“Football Freakonomics”: Why Even Ice a Kicker?
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
Icing the kicker: Even casual football fans have come to expect that when a game is on the line and the kicker is brought out to try a crucial field goal, the opposing coach might call a timeout just as the kicker approaches the ball.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? The coach can “ice” the kicker — mess with his mind, throw off his routine, make him stand around like an awkward guy at a cocktail party for all the world to see.
But does it work? Read More »
It’s No Major Major Major Major, But …
… this was still a puzzling sign to behold. It’s on Lenox Ave. (a.k.a. Malcolm X Blvd.), in the southern end of Harlem:
Did your mind get stuck for a minute when it read those words, or did it quickly skip ahead and fill in a blank? (Danny Kahneman writes nicely about this phenomenon in Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
Once you walk a few steps further south, the sign becomes complete.
Famous Boos
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Boo…Who?“, tackles the phenomenon of booing. Why do we do it? When and where (if ever) is it appropriate? While we focus mostly on modern examples, audiences have been voicing their displeasure for millennia. Tracing the boo back to its origins takes you to ancient Greece, and the Festival of Dionysia, when playwrights competed to determine whose tragedy was the best. Audience participation was considered a civic duty. At the Colosseum in Rome, booing, or the lack thereof, often determined whether a gladiator lived or died.
Hard to say exactly what a boo sounded like back then. Maybe more of a shout, a jeer, or a whistle, rather than the extended, cow-like booooooo we issue today. According to linguist Ben Zimmer, the first time the word “boo” appeared as an expression of dissatisfaction was in the diary of a British schoolboy in 1833. Zimmer wrote about it here. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some noteworthy boos. It is not remotely encyclopedic, and leans very heavily on very recent events. So feel free to supplement with more examples in the comments section. Read More »
Healthcare Needs Insurance Companies Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
My reveries about toasts landing butter side down — the subject of an upcoming blog entry — were pleasantly broken by the discussion on this blog of Ezekiel Emanuel’s analysis of healthcare spending, in which Emanuel goes to town on Left and Right policy ideas for cutting spending. Among his criticisms of Left ideas:
[I]t turns out that the combined profits of the country’s five largest for-profit health insurance companies — United, WellPoint, Aetna, Humana and Cigna — were $11.7 billion, only 0.5 percent of total health-care spending. Even confiscating every penny of those profits would add up to less than half of the cost-saving threshold.
I liked how he quoted the savings as a dimensionless number (the percentage of total healthcare spending). 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 