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Archive for 2012

TV's Relationship to Mental Retardation and Autism

TV is bad for children.  Wait, no it’s not.  Yes, it is!   And it’s really bad for their hearts!

Here’s the latest paper on the topic, from Michael Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov.  Using a natural experiment to rule out the possibility of reverse causation, the authors find “a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates.”  


Football Freakonomics: Tackling the Old Defense-Wins-Championship Cliche

We all know the cliché. Go ahead, put on your best John Facenda voice and say it with us:

DEFENSE. WINS. CHAMPIONSHIPS.

What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?

Or is the saying maybe the collective echo of some grizzled defensive coordinator in a long-ago championship game, trying to fire up his troops during halftime? “Men, you and I know that our teammates on offense are good men, tough men, talented men. And they helped get us here. But let me be clear, gentlemen: DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!”

What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?


All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting!

I’m so pleased to see that stand-up meetings are gaining ground (or at least exposure, in the Wall Street Journal). I am on the record as someone who dislikes meetings in general; I also work much of the day standing up (at a great adjustable desk that Ikea unfortunately no longer makes).

As Rachel Silverman writes:

Stand-up meetings are part of a fast-moving tech culture in which sitting has become synonymous with sloth. The object is to eliminate long-winded confabs where participants pontificate, play Angry Birds on their cellphones or tune out. …


How to Get Your Kid to Do Chores

There’s a new iPad app for parents to incentivize children to do chores. HighScore House! sets up a market for parents and children to assign points to chores and exchange those points for rewards.

Co-founder Kyle Seaman tells us that they’ve tracked 150,000 tasks from about 6,000 users in their beta version (full version will launch in a couple months).

HighScore House! shared some data with us: 43 percent of their users are kids between 5 and 9 years old, with an average task completion rate of 54 percent. Girls have a 2 percent higher completion rate than boys. In general, kids seem to favor low-hanging fruit: lower value tasks (usually easier ones) have a higher completion rate. 


"Never Follow Your Dreams": Mark Cuban Answers Your Questions

Last week, we solicited your questions for Mark Cuban — serial entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, and blogger, who recently published an eBook called How to Win at the Sport of Business.

Here now are Cuban’s answers. A lot of answers. Granted, most of them are short but Cuban can pack a lot into a terse words (unlike a few million politicians and businessfolk we know). He has some strong words on financial engineering and, if you read carefully, lots of good career advice. My hands-down favorite: “Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort.”


The Least Fun Way to Predict a Super Bowl Winner

From Elizabeth Stanton at Bloomberg:

The New England Patriots will win the Super Bowl by at least three points even though the New York Giants have the appeal of “a cocktail party stock,” according to a quantitative money management firm that’s correctly picked the team covering the point spread for eight consecutive years.

Analytic Investors LLC in Los Angeles has documented a tendency on the part of Super Bowl bettors to overestimate the chances of the team that rewarded them more during the regular season — the team with the higher alpha, in investment parlance. In 2008, that was the favored Patriots, who lost to the Giants 17-14. This year, it’s New York.

“Everyone thinks the Giants are rolling right now, a lot of people in my office even,” said Matthew Robinson, a portfolio analyst for global and Japanese equities at Analytic and the author of this year’s analysis. “They like the Giants, but they have faith in the model as well.”

On the other hand, do I label this “the least fun way” because I have a Giants bias and am blind to my blindness?

At least this is less ridiculous than the Super Bowl Indicator.


Bad Names for Online Dating

New research by Jochen E. Gebauer and two co-authors, summarized in the BPS Research Digest, analyzed data from a German dating website and found that an unpopular name will lessen your chances of getting a date in the online dating universe:

The main finding here was that people with unfashionable names like Kevin or Chantal were dramatically more likely to be rejected by other users (i.e. other users tended to choose not to contact them). A user with the most popular name (Alexander) received on average double the number of contacts as someone with the least popular name (Kevin) … However, the researchers also found that people with unpopular names were more likely to smoke, had lower self-esteem and were less educated. What’s more, the link between the popularity of their name and these life outcomes was mediated by the amount of rejection they suffered on the dating site – as if rejection on the site were a proxy for the amount of social neglect they’d suffered in life.

