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How much do I love the Freakonomics blog, the economics blog based on the NYT bestselling book, Freakonomics?

I think it’s my new favorite blog on the internet, that’s how much. And as the New York Times online recently decided to host it, I think more and more people are being turned on to its quirky charms.

The Freakonomics blog explores odd little economic conundrums in a way that’s common-sensical, not buried under mounds of research and indecipherable academic talk.

It’s explored the role of abortion in reducing the crime rate, the consequences of giving money to panhandlers, and the economics of a high-class Chicago brothel in the early 1900s.

Here’s a great example of Freakonomics insight: An interview with Arthur Frommer, who responds to questions from Freakonomics readers.

Frommer is a proponent of low-cost travel that bypasses big hotels for hostels and homes. His tips include getting the most out of a trip by spending “a few nights in the library” familiarizing yourself with the culture and history of your destination.

Q: As the dollar continues to fall against the euro, why aren’t more Europeans traveling to America?

A: Because of the psychological, bureaucratic, and political barriers that we have erected to hinder their travels here. In many of the countries that don’t enjoy our visa-waiver program, it takes three to four months simply to receive an appointment to apply for a visa. Once would-be travelers finally get inside one of our consulates, they are questioned about personal characteristics having nothing to do with security or terrorism, but rather with the possibility that they will overstay their visas and become illegal immigrants. One tour operator handling incoming travel from Poland recently said that half of the people he wishes to send to the U.S. are turned down for visas because they are young, single, without property or homes that they own, etc., and are thus more likely to stay in the U.S. illegally.

When people do travel here, they are treated like criminals upon arrival at customs, or, at best, received with cold discourtesy. The result of all this is that travel to the U.S. has fallen off by close to 20 percent since the year 2000, while most other countries are enjoying a rise of 20 percent or more in their incoming tourism! The decline of our own tourism industry creates a loss of more than $100 billion a year, tens of billions of dollars in tax revenues, and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Read the whole interview here.

Via the excellent Freakonomics economics blog (a daily read for me, now hosted by the New York Times), a piece on responding to panhandlers in the street. Five economists, five responses.

Here is the question put to them:

You are walking down the street in New York City with $10 of disposable income in your pocket. You come to a corner with a hot dog vendor on one side and a beggar on the other. The beggar looks like he’s been drinking; the hot dog vendor looks like an upstanding citizen. How, if at all, do you distribute the $10 in your pocket, and why?

From the responses:

I told Stephen that my allergy to economists was on moral, ethical, religious, and aesthetics grounds. But here is another, central reason: what I call “ludicity,” or the “ludic fallacy” (from the Latin ludes, meaning “games”). It corresponds to the set-up of situations in academic-style multiple choice questions, made to resemble “games” with crisp, unambiguous rules. These rules are divorced from both their environment and their ecology. Yet decision-making on Planet Earth does not usually involve exam-style multiple choice questions isolated from their context — which is why school-smart kids don’t do as well as their street-wise cousins. And, if people often sometimes appear inconsistent, as shown in many “puzzles,” it is often because it is the exam itself that is wrong. Dan Goldstein calls this problem “ecological invalidity.”

Read the whole post here. Login may be required; just use a fake login from the excellent bugmenot.com.

I love economics it for its strangeness, its mystery, its nonintuitiveness. I love how it combines chilly mathematical formality (complete with calculus-based modeling) with the outlandish irregularity of unpredictable human behavior. For like Soylent Green, that’s what markets are: people. Markets — being made of people — never behave as you think they will.

Penn and Teller once demonstrated that if you shoot a watermelon with a rifle, the melon actually jumps towards you, not away from you. Markets behave in the same nonintuitive ways, moving in queer directions all but opposite from where sense says they should go. Economics is a land of puzzles, a social science where people must figure out other people, where logic has all the answers but illogical creatures make all the moves.

I’ve begun reading the excellent Freakonomics blog, a blog dedicated to weird news from the world of economics. I loved today’s short piece on the new book The Econonomic Naturalist, in which a Cornell econ prof publishes the 500-word short answers his students supply to intruiging, real-world economics questions. No, these aren’t foolish “oh, those crazy freshmen” responses, but cogent and impressive answers from young ivy-league economists. Here’s one of the questions:

Why do brides spend so much money — often thousands of dollars — on wedding dresses they will never wear again, while grooms often rent cheap tuxedos, even though they will have many future occasions that call for one?

The answer is found here, in chapter 1 of the book, which I found online on the author’s website. (I read the whole first chapter online — it’s outstanding. Totally worth reading.)

The questions are not about the fate of nations, but are small, simple ones the author and his students find in “the wild,” in the everyday world. Why are there Braille dots on drive-up ATM machines? Why do female models earn so much more than male models? Why do 24-hour convenience stores have locks on their doors? Why does milk come in rectangular containers (jugs and cartons), while soda comes in round cans and bottles? Find interesting answers to all the above here and here (link to PDF file).

Little intellectual puzzles from a vast and a fascinating social science. Delicious stuff.

Oh, how I wish I could take a class from this man. I will have to settle for running out and buying this book at my earliest convenience…