Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]
Search results for freakonomics
How effective are football coaches?
Dave Berri writes: A recent study published in the Social Science Quarterly suggests that these moves may not lead to the happiness the fans envision (HT: the Sports Economist). E. Scott Adler, Michael J. Berry, and David Doherty looked at coaching changes from 1997 to 2010. What they found should give pause to people who [...]
Freakonomics Experiments
Stephen Dubner writes: Freakonomics Experiments is a set of simple experiments about complex issues—whether to break up with your significant other, quit your job, or start a diet, just to name a few. . . . a collaboration between researchers at the University of Chicago, Freakonomics, and—we hope!—you. Steve Levitt and John List, of the [...]
Did Steven Levitt really believe in 2008 that Obama “would be the greatest president in history”?
In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because [...]
Two reviews of Nate Silver’s new book, from Kaiser Fung and Cathy O’Neil
People keep asking me what I think of Nate’s book, and I keep replying that, as a blogger, I’m spoiled. I’m so used to getting books for free that I wouldn’t go out and buy a book just for the purpose of reviewing it. (That reminds me that I should post reviews of some of [...]
Who exactly are those silly academics who aren’t as smart as a Vegas bookie?
I get suspicious when I hear unsourced claims that unnamed experts somewhere are making foolish statements. For example, I recently came across this, from a Super Bowl-themed article from 2006 by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: As it happens, there is one betting strategy that will routinely beat a bookie, and you don’t even have [...]
“I coach the jumpers here at Boise State . . .”
Jeff Petersmeyer writes: I coach the jumpers here at Boise State and as a fan of the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis (the book that got my brain initially wired to look further than just recruiting the “best” jumpers out of high school (as listed by Track and Field News, etc), I have tried to [...]
$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
A blog commenter pointed me to this news article on Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociology professor here: He was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated. According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The [...]
What is expected of a consultant
Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just [...]
A Non-random Walk Down Campaign Street
Political campaigns are commonly understood as random walks, during which, at any point in time, the level of support for any party or candidate is equally likely to go up or down. Each shift in the polls is then interpreted as the result of some combination of news and campaign strategies. A completely different story [...]
A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics
Jonathan Cantor pointed me to a new blog post by Stephen Dubner in which he expresses disagreement with what Kaiser and I wrote in our American Scientist article, “Freakonomics: What Went Wrong?”. In response, I thought it would be interesting to go “meta” here by considering all the different ways ways that I could reply [...]
Economics now = Freudian psychology in the 1950s: More on the incoherence of “economics exceptionalism”
What follows is a long response to a comment on someone else’s blog. The quote is, “Thinking like an economist simply means that you scientifically approach human social behavior. . . .” I’ll give the context in a bit, but first let me say that I thought this topic might be worth one more discussion [...]
I’m officially no longer a “rogue”
In our Freakonomics: What Went Wrong article, Kaiser and I wrote: Levitt’s publishers characterize him as a “rogue economist,” yet he received his Ph.D. from MIT, holds the title of Alvin H. Baum Professor at the University of Chicago, and has served as editor of the completely mainstream Journal of Political Economy. Further “rogue” credentials [...]
Suggested resolution of the Bem paradox
There has been an increasing discussion about the proliferation of flawed research in psychology and medicine, with some landmark events being John Ioannides’s article, “Why most published research findings are false” (according to Google Scholar, cited 973 times since its appearance in 2005), the scandals of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel, two leading psychology professors [...]
Blogging, polemical and otherwise
In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after [...]
Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But [...]
Freakonomics: What went wrong?
Kaiser and I tell the story. Regular readers will be familiar with much of this material. We kept our article short because of space restrictions at American Scientist magazine. Now I want to do a follow-up with all the good stories that we had to cut. P.S. Let me remind everyone once again that Freakonomics [...]
The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports, “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, [...]
Flip it around
Mark Palko discusses a radio interview on the effect of parents on children’s education. In short, the interviewer (Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame) claims that the research shows that parents don’t have much influence on whether their children go to college. The evidence is based on a comparison of adopted and non-adopted children. Palko makes [...]
Top 10 blog obsessions
I was just thinking about this because we seem to be circling around the same few topics over and over (while occasionally slipping in some new statistical ideas):
“One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society”
I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile. Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments: 1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. 2. People are irrational and [...]
Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for [...]
Steven Rhoads’s book, “The Economist’s View of the World”
About 15 years ago I ran across this book and read it, just for fun. Rhoads is a (nonquantitative) political scientist and he’s writing about basic economic concepts such as opportunity cost, marginalism, and economic incentives. As he puts it, “welfare economics is concerned with anything any individual values enough to be willing to give [...]
Is it plausible that 1% of people pick a career based on their first name?
In my discussion of dentists-named-Dennis study, I referred to my back-of-the-envelope calculation that the effect (if it indeed exists) corresponds to an approximate 1% aggregate chance that you’ll pick a profession based on your first name. Even if there are nearly twice as many dentist Dennises as would be expected from chance alone, the base rate is so low that a shift of 1% of all Dennises would be enough to do this. My point was that (a) even a small effect could show up when looking at low-frequency events such as the choice to pick a particular career or live in a particular city, and (b) any small effects will inherently be difficult to detect in any direct way.
Uri Simonsohn (the author of the recent rebuttal of the original name-choice article by Brett Pelham et al.) wrote:
A possible resolution of the albedo mystery!
Remember that bizarre episode in Freakonomics 2, where Levitt and Dubner went to the Batcave-like lair of a genius billionaire who told them that “the problem with solar panels is that they’re black.” I’m not the only one who wondered at the time: of all the issues to bring up about solar power, why that [...]