The Latest Odds on Palin, Ahmadinejad, Strauss-Kahn, and … Another Recession?
Interesting browsing these days on the prediction market InTrade, which is still mourning the loss of its founder John Delaney (a man I very much enjoyed knowing a bit the past few years):
1. Barack Obama to be re-elected President in 2012: 62.0% chance
2. Mitt Romney to be Republican Presidential Nominee in 2012: 29.6%
3. Sarah Palin to formally announce a run for President before midnight ET on 31 Dec 2011: 41.9%
4. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to no longer be President of Iran before midnight ET 31 Dec 2011: 31.0%
5. Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be guilty of at least one charge: 84.0%
6. Christine Lagarde to be named the next Managing Director of the IMF: 85.0%
7. The U.S. Economy will go into Recession during 2012: 20.0%
We should assume that Nos. 1 and 7 are inversely correlated. I went to the site this morning looking to see if there’s a contract out on Lloyd Blankfein, having read this (NYT) article, but I don’t see one (yet?).
FREAK-est Links
Is there a mathematics generation gap? Do good restaurant reviews cause price hikes? Journals of the American Economic Association wave goodbye to double blind peer reviews, and more. Read More »
“The Church of Scionology”
Season 1, Episode 1
About one-third of the companies in the Fortune 500 are family-controlled firms. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that fantastic?
You know the story. Some incredibly hard-working person starts a business – maybe a bakery or a brewery, a carmaker or a newspaper – and, against all odds, the business doesn’t just succeed; it flourishes. But someday, it’s inevitable that the founder will retire (or die). So who takes over then?
That’s easy: the founder’s son or daughter. The scion of the family. Who better to protect and grow the family brand?
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Who could possibly work harder than someone whose name is on the building?
The family firm is a way of life. And it’s a nice story. But we’ve got a big, hungry economy here, people. “Nice” doesn’t necessarily generate jobs; “nice” doesn’t increase productivity or spur innovation. So when it comes to putting the family scion in charge of a company, here’s what we wanted to know: what do the numbers say? Read More »
Winners of Heart + Mind Donations Contest
Earlier I ran a contest for two free copies of More Than Good Intentions. The quick summary: we ran a randomized trial to test whether employing the use of statistics, and worse yet scientific evidence, would raise more or less money when added to a standard emotional appeal in a direct mail marketing solicitation for donations for Freedom from Hunger (a charity I respect and do research with). We split the analysis by size of prior gift. The Freakonomics contest then asked two questions: 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 