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Archive for November, 2011

The Downside of Living in a Need-to-Know World

I like keeping up with things, large and small, as much as the next person.

Or maybe I don’t. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

As someone who’s done a lot of journalism, I certainly have an appetite for being first with a story. In fact, most of the journalism I’ve written was stuff that no one else was writing about. But there’s a big difference between looking off the beaten path and trying to land a scoop within a beat that 100 other journalists are covering. I was never much into that. I understand that news organizations value the scoop but I do question how valuable such scoops really are — especially these days, when the first-mover often gets drowned out by the 1,000 who follow.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the information flow from the demand side rather than the supply side.


Mara Hvistendahl Answers Your Questions

Last week, we solicited your questions for Mara Hvistendahl, recent podcast contributor and the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. Below, Mara responds to some of your questions, addressing everything from dowries to polyandry. Thanks to everyone who participated.

 

Q While there certainly are downsides, with unattached men getting into trouble and being rowdy, won’t a shortage of females help increase the value and position of women in cultures that have been historically resistant to providing them an equal place in society? In theory, they should be able to demand higher standards during courtship and, once married, the threat of divorce would ensure better behavior on the part of men. Of course, a shortage of workers is one of the economic prerequisites to slavery so I guess it can go both ways. –Mike B


Artist Profit-Sharing: Another Example of How California Is Like Europe

How is California more like Europe than the United States? We can think of a few ways, but one of the most interesting involves the rights of artists. As this recent story in the New York Times points out, in 1976 California passed a law that guarantees artists 5 percent of the profits in a later sale of their artwork. In doing so, California copied France and a number of other nations, in which such profit-sharing with artists is required by law. In the rest of the United States, by contrast, artists have no right to the profits a collector might make when they resell their artwork.

From an economic point of view, the California rule is a little strange. As we discussed in a previous post, if I sell my house and in five years it rises substantially in value (an anachronistic example these days, we recognize), I don’t get a cut of the windfall. A deal is a deal.


It's Good to Have Friends in Texas

The University of Texas System regents have chosen to invest $10 million in a start-up company that provides web-based advising services to university students. Perhaps a good idea, although unlike nearly all other investments of the System’s endowment, this one was made by fiat of the Board of Regents with no consultation of its investment advisors. Interestingly, the start-up is run by a man who was on Gov. Rick Perry’s re-election finance committee and by another whose father was a previous chancellor of the System (with the former chancellor being part-owner of the company).

This is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of successful rent-seeking in the public sector (although laypeople might use a less felicitous term than rent-seeking). This blog needs a contest for the most outrageous example of this behavior, and this is my entry into that contest. So, dear readers, please share your examples in the comments section.

[HT to AC]


Drunk Walking, Halloween Edition

Freakonomics has reported at length on the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen versus more common problems that we tend to ignore. And perhaps because of this, we’ve also been in the vanguard of the campaign against drunk walking, which is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving.

And so a recent story from Christopher Shea at the WSJ Ideas Blog caught our eye, because it so perfectly combines these two obsessions. Shea writes that a razor blade in an apple on Halloween is a myth, and has probably never happened. Pedestrian deaths, however, are four times higher on October 31st than an average day, because so many more people are wandering around outside. We at Freakonomics would like to add that some of those Halloween revelers (the adults at least) are also more likely to be inebriated, which no doubt explains some of the accidents.

Happy November.


The Disadvantages of Summer Babies

A new report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies in the U.K. examines the big difference that a few months can make in the student achievement of young children. Authors Claire Crawford, Lorraine Dearden and Ellen Greaves found (along with several previous studies, like this one and this one) that children born in summer months generally score lower on standardized tests and are seen as “underachievers;” while children born in September and autumn months are more academically and socially successful.


Does Democracy Make Us Richer and Better Educated? Or Is It the Other Way Around?

It’s one of the ultimate chicken or egg questions: Does democracy lead to increases in education and income, or do education and higher income lead to democracy? It’s a tricky one, considering that over the last 200 years, they’ve essentially moved in tandem across much of the developed world.
So which is affecting which? A new working paper (full version here) by Fabrice Murtin and Romain Wacziarg attempts to untangle the two to understand whether democracy grows from education and higher income, or vice versa.


Customer Dis-service

I recently had one of the strangest customer service episodes I’ve ever experienced. It took place at Café Bon Appetit in downtown Chicago. A group of twenty of us were eating lunch there. It is one of those places that has many food stations to choose from, then you pay for your food and find a table. There is no table service. It’s a huge restaurant. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the restaurant can seat 300 people. That is one of the reasons we go there in a big group — there are always plenty of seats.

