Cheap Talk » family

  I coach my daughter’s U12 travel soccer team. An important skill that a player of this age should be picking up is the instinct to keep her head up when receiving a pass, survey the landscap...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/10/06/jointly-controlled-lotteries-and-u12-soccer/

Imagine that the President convenes his top economic advisors to get a recommendation on a pressing policy issue. They say unequivocally “do X.” The President asks why and they say “its com...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/09/10/blogging-something-we-know-nothing-about/

I haven’t decided yet and I can’t figure out which side this is evidence for: Me:  Oh I have to remember to set up your desk today because I promised that I would and that if I didn’t I wo...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/09/07/nature-or-nurture/

When you over-inflate a kid’s self-esteem you achieve a short-run gain (boost in confidence) at the expense of a long-run cost (jaded kids who learn that praise is just noise.) For that reason,...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/09/03/the-optimal-time-to-lie-to-your-kids/

Spouse A (henceforth “she”, the driver) prefers the air inside the vehicle to be a little warmer than the preferred temperature of Spouse B (“he”, the navigator, not because he is a worse...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/04/09/consider-the-equilibrium-21/

Look at married female academics and whether or not they use their maiden name. See how this depends on 1. Which of the two names comes earlier in the alphabet. 2. Whether their field uses the le...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/02/19/vapor-mill/

Have you seen Dragon Box?  Once you do, you will be a believer in the power of technology for learning.  I wasn’t before, I am now. My son is 6 and after about 4 hours of fun he can solve sim...

https://cheaptalk.org/2013/01/20/how-to-teach-a-six-year-old-algebra/

My daughter was learning about prime numbers and she had an exercise to identify all the prime numbers less than 100.  I made a little game out of it with her by offering her 10 cents for each n...

https://cheaptalk.org/2012/11/07/introspection-arbitrage/

Its socially valuable for the University of Michigan measure consumer confidence and announce it even if that is an irrelevant statistic.  Because otherwise somebody with less neutral motives wo...

https://cheaptalk.org/2012/11/01/thoughts-left-lying-around-17/

If you got out a pencil and graphed my kids’ time outside, with the date on the horizontal axis and the number of hours spent outside (and not fraying their parents nerves alternately bickering...

https://cheaptalk.org/2012/09/20/summer-vacation-should-be-in-the-winter/