FREAK-est Links
This week, why being a king is the most dangerous job in history, an etiquette group in Germany wants to ban workplace air-kissing, Jonathan Stark’s social experiment with a Starbucks card, anti-technology terrorists attack in Mexico, and why Google and Wikipedia are bad for our memory. Read More »
This Week in Corn Predictions: The USDA Got it Right (Almost)
We’ve been having some fun recently at the expense of people who like to predict things. In our hour-long Freakonomics Radio episode “The Folly of Prediction” — which will be available as a podcast in the fall — we showed that humans are lousy at predicting just about anything: the weather, the stock market, elections. In fact, even most experts are only nominally better than a coin flip at determining a future outcome. And yet there remains a huge demand for professional predictors and forecasters.
Earlier this week, Stephen Dubner and Kai Ryssdal chatted about this on the Freakonomics Radio segment on Marketplace. The question remains: “should bad predictions be punished?”
As mentioned in the segment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s August crop yield report came out today. The result? Not bad actually. The corn yield forecast was revised downward by just 1.3% from its estimate last month. That’s a considerable improvement over last year’s big miss, when the August corn yield report had to be revised downward by almost 7%. Read More »
The (Accidental?) Wisdom of Yogi Berra
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.
Jordan asked:
“Okay, but did he say the quotation in question?” [i.e., did Yogi Berra actually say, "I never said most of the things I said." From three weeks ago.]
According to the ever-helpful Yale Book of Quotations, Sports Illustrated, March 17, 1986, quoted Berra as saying “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Read More »
The Divergence of Fatherhood: Feast or Famine
A recent report by Gretchen Livingston and Kim Parker at the Pew Research Center explores the ways that American fatherhood has evolved over the last 50 years, particularly as it relates to the time fathers spend with their children. Since the mid-twentieth century, fatherhood has split in two distinct directions, they say: fathers either spend significantly more time with their kids, or live totally apart from them.
Fathers who live with their children have become more intensely involved in their lives, spending more time with them and taking part in a greater variety of activities. However, the share of fathers who are residing with their children has fallen significantly in the past half century.
In 1960, only 11% of American children lived apart from their fathers. Today, that share has risen to 27%, while the share of children living apart from their mothers has increased only modestly, from 4% in 1960 to 8% in 2010. 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 