Is Freakonomics too cynical?

I don’t think so, but some people do. Occasionally we hear from readers who say it’s a shame that we’ve called attention to so much deceit, trickery, and cheating among sumo wrestlers, school teachers, tax filers, and online daters. I could argue back and say, “Hey, don’t we also call attention to people who don’t cheat, like the office workers who eat Paul Feldman’s bagels?”

The point isn’t that you can divide people into piles of good people or bad people, cheaters or non-cheaters. The point is that people’s behavior is determined by how the incentives of a particular scenario are aligned.

So it was interesting to see this article on Salon’s Machinist by Farhad Manjoo about a contest run by the website Read more …

There’s been plenty written about the success that can be generated by an effective algorithm. Google and scores of other businesses thrive in large part because they are masters of the algorithmic mindset, gathering and analyzing data in ways previously thought impossible. As consumers, we’ve become accustomed to reaping the benefit of this revolution: using Google to find practically anything, heading to the discount airfare site that guarantees the “absolute lowest” rates, clicking through Amazon’s personal book recommendations.

Ian Ayres, Yale Law School professor, Forbes columnist, and data fanatic, has now written a book on data mining, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. (Full disclosure: Levitt is a friend and collaborator of Ayres, and he blurbed the book; Ayres also discusses Freakonomics and other research by Levitt in the book.)

Ayres writes about “a new breed of number crunchers … who have analyzed large datasets to discover empirical correlations between seemingly unrelated things.” Read more …

Last night, the Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles by a score of 30 to 3. In a baseball game. The last major league baseball team to score 30 or more runs in a game was the Chicago Colts, in 1897.

If you had to guess when the Rangers scored their runs over 9 innings (the game was in Baltimore, so Texas batted in the top of the 9th), how would you distribute the runs? If I had to do it, my linescore would probably look about like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

4 3 1 0 5 6 3 5 3

But here is the actual linescore: Read more …

August 23 the day in 2000 when the first season finale of CBS’ Survivor attracted 51 million viewers, a record audience at that time for a reality show. Only seven short years later, we’re willing to believe a reality show offering a kidney giveaway.