| The Danger of Safety In case you haven't heard, an accident on the Washington metro claimed nine lives last week. But then again, chances are you have heard, as the crash got wide coverage over the airwaves, on the net, and in the papers (by my count, at least five articles appeared in The Times). This is usually the case when trains or planes are involved in deadly disasters.
 Quotes Uncovered: Who Said You're Always Where You Are? 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.
Not Darwin's Year? this year, Darwin's 200th anniversary, Americans favor intelligent design over Darwinian theory. According to the poll, 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with Darwinism, but 52 percent agreed that "the development of life was guided by intelligent design." On the other hand, the poll was commissioned by The Discovery Institute, which advocates intelligent design.
Reading the Employment Report: Focus on Hours, Not Heads The latest employment numbers are out, and they are dreadful. Those commentators who saw "green shoots" out there had been focusing on the fact that in May, the economy "only" shed 322,000 jobs, which is good news when compared with the fact that the economy had been losing over 600,000 jobs per month in January, February, and March. Squint hard enough at the black line in my chart, and you can see why many were hopeful that job losses were slowing down.
How the Market Influences What Language You Read In My Dutch friends tell me that they read foreign (non-Dutch) novels that are translated into English rather than into Dutch. Their English is very good, but their Dutch is clearly better. So, I ask, why read in English?
Berlin Bans Brakeless Bikes Not long ago, cycling enthusiasts took fixed-gear racing bikes out of velodromes and onto the streets, where they were a hit among bike messengers and hardcore urban cyclists. The appeal had to do with the stripped-down simplicity of the bikes.
Bubble Science Gary Stix looks at recent developments in the science of human decision-making and economic bubbles. Stix examines the growing influence of behavioral economists, the neuroscience behind various economic phenomena, and the research of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (), and Andrew Lo.
It Takes a Free Market to Build a Toaster It takes a lot of people to manufacture even the simplest products, so making a household appliance on your own shouldn't be expected to be easy. It may even be impossible. That's what the artist Thomas Thwaites is finding as he tries to make a toaster from scratch, traveling around the world to collect raw materials and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings.
Better Bus Rides, Please The Tri-State Transportation Campaign makes a case for improving the Hudson River bus crossings connecting New Jersey and Manhattan using a combination of animation and statistics, such as
Is Free Free? You can read Malcolm Gladwell's review Chris Anderson's Free: the Future of a Radical Price online for free--except of course for the price you paid for your computer, mobile device, electricity and internet connection. This hitch is just one problem Gladwell has with Anderson's idea...
Why Are You Spending More Time With Your Kids? An exceptionally neat new working paper points out that parents' time spent with kids has increased hugely since the early 1990's, particularly among highly educated parents. This is a remarkable fact, and surprising; these are the same parents whose value of time (their wage rate) has increased relative to that of all parents, as, unsurprisingly, have their hours working for pay (since we know that labor supply responds to wage rates). They thus have less non-work time available and are spending even more of it with their kids. Why the surprising result?
Baseball in Pictures Readers of this blog know that we like baseball and explanatory graphics, so we were excited to hear about Craig Robinson's site, Flip Flop Fly Ball. Robinson presents a series of informational baseball graphics.
So Long and Thanks for All the F-Tests I've been reading a truly excellent book by Joshua Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke called Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. It's not written for a general audience, but if you pulled an A- or better on a college-level econometrics course (and if you love Freakonomics), then this is the book for you. It should be required reading for anyone who is trying to write an applied dissertation. It is the rare book that captures the feeling of how to go about trying to attack an empirical questio; and it does this by working through two or three dozen of the neatest empirical papers of the last decade (often coauthored by Angrist). It is also peppered with references to Douglas Adams's writing -- so what's not to like?
Paved With Good Intentions: The Finalists It wasn't easy picking the finalists for our "Worst Roads in America" competition, but our intrepid judges Genevieve Giuliano and Mohja Rhoads, top transportation scholars at the University of Southern California, made their decisions and selected the posts below. Now it's up to you to vote for the winner in the comments section.
Why the Chinese Save Some say that a major cause of the U.S. housing bubble was a surge in savings overseas, particularly in China, where the personal savings rate soared to 30 percent of disposable income. (In the U.S., meanwhile, we were saving next to nothing). Just why the Chinese were saving so much has been a puzzle to many economists. Now Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang think they've come up with an explanation.
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