Danny ChaiI randomly happened across the Freakonomics web site and I highly recommend reading all of the articles. Fascinating stuff. I like Freakonomics for the same reason I like Rob Neyer – they challenge conventional wisdom backed up with real data and statistics.
For those of you too lazy or uninterested to read it, here’s some distilled interesting facts:
- For children over 2, child seats provide no extra benefit than just using the seat belt. Doesn’t matter how old or new the car is or what kind of car.
- To an economist, it makes no sense for an individual to vote – the cost involved outweighs the benefit. “As the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, ‘A rational individual should abstain from voting.'”
- Many people who do vote probably do it for social incentives. So it’s quite possible that moving to Internet voting would decrease turnout.
- A football betting strategy that routinely beats the bookies is to choose the home underdog.
- The tax gap (difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid) is $345 billion, just a few billion short of the projected budget deficit for 2007. This comes out to $1000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. The audit rate of individual taxpayers is 0.19%.
- Sexual preference may be influenced by price theory
- Crack cocaine is currently 75% cheaper than it was at its peak.
- Several ounces of sugar between meals may be an effective way of losing weight. (It’s called the Shangri-La Diet.)
- Elite soccer players tend to be born during the first 3 months of the year. In England and Germany, more than half of the elite youth league’s players were born in January, February, or March.