Keegy United States - Freakonomics: Fewer Murders, More Suicide?

Fewer Murders, More Suicide?

GOOD produced this sharp info-graphic on murder rates worldwide. One interesting trend it doesn't show: countries with lower murder rates tend to have higher rates of suicide. Take Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates in the world - just 0.5 per 100,000 people. It also has a very high ...

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Freakonomics — October 29

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Getting Off the Waitlist

I gave a talk not too long ago on a college campus. The event was sold out, so the administration started a waiting list for seats. The daughter of a good friend found herself on the waiting list. When I heard she still hadn't gotten a ticket the day before the event, with just a touch of guilt f...

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Freakonomics — October 28

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A Defense of Irrational Taxation?

Here's a behavioral puzzler: Why might it be more efficient for Connecticut to change its sales tax rate from 6 percent to e^2 percent ? Or more generally, why might using irrational numbers as tax rates be less distortionary than rational tax rates? A hint comes from a great article o...

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Freakonomics — October 28

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Baby Einstein's Refund: Not so Smart?

Roughly 15 years ago, before there was such a thing as Baby Einstein, I had a business idea that emerged from a dinner conversation with a linguist. We got to talking about how hard it was for adults learning foreign languages to ever sound like native speakers. One reason for this is, apparen...

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Freakonomics — October 28

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Sorry About That

Gizmodo lists eight "Regrettable Tech Inventions" and their inventors' apologies for them, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee's apology for the double-slash in web addresses - "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //" ....

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Freakonomics — October 28

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Pray for Me: I'm Going on The Daily Show Tonight

The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason...

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Freakonomics — October 27