The other day I was walking past this barber shop on Broadway in the upper 90’s. This sign caught my eye.
It made me wonder what kind of customer is willing to get a crewcut by an “apprentice barber.” Would you? Also, was there really an “apprentice barber” on standby only to handle the $9.99 cuts? Not likely. It did make me think back to when I was in grad school and needed a root canal, and took advantage of the cut-rate dentistry available at my school’s College of Dental Medicine. The root canal was performed by a student — it took many visits, was unbelievably painful, and kept me from returning to any dentist for several years.
The first aim of this study was to investigate whether instant messaging (IM) influences adolescents’ ability to initiate offline friendships. The second aim was to study the validity of two underlying mechanisms that may account for this relationship: (a) the opportunities offered by IM to communicate with a variety of people, and (b) to disclose intimate information. A three-wave longitudinal study was conducted among 690 Dutch adolescents (10–17 years old). Results show that adolescents’ IM use increased their ability to initiate offline friendships over time. Furthermore, IM use indirectly increased adolescents’ ability to initiate offline friendships through the diversity of their online communication partners. These findings suggest that adolescents can practice social skills online and learn to relate to a variety of people, which, over time, may increase their ability to initiate offline friendships.
Our most recent podcast was called “Would a Big Bucket of Cash Really Change Your Life?” It showed that the winners of a 19th-century land lottery did not appear to convert their windfall into intergenerational wealth. This challenges the modern argument that cash transfers are one of the most effective ways of helping a poor family escape poverty — and, therefore, as we said in the podcast, might be seen as a depressing conclusion.
Judd Campbell from Odessa, Texas, wrote in to dispute the depressing part, and offer some worthwhile commentary:
I just finished listening to the latest podcast about the Georgia land lottery in the 19th century. I actually found it not to be depressing at all.
Here’s why:
1. It would be depressing to me to know that poverty has existed into modernity, and the solution would be a simple one-time transfer of wealth. Surely, we could have figured that out by now and eliminated poverty. Clearly, the issue is more complex than that, and thus we have an excuse for not developing a solution. Yet.
2. While I don’t consider myself wealthy, I do make a healthy salary and live in a comfortable home with 4 kids. There are a couple of things that I believe about my life, that may or may not be logical or factual, but provides me comfort:
a. My financial success is not due to my parents. I did it on my own. I did grow up in a comfortable home with loving and supportive parents, my father has a master’s degree, and I appreciate what they have provided me. But in my gut I feel like I achieved my own success. This podcast was uplifting, because it seems to confirm that I am responsible for my own success.
b. On the other hand, I feel like my financial success will help my children be financially successful. Even though I don’t give my parents credit for my success, I believe that I can influence my children to be successful.
I do go by Tom. I, too, heard every combination of comments about what my parents might have been drinking, etc. I made a deliberate choice, therefore, to study whiskeys rather than gin …
The Folly of Eminent Domain Takings of Failing Mortgage Loans By Price Fishback
Several cities around the country are considering using eminent domain to take control of troubled mortgages in their cities. An Associated Press example of how the proposal will work calls for the city to use eminent domain to force the lender to accept $150,000 for a $300,000 mortgage on a home that has a current market value of $200,000. The city would then refinance the loan while cutting the principal owed by the borrower to $190,000.
Eminent domain requires a public purpose for the taking of an asset. The public purpose claimed here is that property values and property tax revenues can be boosted by preventing a mass of foreclosure sales. Real estate studies do show that increasing numbers of foreclosure sales are associated with lower housing values in nearby neighborhoods. However, the spillover benefits of preventing foreclosures, tend to be focused on houses in nearby neighborhoods.
One of the major complaints of right-wing politicians against the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is its imposed mandates that individuals obtain health insurance and that larger businesses offer health insurance to employees. The professed opposition is to the mandates, per se. It ignores the mandates that both employers and workers pay taxes for Social Security coverage—old-age, disability, Medicare, and unemployment compensation. Mandates are not new—nor is “government interference” in private choices about private insurance.
Opposition to the ACA mandates is really just a stalking horse for the eventual dismantling of the American social safety net. If the new mandates were to be dropped (unlikely, thank goodness), I would expect that their opponents would quickly move on to removing mandates for other programs that have been in effect for 70+ years.
