Overcoming Lego Bias

Lego has been christened the most popular toy ever made, despite -- or maybe because of -- its bias toward males over females in its Minifigures. But Lego has at least one other bias: the company produces a full line of Star Wars sets, but not a single set for Star Trek fans. So, in the spirit of creative misuse, one boy has set about converting his Star Wars Legos into Star Trek figures, with the end products chronicled here. (HT: BoingBoing)

Never Pay a Speeding Ticket Again?

Photo: alicegop
A couple weeks ago, I became briefly fascinated and somewhat appalled by the appearance of a new Internet business that offered a sort of insurance against speeding tickets. In return for an annual fee of $169, ticketfree.org promised to reimburse you for the costs of up to $500 in moving violations. Its webpage enthused:


We don

"The Donors Are Taking the Place of the State"

A group of 40 American billionaires, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, has

Will Your Kids Be Better Off Than You?

Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents

Biden's Prediction: Inside Information or Pure Bluster?

Vice President Joe Biden, quoted in the Times a few days ago:

The National Debt Gets a Big Donor

A few months ago, Freakonomics readers weighed in on what kind of person is likely to donate to the national debt. Planet Money wondered the same thing and obtained some interesting information through a Freedom of Information Act request: the majority of the gifts were small (under $100), but 17 of the gifts were for more than $100,000, and one donor gave $1.5 million. (It wasn't us, we promise.) Planet Money has the spreadsheet and invites readers to email them with feedback.

Has American Pop Music Displaced Local Culture?

Given the the digital revolution, the vigor with which America exports its pop culture, and the overwhelming global success of MTV in particular (thanks in large part to this guy), it's a no-brainer to think that pop music has become pretty homogeneous around the world.

But it hasn't.

That's the argument of a new working paper by Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel, called "Pop Internationalism: Has a Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?" (abstract here; pdf here). There is a lot of great detail and data in the paper, but the gist is conveyed in the summary:
Advances in communication technologies over the past half century have made the cultural goods of one country more readily available to consumers in another, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies - in particular the U.S. - will displace the indigenous cultural products of smaller economies. In this paper we provide stylized facts about the global music consumption and trade since 1960, using a unique data on popular music charts from 22 countries, corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. We find that trade volumes are higher between countries that are geographically closer and between those that share a language. Contrary to growing fears about large- country dominance, trade shares are roughly proportional to country GDP shares; and relative to GDP, the U.S. music share is substantially below the shares of other smaller countries. We find a substantial bias toward domestic music which has, perhaps surprisingly, increased sharply in the past decade. We find no evidence that new communications channels - such as the growth of country-specific MTV channels and Internet penetration - reduce the consumption of domestic music. National policies aimed at preventing the death of local culture, such as radio airplay quotas, may explain part of the increasing consumption of local music.
This made me think back to when we were told that nationwide U.S. newscasts, with TV anchormen speaking in their flat midwestern tones, would wipe out regional accents. That didn't happen. Nor, somehow, did Esperanto manage to conquer the globe.

Yes, Virginia ... A Leveraged Lifecycle Can Reduce Retirement Risk

When

Animals as Diplomats

While Zimbabwean officials describe their recent decision to sell a host of animals to North Korea as "purely a business arrangement," zoo animals have often been used as tools in the diplomatic process.

Are Women Nicer? To Each Other?

A bit of self-promotion: in a recent paper, Jason Abrevaya and I examined whether female economists are less likely to say no when making recommendations on publishing papers, and whether they favor female authors.

When Your iPad Says Something You Didn't

A couple days ago, I was in a meeting with several folks. One of them mentioned that he's absolutely ga-ga over his new iPad.

A few hours later, he sent out a group e-mail from that very machine:
We too really enjoyed the meeting and so appreciate your thoughts, insights and excrement for the project.
I guess he still has to get used to Apple's e-mail auto-fill. He was mortified but I told him not to worry: hey, excrement happens.

Quotes Uncovered: Running a Railroad and Famous Misquotes

Photo: Bobolink
Each week, I

Whose Hand Controls the Global Thermostat?

A good report here, from the Economist, on a recent geoengineering summit in Asilomar, Calif. (which, unsurprisingly, had its detractors before it was ever held). The article's final paragraph gets at something we've touched on before, in SuperFreakonomics and on this blog: that if global warming gets bad enough to require a geoengineering intervention, the actual science may well not be the hardest part:
Producing plausible policies and ways for the public to have a say on them will be hard

Giving Doctors an Incentive

While partisan rancor over health care continues in the U.S., Australia is forging its own health care path. Its government, hoping to encourage doctors to treat diabetics outside the hospital, announced that doctors will be given a cash payment for every diabetic they treat, and an additional payment for patients whose health improves.

