Surprise: Money Still Beats Goodwill as Incentive for Organ Donors
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know we write a lot about organ donation and incentives. Like whether registered organ donors should get priority when it comes time to get in line themselves. Or whether the transplant market is too restrictive.
A recent Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel highlights the difference between goodwill and cold hard cash as incentives to donate, not to mention the legal limits that exist to prevent transplants going to the highest bidder. Read More »
Freakonomics Radio Tops the iTunes Charts; and a Contest: Which Episodes Do You Most Love (or Hate)?
With the help of our latest podcast, “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?”, Freakonomics Radio has jumped to No. 1 on iTunes.
This happens once in a while, but is still rare enough to be a big treat. (Ira Glass — who once gave us some podcast advice — has pretty much taken up permanent residence on No. 1 iTunes Place; the rest of us mortals camp out down the street.)
If you visit iTunes this week, you’ll see a lovely promotional banner (below) for our program. That certainly helped with the No. 1 ranking. But so did you! Thanks to all of you for listening, downloading, and spreading the word. We have a great lineup of new episodes coming this fall, and our podcast has just gone weekly.
If you feel like letting us know your favorite (and/or least favorite) episodes in the comments below, that’d be helpful. Good feedback is valuable, in life and in art, but it can be devilishly hard to come by. So we’ll give you an incentive: we’ll send some Freakonomics swag to whoever writes the most interesting positive review and whoever writes the most interesting negative review as well.
Does Fingerprinting Food Stamp Recipients Save Money?
What do New York City and Arizona have in common? No, this is not a trick question; there is one thing: currently, they are the only jurisdictions in the country that require food stamp recipients to register their fingerprints in an electronic database. California and Texas recently lifted their fingerprinting requirements.
Not surprisingly, this has touched off a debate over social utility and costs in New York. Proponents say that the resulting fingerprint database saves the city millions of dollars a year in duplicate fraud. Last year, the Human Resources Administration said it found 1,900 cases of duplicate applications for 2010, with savings of nearly $5.3 million.
Detractors claim this estimate is unproven and that fingerprinting keeps a certain amount of needy people out of the system through intimidation. Read More »
Why Do Only Top MBA Programs Practice Grade Non-Disclosure?
Last spring while I was finishing my fellowship at Columbia Business School, much of the student body was busy trying to overturn the school’s grade disclosure policy. Back then, Columbia was one of the few top MBA programs that did not practice grade non-disclosure, meaning recruiters were allowed to ask Columbia students about their grades. By the end of the year, the issue had passed a student referendum, and this semester Columbia became the latest business school to have a grade non-disclosure policy, which encourages students not to disclose their grades to employers until they’ve been hired.
Grade non-disclosure policies are a quirk of MBA programs. You won’t find them in medical or law school. In fact, the only place you do find them is among top business schools. Of the 15 most selective MBA programs, 9 of them have some form of a grade non-disclosure policy. But of the schools ranked from 20 to 50, none do.
A new paper from a pair of Wharton economists examines why this is. 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 