Psychiatrist Charles Morgan and his collaborators have been studying the effects of Survival School for a number of years. We worked together to conduct a study with the soldiers who’d gone through the training in which some would be fed erroneous information. Some have been exposed to misinformation about the “perpetrator” who conducted the hostile interview. They were showed a photograph of a man who was identified as the one conducting the interrogation, and were asked questions such as, “Did your interrogator give you anything to eat? Did he give you a blanket?” The trick was that the photograph was of a completely different person. When the soldiers were fed this misinformation, 84% of them later on went ahead and identified the person whose photograph was shown. All of them were, of course, mistaken.
I was at a restaurant the other day which had an interesting feature: the two menus they gave us listed different prices for the same items. One menu quoted $12 per margarita and the other offered the exact same drink for $11.
For a split second I wondered whether the restaurant was carrying out some sort of pricing field experiment. I’m pretty sure, though, that wasn’t the case. Just regular old incompetence, I suspect.
I wouldn’t usually pay $11 or $12 for a margarita, but I was so curious in this circumstance that I went ahead and ordered one. (Well, actually, I ordered three by the time I was done.)
What was the true price? Strangely, it turned out not to be $12, or even $11. They charged me exactly $7.94 per drink.
Luckily, I didn’t know that in advance or I might have had a fourth margarita, which definitely would have been a bad idea.
Last spring, I blogged about the $5/day for in-house food purchases that many Sheraton hotels give guests who waive house-cleaning. In some hotels, they offer a choice between the $5 and 500 frequent-guest points. Which is better? For infrequent guests like me, the $5 is better. But in some of the best Sheraton hotels, it only takes 10,000 points to obtain a free night—i.e., 20 days of no house-cleaning. If you are a frequent guest, that seems like a much better deal—the opportunity cost of one free night is $100, typically far below the price of a night. The Sheraton’s offer creates a separation between infrequent and frequent guests, benefiting the latter (and giving people an incentive to become frequent guests). (HT: DJH)
If you have a tough decision to make, wander on over to FreakonomicsExperiments.com. So far we’ve helped more than 20,000 people make decisions, and the preliminary results look great.
As an incentive to get people who tossed coins at FreakonomicsExperiments to complete follow-up surveys, we promised to give away prizes via lottery. As evidence we kept our word, the complete list of winners is here.
A while back we held a contest for the new popular economics book written by Uri Gneezy and John List. The authors and their publishers picked some of their favorite title suggestions and then we ran a beauty contest to determine which title was most popular among blog readers. The deal was that the person who proposed the winning title would get $1,000. Another $1,000 was to be split between randomly selected beauty contest participants.
Before I tell you which title won, let me tell you about the naming of Freakonomics. We had such an impossibly hard time coming up with a good name until my sister Linda came up with “Freakonomics.” To make a long story short, the publishers hated that name for a long time, but finally gave in. The rest is history. Of course we were all just guessing — it would have been nice to have data, the way Uri and John did.
So what do the data say? The winner of the beauty contest, with 33 percent of the votes, was The Carrot that Moved A Mountain: How the Right Incentives Shape the Economics of Everyday Life. Congratulations to Ivy Tantuco who proposed that title and collected the $1,000 prize.(Congratulations also to Jenna Dargie and Melinda Reiss, who were the randomly chosen beauty contest winners and pocketed $500 each.)
Last year, we did a podcast on college tuition which discussed the growing gap between a college’s “sticker price” and the actual tuition paid by low- and middle-income working families. In order to demystify this gap — and help low-income families understand that many expensive private colleges are actually well within their reach — Wellesley College has just released a “Quick College Cost Estimator” calculator.
