During the World Cup, I heard a lot from my friends Rich Glanzer and Anthony Orefice about how ridiculous it was that the best soccer players in the world, these supposedly manliest of men, the pinnacles of testosterone, seemed to crumple into screaming fits of pretend pain about every five minutes or so. After all, hockey players have been known ( Read more... )

Consider this:
Congress Close on "Cash for Clunkers"So, just how may old cars can I buy from people for less than $4,500 to trade in for a new car? And, are these vouchers stackable? Who thinks I can get a Mercedes in exchange for a dozen Darts, T-1000s, and Pintos ( Read more... )

I've always been wary of schemes that seem to produce money in exchange for nothing. GRS commenter "Frugal Bachelor" puts it succinctly:

Is there any reason why you’re cherry picking [the] US stock market, and from a narrow time period? Look at Japan which from 1921 - 1996 (75 years), had -0.81% real capital appreciation. If the 10% is real, ( Read more... )

Levitt@Freakonomics tells a story about how he once proved what I knew intuitively: that wines, in general, don't actually taste that different from one another. He also provides a link to an academic working paper that proves out his experiment with a much larger dataset.

The money quote:
What lesson should we take from this? No matter what, do ( Read more... )

The U.S. House of Representatives just passed a bill that should hold back the Alternative Minimum tax for next year, assuming that it passes the Senate largely intact and gets signed ( Read more... )

If you listened to what Fed chair Ben Bernanke had to say today, or you've read a number of Tom Friedman's columns over the past few years, you hear a lot of points to the effect that the rising price of gasoline should somehow "convince" people to consume less of it. Plenty of good economists have said much the same thing. And, if you've read ( Read more... )