Apparently, Kevin really is more than a name.


The Politics of Political Prediction Markets

For years, I have argued that the best way to track what really matters through election season is to follow the political prediction markets. The one difficulty is that these markets aren’t really available to the general public.  Sure, the University of Iowa runs a market, but because it’s for research purposes, the maximum bet is set at only $500. And while I track InTrade closely, they’re based in Ireland, and are frowned upon by American regulators. Likewise, Betfair won’t deal with American customers.  But all that may be about to change.


A Great Example of Bias Within Academia

It is amazing how good we are — even the smartest, most rational people among us — at not recognizing our own biases. (Danny Kahneman memorably calls this being “blind to our blindness.”)

We recently put out a podcast called “The Truth Is Out There … Isn’t It?” about how people decide what to believe about everything from global warming and nuclear risk to UFO’s. It was inspired by the research of Dan Kahan and his colleagues at the Cultural Cognition Project; they have found that we systematically filter our beliefs through our personal and political filters. In other words, we allow our biases to influence what we think about theoretically non-ideological issues, but we aren’t aware of that influence.


Jacky Kaba Keeps Writing Interesting Papers on Race

I blogged a few years ago about Amadu Jacky Kaba under the headline “A Scholar to Keep Your Eye On”:

Amadu Jacky Kaba is a Liberian-born striver who first came to Seton Hall University as a basketball player and, several degrees later, has returned as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. Like our friend Roland Fryer, Kaba is a black scholar who studies a lot of racial issues with a perspective and a latitude that is unavailable to white scholars.

If indeed you had kept your eye on Kaba, you would have seen that he keeps writing lots (and lots) of interesting papers.


Father of Our Country as an Economist

In his book Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow quotes a letter that speaks to the hoary economic historians’ debate about the profitability of slavery.  Washington noted that in his time Virginia estates were forever doomed to lapse into debt, “as Negroes [sic] must be clothed and fed and taxes paid…whether anything is made or not.”  Even if slavery were on average profitable, Washington noted that slaves represented a fixed cost of production. 


Food Aid: Bad for Peace?

A new working paper (ungated version here) by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian may have interesting implications for U.S. policy on humanitarian aid. We’ve blogged before about the “crowding out” effect of food aid, but this research points to another alarming effect:

[A]n increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts.


Are Super Bowl Ads Too Cheap?

The Super Bowl has by now become such an institution – it’s practically a second New Year’s Day – that just about everyone feels compelled to watch it, even if they don’t care one bit about football. One consequence of this fact is that the broadcast of the game (on NBC this year; it rotates annually among NBC, CBS, and Fox) has turned into an another event entirely: the most massive real-time advertising opportunity in history.

This has had a few linked effects: the price of the ads has risen ever higher; advertisers spend more time and effort making better ads; and the ads have gotten so good that a lot of people time their kitchen or bathroom breaks to the game action in order to not miss the ads.


Collateral Damage from the Japanese Tsunami Disaster?

A reader named Mark Weitzman calls our attention to a Yomiuri Shimbun article with a provocative claim:

Quake efforts blamed for rise in snow mishaps

This winter’s heavier snowfall has seen more than 500 people across seven prefectures die or become injured in snow-related accidents, including cases in which they had been trying to remove snow, it has been learned.

People are trying to remove snow themselves using shovels and other tools because of delays in municipal-led snow removal. The delays have been caused by a shortage of dump trucks–many of which are being used in areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake for reconstruction work–to transport snow.

According to data compiled by the Akita, Aomori, Ishikawa, Nagano, Niigata, Toyama and Yamagata prefectural governments, the death toll from such snow-related accidents had reached 31 as of Wednesday, while 479 people had sustained injuries.


