Robin Goldstein on the Economics of Wine
We are delighted to welcome Robin Goldstein to our family of Freakonomics blog contributors.
We’ve blogged in the past about Robin’s research involving blind wine tastings, as well as his research on whether people can tell the difference between pate and dog food. Read More »
When Boring = Great
John Lorinc profiles Mark Carney, the governor of the Central Bank of Canada. While the rest of the developing world’s banks are on life support, Lorinc writes that Canada’s financial system “has sailed through this crisis with its international reputation almost unscathed.” Carney is also a vocal advocate for increased regulation of the financial sector and is one of the primary architects of the G20′s regulatory reforms. Read More »
Freakonomics Quiz: Where Does the Harvard Class of 1989 Live Now?
I could find nine people from my class who are famous/semi-famous/infamous. Interestingly, not one of them sent in an entry to be published in the book. Overall, about 40 percent of the people in the class sent in updates. What was most surprising about the famous people not writing in is that many of them are famous because they are writers.
The other thing that struck me as interesting and somewhat surprising was the geographic distribution of my former classmates. Let’s see whether the distribution is surprising to the blog readers by running a contest. Read More »
Numbers Are Bad Liars
In a Washington Post op-ed, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco claim that the truth lies in the digits of the vote count. Humans are bad at making up fraudulent numbers, they write, and the fact that the vote counts for the different provinces contain “too many 7′s and not enough 5′s in the last digit” and not enough non-adjacent digits points to made-up numbers. Read More »
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