Technology and Trade

John van Reenen of the London School of Economics gave a very neat paper recently.

A huge literature has demonstrated the growth in inequality in the U.S. and Europe in the past two decades, with most papers pointing to skill-biased technical change, and others pointing to the growth in international trade. This new study combines the two, showing how the expansion of imports from low-wage countries, particularly China, has induced European and American firms to switch to higher-technology products, to innovate more and to reallocate workers to plants that use more up-to-date technologies.

These changes in the nature of production, which have been strongest in those industries and those times where/when imports from China have grown most, may have contributed substantially to the decreasing relative earnings of the less-skilled. So it is not only trade, not only technological change that has altered Western labor markets; it

Farewell, George Johnson

One of my best friends in the profession, George Johnson, passed away this week at age 70.

Quotes Uncovered: The Curious Cat

Photo: Sukanto Debnath
Each week, I

Tighter Government, One Nudge at a Time

The federal government may have a reputation for being a bit slow and bloated, but a new concept, the President's SAVE award, hopes to change some of that. Begun in 2009 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), it's "a contest for federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently." (Where was this program when John Szilagyi needed it?) During the first submission window, the OMB received nearly 40,000 ideas within three weeks; the best ideas were passed to the appropriate government agencies. One idea is already bound for implementation: the Department of Homeland Security "announced that it is changing the default setting for its payroll statements from paper to electronic ... By making e-statements the default option, while giving employees the option to opt out in favor of the paper statement, we hope to increase the percentage of federal employees who use this approach while saving the taxpayers

Bad (and Worse) Corruption

Ray Fisman, writing in Foreign Policy, explains that some types of corruption are better than others: "In an orderly, predictable -- yet corrupt -- system, businesses can at least calculate expected returns and plan accordingly.

Our Daily Bleg: Help Honest Michiganders Get Their Camping Fix

A reader named Gregory Riffe wants the Freakonomics blog readership to help solve a dilemma:

I live in Michigan and like many other Michiganders, I like to go camping in the state parks in the summer. This is such a popular pastime that weekend campsite reservations are in high demand, which has led to people gaming the system to get weekend campsite reservations at the expense of overall utilization of the campgrounds. I was wondering if you could suggest a system whereby the awarding of campsite reservations in Michigan state parks could be more equitably distributed and increase the total utilization of the campgrounds.

The state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has provided a nice online reservation system that allows people to make reservations for campsites up to six months in advance of your arrival date. So for instance, if one wants to camp on the Friday and Saturday of July 16-17, one can make a reservation on January 16 for the two days. The maximum number of days a campsite can be reserved is 15.

Experienced users will game the system by booking 10-15 days at a time to get a weekend, then canceling all the days but the weekend they want. For example: I want to camp on Thursday through Saturday, July 15-17. The earliest I can book just the weekend is January 15 (6 months in advance of the arrival date). However, on January 3, I can book 15 days (July 3-17). I can then cancel the days leading up to July 15 and keep the three weekend days. Anyone who wants to book just the weekend will find very few openings because they will already be taken by people making long reservations and canceling the portions they never intend to use.

This prevents anyone else from reserving a campsite that will ultimately be empty until the gamer decides to cancel the portion that they have no intention of using. It also penalizes everyone who has not learned to game the system by denying them any chance at weekend reservations. The DNR has instituted a penalty for canceling reservations, but the penalty for canceling is just $18 and the cost of a day

When Should You Go For the Extended Warranty?

Daniel Hamermesh

You shouldn

LED Astray

Technological innovation has cut many of the trickiest environmental Gordian knots. As readers of SuperFreakonomics know, at the end of the 19th century the American city was tottering on the brink of environmental catastrophe. The cause: byproducts of transportation, specifically the horse-drawn variety (more here). Manure, flies, accidents and disease abounded, until the timely arrival of a technology which at the time was hailed as an environmental savior -- the internal combustion automobile.

Of course, those who celebrated did not fully realize that the miracle technology would bring troublesome consequences of its own. Today we face the specter of global warming, to which the automobile is an important contributor.

Just like our ancestors in the fin-de-siecle city, we are using new technology to fight the shortcomings of the old. And unsurprisingly, like our ancestors, we are bound to find that our technological fixes can have unintended, malign consequences of their own.

Consider the seemingly noncontroversial replacement of conventional traffic signals with LED bulbs. What

Engineers Among the Terrorists

A study by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog reveals that engineers are "three times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine, or the sciences," as reported in Slate. So why the career change? Among the sociologists' hypotheses: Lack of jobs for engineers in Arab countries and "a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise."