Bring Your Freakonomics Questions for a Radio FAQ
Once in a while, we do an FAQ podcast (that’s FREAK-quently Asked Questions) whereby you send us questions via the comments section and we answer them in a radio program. We’re gearing up to do another FAQ, likely to be released on Jan. 4, so fire away. Given the release date, you might consider asking about New Year’s resolutions (and the commitment devices we sometimes employ); the dangers of drunk walking; maybe even the reproductive provenance of your holiday meal. Feel free to ask followup questions on radio stuff we’ve done in the past too, like the “Prius Effect” (conspicuous conservation), the decline of hitchhiking, and whether expensive wines actually taste better. Thanks in advance.
The World’s Best Economics Department?
A new website, from the University of Chicago’s Initiative on Global Markets (IGM), will “pose one question a week, and post answers from 40 senior professors at elite U.S. universities” in an effort to create “the world’s best economics department.”
“We’re doing this because we think economists have a distorted role in policy debates,” said Brian Barry, the director of IGM. “When experts fight about minor points they get much more attention than when they broadly agree about important ones. And when they disagree about big issues, the reasons don’t often come through clearly. Sometimes, ideas that are shaky or on the fringe get passed off as mainstream.”
So far, economists have responded to questions about federal “buy American” mandates, education and taxes. Read More »
Beware: This Blog Apparently Causes Academic Fraud
Way to scapegoat, Chronicle of Higher Education!
An article about a Dutch psychologist accused of faking his research data wonders if academic fraudsters are responding to the wrong incentives:
Read More »Is a desire to get picked up by the Freakonomics blog, or the dozens of similar outlets for funky findings, really driving work in psychology labs? Alternatively—though not really mutually exclusively—are there broader statistical problems with the field that let snazzy but questionable findings slip through?
The Economic Battlefield of the NBA Lockout
The following is a guest post by David Berri, a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is also the lead author of Stumbling on Wins, the general manager of the sports-economics blog Wages of Wins, and is a frequent contributor to the Freakonomics blog.
With the NBA away, sports fans are looking for something to satisfy their need to watch teams strive for victory. Well, why not take a look at the teams competing in the lockout? Okay, maybe this is a contest only a sports economist could love. But while it may not appeal to everyone, the labor dispute is still best thought of as a contest between two teams.
The first team is the NBA owners. The owners are the dominant buyer in the world market for elite basketball talent, so they have substantial monopsony power. In the other corner are the players, who are currently trying to disband their union. This union gave the players monopoly power in the sale of elite basketball talent (more specifically, in helping to determine the conditions under which individual players would sell their services). When a monopsony meets a monopoly on the economic battlefield, the outcome is determined by bargaining. 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 