Swallowing the Whistle: A Guest Post by Tobias Moskowitz

With the upcoming Super Bowl this Sunday pitting the Giants against the Patriots again (they last faced off in 2008), who could forget the most infamous play in Super Bowl history?  And in case you did forget, the image of David Tyree reaching back until he was nearly parallel to the field and snatching the ball with one hand and pinning it to his helmet has been either shown or referred to at least 150 times on ESPN and the NFL Network in the last week — and we’re still a week away from the game!

The play was extraordinary, no doubt about it, but perhaps the most interesting aspect of that play was something rather ordinary that happened well before Tyree made his remarkable grab (it was the last catch of his career by the way—one hell of curtain call!), something that is much more likely to be a factor in the upcoming game. 


Can We Add Carmen and Gang Signs to the "Formerly Repugnant" List?

I have probably seen and listened to more opera than the median American, but that’s not saying much. In other words, I am not very knowledgeable about opera itself, or its history and mores, etc. If I were, what I’m about to tell you probably wouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Not long ago, in an airport far from home, I met a nice fellow who turned out to be a Spanish-born tenor now living in the States, named Alvaro Rodriguez. We kept in touch and he let me know that he’d be performing with the New York Lyric Opera, playing Don Jose in Carmen. So I bought my tickets and decided to read up on Carmen since: a) I didn’t know the story all that well; and b) my French is spotty at best; and c) this would be a scaled-down production, with no subtitles, etc.


Financial Literacy Solutions, Information-Design Edition

In our latest podcast, “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?” we talked about America’s financial literacy problem, a topic we’ve written about before. In the podcast, two Council of Economic Advisers chairmen discuss the role of financial illiteracy in the recession. And economist Annamaria Lusardi and legal scholar Lauren Willis offer their solutions to the problem.

Two designers, Tristan Cook and Thomas Nelson of Humans in Design, also have a pitch.


Astounding Fact of the Day

More evidence of the relationship between the housing market and the overall economy:

Construction makes up less than 5 percent of employment but accounts for more than 40 percent of the large swings in the job-filling rate during and after the Great Recession.

That’s from “Recruiting Intensity During and After the Great Recession,” by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John C. Haltiwanger (abstract; PDF).

 


Playing the Nerd Card (Ep. 77)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Playing the Nerd Card.”

(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)

It’s about the rise in basketball players (and other athletes) showing up at press conferences wearing the kind of eyeglasses usually associated with Steve Urkel and Buddy Holly. Among the practitioners: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, and Robert Griffin III.

What’s going on here? Has the rate of myopia exploded, even among premier athletes?

We talk to Susan Vitale, a research epidemiologist with the NIH’s National Eye Institute, who worked on a large study on myopia in the U.S. There has indeed been a huge spike in recent decades, and it’s especially pronounced among blacks.


Classrooms With 500,000 Students

I am fascinated by the Stanford online courses in machine learning and artificial intelligence. My first inkling of them came when quite a few of my students started taking the artificial-intelligence class. Olin is very small, only about 400 students, so I realized that these online courses must be large. But I almost fell over when I saw that enrollment varied from 66,000, at the low-end, to 160,000.

Sebastian Thrun, who co-taught the artificial-intelligence course to 160,000 students, is now leaving Stanford teaching in order to teach courses to 500,000 students for free. What an inspiring goal!


Where Have All the Bobs Gone?

Jon Bois at SB Nation writes about the disappearance of Bobs in sports:

Across the histories of Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, and NCAA football and basketball, there have been a total of 1,884 athletes who primarily went by the name Bob. Not Robert, or Bobby, but Bob. 

Of those 1,884 Bobs, Sanders [of the San Diego Chargers] is the only one still playing.

We’ve written regularly about names and how some just go out of fashion. The fact is that “Robert” is still holding its own.


