FREAK Shots: Only in Japan?
Are such products too weird to take hold in the U.S.? Remember that the Walkman, the great cassette-tape ancestor of portable CD players and iPods, also started out as one of those wacky Japanese inventions. Read More »
How Do You Speed Up Economists?
Like many other journals in economics and other disciplines, the Economic Journal, the main scholarly organ of the Royal Economic Society, has paid referees (judges of submitted scholarly papers) for prompt reports (e.g., the American Economic Review offers $100 for a prompt report). The purpose of this is to provide an incentive to get the Read More »
Why Didn’t a Woman Write Freakonomics?
| Alison Flood, writing on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, asks why Freakonomics and most other books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular” weren’t written by women. She theorizes that either women are better at storytelling (think Factory Girls and The Big Necessity) than “sell[ing] our hypothesis about the world” — or it’s just Read More »
Let's Call It a Flump
The economics meme of the day appears to be naming the current downturn. A while back, our friends at Economix solicited reader suggestions, of which my favorite was “The Great Deception.” Read More »
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