Bring Us Your Freakonomics Questions for Another Radio FAQ
It’s time again to record another FAQ podcast (that’s “FREAK-quently Asked Questions”), and we need your help!
Every once in a while, we solicit questions from Freakonomics readers and answer them on Freakonomics Radio. Levitt always has a great time doing this, as evidenced by his answers to why “I don’t know” is so hard to say or why we vote (or don’t).
So fire away in the comments section below, and keep up with the podcast at iTunes or via the RSS feed to see if your question gets answered.
A Hidden Side of Domestic Violence
In a recent podcast called “Save Me From Myself,” which is about the use of commitment devices, we discussed one such measure that’s intended to protect victims of domestic violence. It featured an interview with Brown economist Anna Aizer, co-author of this paper on the topic. A listener named Jay Turley wrote in:
Read More »This episode was very interesting, as usual. But the whole “domestic violence” section really irritated me.
As a male victim of domestic violence from a woman, I found it surprising that people such as yourselves completely bought into and promoted the now-disproved tenet that domestic violence equals male-on-female violence.
Hitchhiking Gets a Hearing in D.C.
Inspired by our podcast “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?,” transportation scholar Alan Pisarksi organized a discussion session on the topic at the recent Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. Pisarski, who was also featured in our episode, hoped the event would encourage scholars to apply insights from the past to current issues in transportation policy. Read More »
Frank Rich on Media Bias
Our latest full-length podcast, “How Biased Is Your Media?,” is about how academic researchers have been trying to measure the slant of your news.
The most common meme in this realm says that the mainstream media leans to the left. Frank Rich, a former op-ed columnist at the New York Times, who is now a writer-at-large for New York Magazine, says recent history proves this just isn’t true. Take, for instance, how his former employer handled the lead-up to the war in Iraq:
Read More »RICH: I think it flies very much in the face of the assumption that the so-called liberal media are out to doom Republicans or conservative causes. The New York Times promoted dubious evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs on its front page. The New York Times is thought by many on the right to be a so-called liberal slanting paper. The Washington Post, also, less elaborately, failed to really vet the evidence. The networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC are often considered by the right to be liberal news organizations. None of them questioned at all the rationale for going to war in Iraq.
You Are What You Say: Democrats and Republicans in Blue and Red
Our latest podcast is called “How Biased Is Your Media?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes or get the RSS feed.)
It includes an interview with University of Chicago economist Matthew Gentzkow, who discusses a study he coauthored with Jesse Shapiro about newspaper bias. They used a sample of 433 newspapers and sorted the phrases favored by Congressional Democrats and Republicans. Read More »
More Commitment Devices From Our Readers
Our recent podcast about commitment devices, called “Save Me From Myself,” continues to elicit responses from readers sharing their own experience. The other day, Amber told us about joining the Air Force as a commitment device.
Here’s another pair of stories. The first is from Philip Veysey, who lives in Madrid. He is looking for some advice:
Read More »Hi guys,
I listened with interest to your podcast about commitment devices and I thought I would share my own which I devised as a way to curb my unnecessary clothes shopping. I found that I was buying simply more clothing that I needed and although this wasn’t causing me any major problems, I realized that it was really wasteful and I decided to think of incentives to make me stop.
Freakonomics Poll: Have You Tried a Commitment Device?
Our latest podcast, “Save Me From Myself,” is about the use of commitment devices. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes or get the RSS feed.)
A commitment device is a sort of mind trick to help you accomplish a goal that you don’t quite have the willpower to achieve on your own. Sometimes we need a contract with ourselves, or a little financial stake for motivation. This goal can be exercising, studying, quitting smoking, or anything really.
So we want to ask: have you tried one? What was it? And, most important, how did it turn out? Read More »
Financial Literacy Solutions, Information-Design Edition
In our latest podcast, “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?” we talked about America’s financial literacy problem, a topic we’ve written about before. In the podcast, two Council of Economic Advisers chairmen discuss the role of financial illiteracy in the recession. And economist Annamaria Lusardi and legal scholar Lauren Willis offer their solutions to the problem.
Two designers, Tristan Cook and Thomas Nelson of Humans in Design, also have a pitch. Read More »
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