Macro Insights from the Brookings Panel
Today, I’m off at the spring meeting of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity. And for any serious student of the economy, it’s a great line-up of papers. (Full disclosure: David Romer and I are the editors. We commissioned the papers, so of course we love ‘em.) Rather than write about the papers, I figured Read More »
When Estimating Is Dangerous
A recent article in The New York Times offers a worrying application of street-fighting reasoning methods. The article describes the deterioration of the Lake Isabella Dam in California. This dam, the article reports, is one of 4,400 considered “susceptible to failure” (out of the 85,000 dams in the country). I’ll pass over lightly the statement early in the article that the repair costs would be “billions of dollars,” and note only that this figure seems like a massive underestimate. Read More »
Was Microsoft Wrong to “Use” the Japanese Earthquake for Marketing?
This past weekend, Microsoft tried to do a little good (donate $100,000) and use that good to market Bing. Read More »
Quotes Uncovered: Pardon My French
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 