A couple weeks ago, Levitt wondered about the crowds that buy the slew of anti-religion and anti-God books that are so popular these days. His argument included an analogy — which many commenters found lacking, I should say — about bird-watching books: even if you hate bird-watching, you’re not prone to buy a book that bashes it.

By strange coincidence, I had just started reading a book that’s about God and bird-watching. It’s an advance copy of The Life of the Skies, by my friend Jonathan Rosen. It includes an interesting chapter about the famous search for the ivory-bill woodpecker, long thought to be extinct. (Rosen had written earlier on the subject, in both The New Yorker and a Times Op Ed in 2005, after the apparent rediscovery of the “Lord God bird,” so named because it’s allegedly so beautiful to behold that you can’t think of anything to say except “Lord God!”) Read more …

Following last week’s quorum about street charity, we’ve now brought in a half-dozen bright people to address a very different issue:

Is it finally time to believe in the housing bubble? And how much should the average American care?

While the topic of real estate has hardly been neglected on this blog, the housing bubble is another story. Here to tell the story are:

Robert Shiller, the Yale economist and Irrational Exuberance author, who has indexed U.S. home prices back to 1890; Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors; David Lereah, the N.A.R.’s former chief economist, who is now executive vice president of Move, Inc.; Barbara Corcoran, the real estate maven and author; Aviv Nevo, a professor of economics at Northwestern and a co-author of a study about FSBO (for sale by owner) sales versus sales via a realtor; and Amir Korangy, founding editor of the very good New York City real estate publication The Real Deal. Here are their replies: Read more …

One final thought (for now) on terrorism:

The people who should most despise my blog posts on terrorist attacks (found here and here) are the government officials charged with fighting terrorism. Why? Imagine that one of the scenarios mentioned in the posts or the accompanying comments ever did come to pass. No doubt someone would write a headline saying something like, “Did the Freakonomics Blog Give Ideas to Terrorists?” But I suspect there would be far more headlines like this: “Government Officials Failed to Prepare Against Terror Attack Predicted Years Ago by Freakonomics Blog.”

Running the Department of Homeland Security is about the toughest job around. Those folks have my sympathy. The number of ways we can be attacked is virtually infinite. If anything bad happens, security officials are squarely to blame. If nothing happens, hardly anyone even knows that these people are the ones in charge. I would bet fewer than 20% of Americans could name the current Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (If you need some help, the answer is here.)