Steven D. Levitt's Blog
December 3, 2009
After jump-starting the economies of Somali fishing towns, local pirates are taking their local business further by setting up "stock exchanges" that host 72 pirate gangs or "maritime companies," a Reuters article reports.
Today I will give my long-awaited response to the many questions about the leading phraseological enigma of our time, namely the origin of the phrase "the whole nine yards." I am sorry to disappoint by having no definitive answer, but the reality is that many of the major etymological riddles have no known answer.
National borders may sometimes seem like arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but a new study from the University of Haifa reveals that those borders mean something to the resident animal populations.
December 2, 2009
There's a strange view out there that with unemployment above ten percent, and inflation nascent, the Fed should be thinking about raising interest rates. Yesterday Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser attempted to explain his view:
Gautam Naik provides an interesting and cleverly written piece on the search for a biological basis of violent behavior.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice (here's his TED talk on the topic) was, for me at least, very persuasive. It made a compelling if counterintuitive argument: even though many people (economists especially) argue that more choice is almost always a good thing, Schwartz argued that too much choice is actually a bad thing, causing decision paralysis and unhappiness.
A Boston Globe article explains how "positive deviance" - a way to change behavior by using "nudges" that already exist in a community, rather than imposing them from the outside - substantially decreased malnutrition in a Vienamese village: researchers observed children who looked more nourished than others, found that their families were feeding them crabs - considered a low-class food - and encouraged neighbors to follow the family's good example.
Steven D. Levitt's blog
- Steven D. Levitt's profile
- 19 followers
Steven D. Levitt isn't a
Goodreads Author (yet), but he
does have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
his feed.