“The conversation that takes place around college costs is largely misguided,” Phillip B. Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley, told DavidLeonhardt of the Times. “People focus only on the sticker price. The sticker price is a meaningful statistic for roughly 40 percent of our students. The majority of our students are receiving financial aid, and for them the sticker price is an irrelevant number.” While The College Board and Harvard have similar calculators, Leonhardt likes the simplicity of Wellesley’s version. “The larger point is that Wellesley’s calculator is a significant step in the growing effort to spread accurate information about college costs,” writes Leonhardt. “As Mr. Levine says, the widespread misunderstanding of tuition ‘clos
In the Globe and Mail, Clive Thomasargues that all the time kids spend on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs may be making them better writers and thinkers. Thomas cites the work of Andrea Lunsford, an English professor at Stanford, who recently compared freshman composition papers from 1917, 1930, 1986, and 2006 and found that, while the average rate of errors hasn’t changed much since 1917, students today write longer, more intellectually complex papers:
In 1917, a freshman paper was on average only 162 words long and the majority were simple “personal narratives.” By 1986, the length of papers more than doubled, averaging 422 words. By 2006, they were more than six times longer, clocking in at 1,038 words – and they were substantially more complex, with the majority consisting of a “researched argument or report,” with the student taking a point of view and marshalling evidence to support it.
“Student writers today are tackling the kinds of issues that require inquiry and investigation as well as reflection,” Prof. Lunsford concluded.
To be fair, the scholar’s name is Thomas Collins (he is director of the university’s Food Safety and Measurement Facility), and we don’t know if he really goes by Tom.* Furthermore, Tom Collins the drink is made with gin, which isn’t a whiskey, the beverage under study here. But still … fantastic. Thanks, Marc.
*Prof. Collins, please drop us a line and let us know if you do.
Deuteronomy 28:68 states “ye shall sell yourselves unto your enemies for bondmen and for bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.” Oh dear, even at a price of zero, supply would exceed demand. (Josephus noted that there were so many slaves on the market when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 C.E. that many couldn’t be sold even at fire-sale prices.)
Why not buy a slave at no cost? The answer, presumably, is that potential buyers already owned so many low-priced slaves that they believed that another slave’s marginal productwould fall short of his or her upkeep. The variable cost of maintaining the slave must have exceeded his/her output. Is there a contemporary analogy to teaching assistants?
The quest began in 2005, when Sachs, who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, started an ambitious program called the Millennium Villages Project. He and his team chose a handful of sub-Saharan African villages, where they imposed a series of “interventions” in such areas as agriculture, health and education. The idea was that these villages would show Africa — and the world — how the continent could loosen the grip that extreme poverty had on so many of its people.
Sachs admirably raised millions, drew attention to efforts to alleviate poverty around the world, and launched Millennium Villages in several countries. However, the reviewers hone in on the book’s discussion of many of the difficulties, such as drought, disease, locals who resisted the idea of selling their prized camels at the new markets set up for them, or locals who used the anti-malarial bednets on their goats rather than their children.
Michael Sivak, a transportation scholar at the University of Michigan whose work has appeared on this blog before, released a new study on inter-state variations in economic activity per unit of driving. His findings are interesting and reflect significant differences in GDP per distance driven among U.S. states:
In 2011, the highest GDP per distance driven was in the District of Columbia ($30.04/mile, followed by Alaska, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. The lowest GDP per distance driven was in Mississippi ($2.51/mile), followed by Alabama, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The median value was $4.66/mile. In comparison, the standard federal reimbursement rate for fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile in 2011 was $0.51/mile.
From 1997 to 2011, the largest absolute increase in GDP per distance driven (with GDP measured in current dollars) was in the District of Columbia (+$14.95/mile), followed by Alaska, New York, Delaware, and Oregon. The smallest increase was in Mississippi(+$0.67/mile), followed by Alabama, Michigan. Florida, and New Mexico.
In our “Legacy of a Jerk” podcast, we discussed (among other things) the injunction against speaking ill of the dead. It featured an interview with a daughter of a woman named Carole Roberson, whose obituary stated that she was “a difficult mother and a horrendous mother-in-law.” That said, the obituary also said that “she will STILL be missed.”
Several readers have now sent us this A.P. article about an obituary for a Nevada woman named Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick. She makes Carole Roberson sounds like an angel.
