Drops in the Bucket: How Far Along Are We Really Toward Reducing Healthcare Spending?
This is a guest post by Jeff Mosenkis, a freelance producer with Freakonomics Radio who holds a Ph.D. in psychology and comparative human development.
Ezekiel Emanuel has a series of columns in the New York Times exploring healthcare costs that’s worth examining. Emanuel is an oncologist and prolific bioethicist. He has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard, where he also taught. He advised the White House on healthcare, and was recently named chair of the bioethics department at Penn. And yes, he’s the older brother of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel (fictionalized by Jeremy Piven on Entourage).
Two weeks ago, Emanuel pointed out that even though the U.S. outspends every other country on healthcare ($2.6 trillion a year; the equivalent of France’s entire GDP), we’re nowhere near the healthiest country. This week, he debunks ideas from the Left and Right about how to fix soaring costs. Read More »
Cockpit Confidential: How Difficult Was That Landing in Poland?
In the past, we’ve brought you the airline expertise of Captain Steve. Now, in a new feature we’re calling “Cockpit Confidential,” commercial airline pilot Patrick Smith writes about the hidden side of the airline industry. First up, Smith takes you behind the scenes of the recent belly-landing of a Polish Airlines 767, looking at what the media got wrong and what was likely going on inside the cockpit as the crew scrambled to deal with an almost unprecedented situation. Read More »
How Smart Is the Octopus?
We’ve blogged extensively about the often human-like behavior of monkeys, but here’s another animal that may give monkeys a run for their money: the octopus.
“Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind,” writes Sy Montgomery in a new article for Orion Magazine. “But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities.”
Here’s one example of the animal’s intelligence: Read More »
The Pricing Strategy of Omelets
A café in Seattle offers a 3-egg omelet breakfast for $7.99, and a 6-egg omelet breakfast for $9.99. They will let two people split the 6-egg omelet, and even let the two people order one slice of different kinds of toast with the shared omelet. Is this pricing strategy crazy?
Perhaps, but unless each person would order a 3-egg omelet otherwise and pay $15.98, perhaps not. The marginal cost of making the 6-egg omelet is really just the 3 eggs, which cost much less than $2. The good deal on the shared 6-egg omelet induces a couple to split it, and stuff themselves, rather than split a 3-egg omelet, which my wife and I often do. The incentives provided by this pricing decision may actually raise the café’s profits.
(HT to MH)
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 