Why Does the Kindle Feel So Much Heavier Than the Nook?

As someone in a mixed marriage — that is, in our home we read on Kindles and Nooks (and also an iPad) — I got a laugh out of the following e-mail. It’s from a Buenos Aires reader named Pablo Untroib:

Hi guys, read your 1st book and I’m on my way to finish SuperFreakonomics, today it happened something that I thought you would be interested. First a little introduction:

Two months ago I purchased a Nook simple touch e-book reader, these gizmos aren’t that popular here in Argentina compared to USA, so my wife’s 1st reaction was, why you spent money on that thing? So I loaded it with some books, she likes and not a day passed then she said: this Nook is mine, you should get a new one for yourself. Strategic error on my side, I should had purchased two to start with.


Some Links Worth Following

1. President Obama is reading The World America Made, which downplays the America-is-in-decline meme; meanwhile, Latin America pushes the America-is-in-decline meme.

2. Austan Goolsbee is on Twitter, and has lots to say. (This will surprise no one who read this.)

3. If you have a Godfather-obsessed kid, as I do, you may want to read The Godfather Effect. (Good WSJ review here.)

4. “Is economic repugnance closely related to biological disgust?” Yes, this is from our friend Al Roth. More here on disgust and food.


Olympian Economics (Ep. 85)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Olympian Economics,” with Tess Vigeland sitting in for Kai Ryssdal this week.

(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)

With the 2012 Summer Olympic Games getting underway this week in London, we ask a simple question: do host cities really get the benefits their boosters promise, or are they just engaging in some fiscal gymnastics?

If you’ve read what we’ve posted in the past about the Olympics, you may already have a glimmer of a hint of a possibility of the answer to that question.


Question of the Day: What Does a Roommate's Bad Habit Say About the Economics of Jealousy?

I have long been interested in the effects — psychological, economic, and otherwise — of jealousy (and, relatedly, disgust and repugnance). Even using the word “jealousy” is probably loaded. (Maybe “resentment” is better? Doubtful.) In any case: somewhere between the 99% movement and the Mitt Romney-as-private-equity-bloodsucker meme lies a discussion that includes a lot of legitimate questions about fairness and a lot of less-legitimate emotional reaction that gets turned into political and intellectual fodder.


Of Booze and Bags

The Austin City Council is about to outlaw the paper and plastic bags you get at the grocery store. Retailers don’t like the ban. One particularly clever argument by liquor retailers is that it will encourage people to buy less — not a good thing, so they argue, when unemployment is high. 

This is a bad argument for so many reasons: 1) Booze demand and bag provision are at most only a tiny bit complementary — one can always carry the six-pack out by hand; 2) To argue that high unemployment is a reason for anything other than macro stimuli is totally self-serving.  I think all universities should hire more economists to reduce unemployment (although others may differ). The best argument against the ban is that it is not efficient—the environmental improvements don’t justify the extra resource cost of schlepping reusable bags into stores.  I don’t find even that argument to be very persuasive.

(HT to TC).


The Hidden Side of the Super Bowl (Ep. 59)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast covers the upcoming Super Bowl between the New York Giants and New England Patriots. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)

We figured that of the 100 million-plus people who “watch” the game each year, a lot of them aren’t what you’d call rabid football fans. Does that describe you? If so, this episode is a handy cheat sheet that’ll let you converse knowingly with your football-crazed friends, and maybe even one-up them.


Got a Question for Mark Cuban? Ask Away …

Mark Cuban is known for a lot of things: the well-timed sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo!, which made him rich; his high-profile ownership of the Dallas Mavericks (and co-ownership of the media company 2929 Entertainment); his cameos on Entourage, and much more. (FWIW, Forbes pegs Cuban’s net worth at $2.3 billion.)

Now Cuban has  published an eBook, How to Win at the Sport of Business. It is compilation of greatest hits from Blog Maverick. Cuban did a Q&A on our blog a few years ago and is now back for more.