“On behalf of her children who she abrasively exposed to her evil and violent life, we celebrate her passing from this earth and hope she lives in the after-life reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty and shame that she delivered on her children,” the scathing obituary begins. … [It] was written by Johnson-Reddick’s adult children, whose horror stories prompted Nevada to become one of the first states to allow children to sever parental ties back in the 1980s. …
In our podcast “Women Are Not Men,” we explored why Wikipedia has such a low percentage of female editors. John Riedl, the researcher who studied the Wikipedia gender gap (and who passed away this summer), had this to say:
RIEDL: We know from a bunch of psychology studies that women tend to be made more uncomfortable by conflict than men are made uncomfortable by conflict. And so one of the ideas is maybe in Wikipedia where the fundamental nature of the site is that if you want to correct what someone else has done, the way you do that is you delete it and write them a really mean message. Well, maybe that’s creating a culture of conflict that is driving women away. They just don’t find it a place they enjoy being, and so they go places where they’re happier.
The BPS Research Digest offers a quick guide to the psychology and science of human attraction. Their dating suggestions — based on real studies — are:
Al Rothreports on an interesting gender gap in Taiwan: according to an article in Focus Taiwan, “Of the 620,000 people on Taiwan’s organ donation list, 65 percent are women…” The article goes on to point out that:
The trend is more pronounced in the largest demographic of organ donors, those aged 21-50, which features 2.2 times more women than men, Wu [Ying-lai] said, based on an analysis of the 223,250 people who have signed up for the national organ donation program in the past 10 years.
Looking at the data more closely, the largest groups of donors are women aged 31-40, followed by women aged 41-50, women aged 21-30, men aged 31-40, and men aged 41-50, she noted.
I get invitations to guest lecture at English universities on Wednesdays, but almost never for Wednesdays in the U.S. I didn’t know why this difference exists, until one of the inviters mentioned that many English universities keep Wednesday afternoons free of regularly scheduled classes, historically so students can engage in inter-scholastic athletics. Universities thus have created a positive coordination externality.
We economics professors don’t engage in these athletic endeavors, but the athletic coordination creates a positive externality for economists: In scheduling seminars, we know that most faculty members at other universities are free to visit, and most of our colleagues should be available to attend the seminar. (HT: NT)
This isn’t completely true — there has been one, I remember it from when I was a kid. A player for the Detroit Lions named Chuck Hughes collapsed and died in the field in 1971. This doesn’t invalidate your point from the story — his death was not related to a football injury, but was caused by a heart attack.
Anyway, in case no other overzealous pedant hadn’t pointed this out, I thought you would like to know 🙂
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average students and less-qualified students.
Last year, Google realized that its employees were eating too much free candy — M&Ms, specifically. So the company conducted a little experiment, and carefully tracked the results. Cecilia Kang, writing in the Washington Post, summaries:
What if the company kept the chocolates hidden in opaque containers but prominently displayed dried figs, pistachios and other healthful snacks in glass jars? The results: In the New York office alone, employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms over seven weeks. That’s a decrease of nine vending machine-size packages of M&Ms for each of the office’s 2,000 employees.
The company has conducted similar experiments in an effort to reduce consumption of sugary drinks and encourage employees to consume less calories in the company’s cafeterias. “With a company as big as Google, you have to start small to make a difference. We apply the same level of rigor, analysis and experimentation on people as we do the tech side,” says Jennifer Kurkoski, a member of Google’s HR team.
“To some extent, we treat women as vessels of reproduction, and once they’ve done that we don’t pay much attention to them.”
That’s from Don McNeil‘s Times article about women’s life expectancy:
Life expectancy for women who live to age 50 is going up around the world, but poor and middle-income countries could easily make greater gains, according to a new World Health Organization report.
Heart disease, stroke and cancer kill most women over 50, said Dr. John R. Beard, director of the W.H.O.’s department of aging, so countries should focus on lowering blood pressure with inexpensive drugs and screening for cervical and breast cancer. Those diseases can be prevented or treated, said Dr. Beard, who was also an author of the study, which was published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization.
Related (if barely): Ronald Coasehas died at age 102.
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, with Jonathan Rose and Kenneth Snowden.
written by Uri Gneezy and John List. The authors and their publishers picked some of their favorite title suggestions and then we ran 
. You can read about it in the