner at home). Have I substituted toward wine, moving down the demand curve because the price is lower than at home? Or am I drinking more because I am alone and miss my wife? has my demand curve for wine merely shifted out due to my solitary lifestyle?

Polling: What's the Point?

By Freakonomics — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:29:08 PDT

Conor Clarke suggests removing polls from the American political process. Not only are poll results frequently wrong, he argues, but polling "uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy."

When Credit Card Companies Compete, You Win

By Ian Ayres — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:43:52 PDT

Barry Nalebuff and I have a new column in Forbes ("A Market Test for Credit Cards") which criticizes some aspects of the recent credit-card legislation as being too anti-market.

At Least the French Are Honest

By Steven D. Levitt — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:11:10 PDT

After winning a stage of the Tour de France, Frenchman Thomas Voeckler was quoted as saying,

Looking for Someone to Blame?

By Freakonomics — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:54:15 PDT

In an article headlined "The Man Who Crashed the World" Michael Lewis profiles Joe Cassano, the former head of A.I.G.'s Financial Products unit. Lewis interviewed employees at the beleaguered F.P. unit and writes that most believed that "if it hadn't been for A.I.G. F.P. the subprime-mortgage machine might never have been built, and the financial crisis might never have happened."

Quotes Uncovered: Brides and Fruit Flies

By Fred Shapiro — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:09:28 PDT

A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.

"Family Values" and the Law: A Guest Post

By Stephen J. Dubner — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:32:48 PDT

We previously featured some compelling guest posts by the legal scholar Ethan Leib on the subject of friendship and the law. Now he is back, along with his two co-authors on a new book called Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. This is their first of three posts.

Would You Pay More ...

By Freakonomics — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:16:19 PDT

... for a Sanka ashtray if Luc Sante made up a story about it? Apparently at least a few people would, as Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker found when they launched a project called Significant Objects, where they paired up creative writers with objects bought at garage sales and asked them to make up a story about the objects. Each object is for sale on eBay, where anyone can bid for it.

A SuperFreakonomics Counting Contest

By Stephen J. Dubner — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:05:50 PDT

The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest? Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don't yet exist.

Shopping for Gamblers

By Freakonomics — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:38:34 PDT

How can Swoopo, the online auction site, rake in $2,151 selling a laptop for $35.86? Easy: set an opening price of $0.01 (almost free!), then let each new bidder top the last by only a penny, and extend the auction each time someone places a bid in the final seconds. Oh, and collect $0.60 from each player for each bid they place. The winner of the auction might walk away with a good deal, but the losers will have racked up big fees chasing their sunk costs.

Track Your Taxes

By Freakonomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:42:06 PDT

Concerned citizens can now track government spending at USASpending.gov. Users can view current and historical spending on contracts, grants, and loans, broken down by characteristics like congressional district and contractor. The website, mandated by the Federal Funding and Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, is a revamped version of fedspending.org. Warning: if you're a pacifist, steer clear, or at least keep your blood-pressure pills at hand.

Man vs. Machine on Jeopardy

By Steven D. Levitt — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:46:19 PDT

IBM researchers are hard at work creating a computer that will match wits against humans on the television show Jeopardy. Compared to checkers, chess, or backgammon, playing Jeopardy would seem to be a hard task for a computer because language is such a fundamental part of answering the questions correctly.

Domo Arigato Missus Krugman

By Freakonomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:30:50 PDT

Slate columnist Daniel Gross thinks he's found the female embodiment of Paul Krugman in Japanese economist Noriko Hama.

The Nanny Nation

By Dwyer Gunn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:16:36 PDT

Barry Ritholtz, in his new book Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy writes, "The iconic image is the American cowboy. You can picture him on a cattle drive, wearily watching over his herd. All he needed to get by were his wits, his horse -- and his trusty Winchester."

FREAK Shots: Bird Critics

By Freakonomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:49:01 PDT

A new study by a research team from Tokyo's Keio University found that pigeons can distinguish between paintings the researchers consider good and bad.