A Flight-Delay Excuse I'd Never Heard Before
I have heard a lot of reasons for planes being delayed, but this was a new one. My Delta flight out of JFK was just about to push back from the gate when the captain made an announcement. He explained that there is a wheelchair on board every flight, and the one on this plane had had a malfunction – the handle broke, he said – which made it unusable. It didn’t seem to matter that no passengers on the flight had needed a wheelchair to board: the plane couldn’t take off, he said, until a replacement was brought on board. Read More »
Brother, Can You Spare a Trill?
Economists Mark J. Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller propose a new tool for government financing: “trills” — i.e., shares in U.S. GDP. Read More »
Predicting the Midterm Elections: A Freakonomics Quorum
This year’s midterm elections promise to be a bit more eventful than usual, with predictions of seismic change in Congress and in many statehouses, most of it in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next? Read More »
Very Long Odds in the Israeli Lottery
A funny thing happened in Israel last week. The winning state lottery numbers were the same as the numbers drawn three weeks earlier. Read More »
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