Is There a Point to Conducting Polls About Whether or not Sexual Orientation...
Companies like Gallup do surveys all the time on a wide range of issues: Who do you intend to vote for in the next election? What issue are you most worried about? Do you approve of the job George Bush...
View ArticlePolling: What's the Point?
Conor Clarke suggests removing polls from the American political process. Not only are poll results frequently wrong, he argues, but polling “uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy.” He also...
View ArticleDebt Ceiling Poll: To Raise or Not to Raise
According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post, more people see raising the debt limit as a bigger risk than not raising it. Though it’s close, and the margin has shrunk...
View ArticleFreakonomics Poll: Are you a Scion?
We had a poll earlier this week that asked: should you give your kids the company? That’s the question of our latest podcast and hour-long Freakonomics Radio special “The Church of Scionology.” (You...
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Are We Really Losing 1% of GDP Due to Poor Health? Also, a Poll on Polling
(Digital Vision) We’ve been writing a lot about obesity recently. First, it was this study about projected future obesity rates, then we covered Denmark’s saturated fat tax, which Steve Sexton then...
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Freakonomics Poll: Have You Tried a Commitment Device?
(Photo: Alan Cleaver) Our latest podcast, “Save Me From Myself,” is about the use of commitment devices. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes or get the RSS feed.) A commitment device is a sort of...
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“AI: Adventures in Ideas”: Getting to “Yes (I’ll Participate in Your Survey)”
Readers may know that I’m not the most qualified person to talk about using surveys. My first attempt — asking street gang members “How does it feel to be black and poor? Very bad, bad, good, …” — was...
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FiveThirtyEighter Nate Silver Answers Your Questions About Politics,...
We recently solicited your questions for Nate Silver regarding his new book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t. Not too surprisingly, a lot of the questions were...
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Lying to Ourselves: a New Marketplace Podcast
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Lying to Ourselves.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript...
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Let Us Know What Kind of Free Stuff You Really Want
When we ask people to contribute to our public-radio Freakonomics podcast, our sponsor station WNYC offers some of the standard public-radio gifts: a Freakonomics t-shirt, a coffee mug, copies of our...
View ArticleHave Voters Started to Lie Less About Minority Candidates?
Here’s a really interesting article (albeit a few months old) from the Pew Research Center that concerns a point we’ve touched on before: Minority political candidates tend to do better in pre-election...
View ArticleGuest Blog: Who’s to Blame for Inaccurate Election Polls?
A few days ago, I blogged about how pre-election polls have historically overstated a minority candidate’s standing, but how that gap seems to be shrinking. In other words, according to the Pew...
View ArticleMore Commentary From Gary Langer
Today, ABC News director of polling and Freakonomics.com guest blogger Gary Langer offers an interesting breakdown of recent poll numbers on a particularly timely topic: Whether a pro-abortion stance...
View ArticleIf I Ask You About Doing Something, Will You Do It?
A recent study by the ad agency BBDO Worldwide links habitual behavior to product brands. While the findings — that people adopt daily rituals like tooth brushing or midday snacking and typically stick...
View ArticleThe FREAKest Links
Our own Gary Langer analyzes polls on recently departed conservative icon Jerry Falwell taken over his lifetime. The results can be summarized as follows: “Popularity with most Americans was not among...
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