Word: dubner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Finally, there is the gift of humility, which parents need to offer one another. We can fuss and fret and shuttle and shelter, but in the end, what we do may not matter as much as we think. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they...
...book was a surprise mega best seller, with more than 4 million copies now in print worldwide. Levitt and Dubner became sought-after speakers and much-linked-to bloggers. They had made economics seem unexpectedly ... fun. "CSI: Economics," one observer called it. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...
...Levitt and Dubner are about to land in the middle of this maelstrom with a new book, Superfreakonomics. It's very good - jauntier and more assured than their first. But is the world ready for freakonomics again? Or, to put it another way, can the freakonomists restore our shaken faith in economics...
...been smart enough to avoid it - and to win, in 2003, the John Bates Clark Medal, an award for the top under-40 American economist that is often the precursor to a Nobel (no, he's not really a "rogue economist"). His work also caught writer Dubner's attention, which led to the 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine that spawned Freakonomics...
Except when you can't. In Superfreakonomics, he and Dubner detour from small puzzles (can you find a terrorist by using financial data? How much money do prostitutes make?) to tackle the big, big issue of global warming. This is partly an opportunity for Levitt to express his skepticism of models of complex phenomena such as the global economy or, in this case, the global climate. Mainly, though, it's an excuse to tout the mind-blowing ideas for combatting global warming that he and Dubner learned about while hanging out with former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold...