The Price of Friendship, as Measured by Radiohead Tickets
This morning, I got a hurried whisper-screaming call from my good friend Jonathan C.:
“I. Have. Radiohead. Tickets.” he breathed. “Do you want one?”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Radiohead is a very very popular UK rock band. Tickets for the band’s 2 New York shows, the first U.S. performance in 3 years, went on sale this morning on Ticketmaster and sold out in a couple minutes.
Radiohead is famous for doing price experiments with fans. At the height of illegal downloads, the band asked fans to pay-what-you-want for their album. They picked a small venue in New York — the Roseland Ballroom which accommodates 3,000 instead of Madison Square Garden which seats about 20,000 — and limiting ticket sales to 2 per customer. But can limiting supply like this really stop a black market from emerging? Read More »
Computers vs. the News: What’s Behind the Stock Market Chop?
Today marked another triple-digit move for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed up 272 points. Of the 45 trading days over the last two months, 28 of them (including today) have seen triple-digit moves, meaning the Dow has gone up or down by 100 points (or more) 62% of the time since July 25. The average daily move for the Dow during that time has been 188 points, or 1.6%.
Here’s a snapshot showing the performance of the Dow over the last two months:
Pretty choppy, right? I’m no stock market historian, but I’d imagine that you’d be pretty hard-pressed to find such a sustained period of volatility. Which brings up the question: what’s causing this? Obviously, there is a lot of uncertainty (and fear) in the market right now. From Europe’s sovereign debt problems, to America’s toxic political climate, to the sputtering global economy, there is a lot to be anxious about. Anxiety breeds indecision, which characterizes the bumpy market pretty well. Read More »
A Subway Ride to the Past — Compliments of Nucky Thompson
This past weekend, I was waiting for the subway when an old, 1920s-era train pulled to a stop on the express line. My first thought was that it was one of those worker trains you sometimes see (especially on weekends) that ferry MTA crews along the line as they make repairs. But passengers were getting on. Guys in MTA gear hauled open the manually sliding doors and did an old-fashioned call-out: Downtown express train. Next stop 72nd Street. Getting on seemed the obvious thing to do. It helped that neither I nor my wife had seen the news that HBO paid the MTA $150,000 to run a 1920s-era vintage subway train up and down the express line, as a way to promote the second season of Boardwalk Empire.
So the effect was as they’d intended: stupefaction, followed by slow realization, followed by total bemused wonderment. It felt like being at an amusement park. I was amazed at how fast it went, how comfortable the seats were (compared to the current plastic ones), and how loud it was with the windows down. Here’s a video: Read More »
A Sports Economist’s Thoughts on Moneyball: A Guest Post by J.C. Bradbury
J.C. Bradbury is a long-time friend and contributor to the Freakonomics blog. An associate professor of economics at Kennesaw State University, Bradbury is the author of two books on baseball: The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, and Hot Stove Economics: Understanding Baseball’s Second Season. For years, he covered the intersection of baseball and economics on his Sabernomics blog.
So with the new movie Moneyball out, we wanted to get J.C.’s thoughts on how well the book translates onto the big screen, and whether it does justice to the wonky, sabermetrics approach to baseball.
An Economist’s Thoughts on Moneyball
By J.C. Bradbury
When it was published in 2003, the book Moneyball generated a buzz in the field of economics because it covered several topics economists like, such as constrained maximization, market efficiency, entrepreneurship, and statistical analysis. To most people, economics is boring: it’s a class they took because they had to. Author Michael Lewis introduced important economic concepts through a venue that millions of Americans pay to watch. As a book, it succeeded, but I was skeptical that it could work as a movie. I was wrong. Even my wife, who only reluctantly agreed to see the movie with me, enjoyed it. 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 