One of the diners, who is on some sort of vegan, non-gluten health kick, had brought her own lunch. The rest of us had bought our lunch there. We found a table in the nearly completely empty back seating area. About halfway through lunch, the restaurant manager appeared. I assumed it was to thank us for coming and to ask how the food was. It turned out his mission was quite different.


The Way We Teach Math, Sciences, and Languages Is Wrong

A few years after I learned German, I got the chance to learn French. That experience gave me lots of ideas for why our teaching of many subjects, especially science and mathematics, is so unsuccessful—and for how we can improve our learning.

I studied French in school for five years. However, when I went to France after college, I could barely buy a train ticket. The impetus to try again came a few years later, in the summer of 1993. Our whole family was going to spend two months in Lyon while my father took a sabbatical. The rest of us enrolled in a four-week language course at the Alliance Française.

While still in America, to get more benefit from the language course, I started relearning French. On the recommendation of a friend who is a linguist and mathematician, I got the self-study French course made by Assimil entitled Le Nouveau Français sans Peine (New French With Ease). (Many other self-study courses should also work well. I have not tried them, so I do not have the knowledge to draw out lessons for learning other subjects, which is my main interest here. But to learn about language programs, I recommend the excellent “How to learn any language” site.)

I did one French lesson daily starting from Lesson 1. I read a short, idiomatic dialogue out loud using the pronunciation key, then listened to it on the tape, repeating it sentence by sentence. The lesson finished with 2 minutes of fill-in-the-word exercises using the vocabulary from the dialogue. Each lesson took about 30 minutes. After three months of this preparation, when I landed in France I could converse with random French people on the train.


Talk Back: Tell Us Your Election Stories

Ever notice anything strange around town when elections are coming up?

Our latest podcast, “Wildfires, Cops, and Keggers,” looks into the odd by-products of electoral politics — that is, not just which politicians get elected, but what kind of below-the-radar shenanigans happen before (and sometimes after) an election, usually inspired by how an incumbent’s incentives are lined up. Maybe property taxes dropped in the run-up to an election, only to spike once an incumbent had won another term. Maybe more cops and firemen were hired during campaign season.

Given that many of these election-cycle fluctuations occur in less-scrutizined local elections, we want to hear from you any interesting examples you’ve witnessed. Tell us your election stories in the comments below!


What's the ROI on Cold Case Investigations?

The field of forensics has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years, so much so that decades-old crime cases can sometimes be solved with DNA testing and other modern technology. In an effort to increase case clearance rates (and catch bad guys long gone) police departments have slowly opened more ‘cold case’ units over the last 20 years; a phenomenon that has been documented and dramatized on TV.

In a new RAND paper, researchers Robert C. Davis, Carl Jensen, and Karin E. Kitchens set out to measure the effectiveness of cold case units by posing a simple question, though one that’s rarely asked of police work: What’s the return on investment?


System D: The Shadow Economy is the Second Largest in the World

In 2009, the OECD concluded that half the world’s workers (almost 1.8 billion people) were employed in the shadow economy. By 2020, the OECD predicts the shadow economy will employ two-thirds of the world’s workers.
This new economy even has a name: “System D.”

In a new article (accompanying photoessay here) for Foreign Policy, Robert Neuwirth explains:

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.


Does the Public Want Geoengineering? (And: Does It Need a New Name?)

As someone who has written about geoengineering (and been hit with the requisite slime for doing so), I was more than a little surprised to see the results of a survey about the public’s view of geongineering (abstract here; PDF here) by researchers at the University of Calgary, Harvard, and Simon Fraser University, and published in Environmental Research Letters. From the press release:

Research on geoengineering appears to have broad public support, as a new, internationally-representative survey revealed that 72 per cent of respondents approved research into the climate-manipulating technique…. Public awareness of geoengineering is remarkably broad. Eight per cent of the sample were able to provide a correct definition of geoengineering, an increase on previous estimates; however, 45 per cent of the sample correctly defined the alternative term “climate engineering”, adding weight to the argument that “geoengineering” may be misleading and difficult to understand.


A Craigslist for Currency Markets

In Belarus, the government doesn’t allow trading of its ruble outside a narrow price range, which greatly overvalues the ruble— so there is a price floor on the ruble compared to the euro or dollar. Because of the floor, currency trading had dried up: who would want to sell foreign currencies for grossly overpriced Belarussian rubles??

A friend of one of my students has a website designed to overcome rigidities in this market, sort of a Craigslist for currency. People specify amounts willing to buy or sell, agree to trade at some price and arrange a meeting place (often one of the empty currency-trading booths!). When they meet, trade nominally occurs at the official price floor, making the transaction nominally legal; but the person selling rubles makes side payments to the buyer to lower the price sufficiently so that the trade actually takes place at the equilibrium price.

One more way in which technology helps markets circumvent imperfections and rigidities.

(HT to MK)