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Archive for November 29th, 2011

Bargain Hunting for Charities

Gosh that sounds so stingy. When we are charitable, we don’t want to be cheap. This is our moment of giving, of generosity, not bah-humbugness. Alas, that is exactly what we should be. If we go to a restaurant for chicken wings, what would you think of the following prices:

4 chicken wings: $8
6 chicken wings: $8
8 chicken wings: $8

Which would you opt for (assuming more is always better)? Naturally, it shouldn’t require much thought. So why not apply this to charity?

This is what Givewell does. (And I’m pleased to say, you can see the imprint of lots of research from Innovations for Poverty Action on their assessments and recommendations). You may remember I blogged about Givewell over the summer, and how there is no correlation between their assessment of organizational effectiveness and the horrid measure often used by those in search of a good charity, “general administrative and fundraising expenditures as a proportion of program expenses.”


Labor Peace in Baseball May Not Last Forever

The following is a guest post by David Berri, a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is also the lead author of Stumbling on Wins, the general manager of the sports-economics blog Wages of Wins, and is a frequent contributor to the Freakonomics blog.

Last week I looked at the labor negotiations in the NBA. Since then, the NBA appears to have reached an agreement with its workers, ending the latest dispute in professional North American sports.

Over the last three decades, labor disputes have become a common feature in professional sports. In fact – as The Wages of Wins indicated– relative to non-sports industries, labor disputes are about 25 times more likely in professional sports. So the recent lockout in the NBA was hardly surprising.


Shooting The Right Profile

My old band was called The Right Profile. (I talked about quitting in this radio show.) It wasn’t a great name probably but we stuck with it. I did love its provenance. It came from a song on The Clash’s London Calling, which is still one of my favorite records ever. “The Right Profile” was about the strange, sad life of the actor Montgomery Clift, who after a terrible car crash was shot from the right side. It was hardly the best song on London Calling — I wouldn’t even put it in the top five — but you come to love the names of people and things you loved, so I always loved The Right Profile.

So I was very jazzed to learn, via Variety, that a biopic of Clash leader Joe Strummer is in the works, to be directed by Julie Delpy, and it’s got a great title:

Details from The Right Profile are being kept under wraps, but the idea is to focus on Strummer’s life and his planned disappearance from the public spotlight in 1982. Pic is titled after the song “The Right Profile,” which appeared on the Clash’s seminal 1979 album “London Calling.”

An iconic figure of the British punk movement, Strummer died in December 2002, just a month before he and the Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Can’t wait.

(HT: Mark Ehrenkranz)


More Heresy on Obesity

Obesity — its causes and consequences — is a frequent topic on this blog (and the podcast too). In the podcast, Eric Oliver argued that “the causal relationship between weight and maladies like heart disease, cancer, and even diabetes has not been firmly established.” That certainly strikes some as heresy. In a recent EconTalk podcast, noted heretic Gary Taubes lays out a well-argued position:

Taubes argues that for decades, doctors, the medical establishment, and government agencies encouraged Americans to reduce fat in their diet and increase carbohydrates in order to reduce heart disease. Taubes argues that the evidence for the connection between fat in the diet and heart disease was weak yet the consensus in favor of low-fat diets remained strong. Casual evidence (such as low heart disease rates among populations with little fat in their diet) ignores the possibilities that other factors such as low sugar consumption may explain the relationship.

Anyone for the paleo diet?


Addition Is Useless, Multiplication Is King: Channeling Our Inner Logarithm

TIME magazine has been running a series called “Brilliant: The science of smart” by Annie Murphy Paul. The latest column, “Why Guessing Is Undervalued,” quoted several results from research on learning estimation, a topic near to my heart. One result surprised me particularly:

…good estimators possess a clear mental number line — one in which numbers are evenly spaced, or linear, rather than a logarithmic one in which numbers crowd closer together as they get bigger. Most schoolchildren start out with the latter understanding, shedding it as they grow more experienced with numbers.

I do agree that children start out with a logarithmic understanding. I first learned this idea from a wonderful episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab on “Innate numbers” (Nov. 30, 2009). The producers had asked Stanislas Dehaene to discuss his research on innate number perception.

One of his studies involved an Indian tribe in the Amazon. This tribe does not have words for numbers beyond five, and does not have formal teaching of arithmetic.


Fun Things That Show Up on Flickr

Its content notwithstanding, what’s interesting to me about this picture is how jarring it is to see a black-and-white photograph these days. It instantly looks like an antique. There was a time, not so long ago, when 99 percent of serious photographers sneered at color photography. I worked at the N.Y. Times when it began printing color photographs in the news sections, and from some of the shrieking commentary you would have thought they were producing the color ink by pulverizing baby seals and kittens. The full-on proliferation of color photography is a good example of how quickly we get used to new things that we predicted we’d never get used to.

(HT: J.L.)


Risk = Hazard + Outrage: A Conversation with Risk Consultant Peter Sandman

In our recent podcast “The Truth is Out There… Isn’t It?,” we hear from professional skeptics, former UFO investigators, and “social incompetence” experts. One fascinating interview that didn’t make the final cut was with Peter Sandman, a “risk-communication consultant” whose work was also cited in Freakonomics. (Here is how he came to be what he is.)

Sandman breaks his work into three areas: scaring people who are ignoring something that is legitimately dangerous and risky; calming down people who are freaking out over something that’s not risky; and guiding people who are freaking out over something that is legitimately risky. To accomplish all this, Sandman came up with a useful equation: Risk = Hazard + Outrage. Here are some excerpts from Stephen Dubner’s interview with Sandman, which ranges from the perceived risk of WMD’s in Iraq to the debate over climate change.