If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them
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 researches.
Barry Ritholtz asked:
Read More »“I keep hearing variations of the following as Twain: ‘History may not repeat but it rhymes.’ But I have never been able to track that back to Twain anywhere.”
Parents Are Less Happy. So What?
Bryan Caplan’s new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, (which he blogged about for us here and here) has people talking about happiness and kids, again. Over at Cato Unbound, my better half Betsey Stevenson takes Bryan to task on some of his claims. It’s worth reading the full essay. Jeff Ely at Cheap Talk says you should take note of her views on the distinction between happiness and utility. Instead, I want to highlight an insight that comes from thinking through a formal framework: Read More »
The New GDP Data Is Bad. The Hidden Data Behind It Is Worse
This morning the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released its latest estimates of GDP. And there’s bad news, hidden in the details. Most analysts are focused on the fact that GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was unrevised, remaining at 1.8%. But they’re focused on the wrong number.
National accounting aficionados know that hidden beneath the headline number is an alternative estimate of GDP. This alternative is often called GDP(I), because it is based on income data, rather than spending data. And GDP(I) is actually a more reliable estimate. Unfortunately, this more accurate indicator tells us that GDP grew by only 1.2%. That’s bad news. Read More »
Freakonomics Radio: The Economics of Bounty Hunting
What are the chances that Dominique Strauss-Kahn will jump his very large bail? Very slim. But if that somehow were to happen, he’d have to worry about more than just the police; he’d also have a bounty hunter on his tail.
Our new Freakonomics Radio podcast, called “To Catch a Fugitive,” explores the economics of bounty hunting. (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via on the media player at the top, or read the transcript here) It features a pair of great guests.
The first is Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University who is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and blogs at Marginal Revolution. Here is the Journal of Law and Economics paper that inspired the episode, “The Fugitive: Evidence on Public Versus Private Law Enforcement From Bail Jumping,” which Tabarrok co-authored with Eric Helland. And here is a related article that Tabarrok published in The Wilson Quarterly.
The second guest is Bob Burton, a longtime bounty hunter who literally wrote
the book on the subject, called Bounty Hunter. As you will hear in the podcast, he is a colorful guy, but in most ways the polar opposite of Dog the Bounty Hunter. 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 