Playing the Nerd Card

Kai RYSSDAL: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It’s that moment every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name — it is the hidden side of everything. Dubner, good to have you back.

Stephen DUBNER: Great to be here, Kai. I don’t know with the L.A. teams out of the NBA playoffs now — I don’t know if you’re still paying attention or not.

RYSSDAL: I am so done with the Lakers. And this is where the hate mail from L.A. comes in. But I mean, come on, really? Get over yourselves.

DUBNER: Well, there is a trend — besides the demise of the Lakers — that is unmistakable, but it’s a trend off the court. It’s something you see during the post-game press conferences, and that is that just about every star player — LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett and Kevin Durant — they’re all wearing these big, chunky, black eyeglasses. You know, the kind that Urkel used to wear, depending on your timeframe, Buddy Holly.

RYSSDAL: That’s right. I saw — who was it? — I guess it was LeBron I saw at a press conference, from Miami, yeah.

DUBNER: There you go. Now, in the old days, it was pretty uncommon to see many athletes wear any kind of glasses. So, my first thought was simply, ‘Hey, maybe poor eyesight is on the rise.’ So, we reached out to Susan Vitale, she’s a researcher at the National Eye Institute, and she has looked at the rate of myopia — or near-sightedness — among Americans in the early 1970s and then again in the 2000s.

Susan VITALE: So, in ’71-’72, the prevalence of myopia in people who are aged 12 to 54 was 25 percent, or one in four people. And when we applied those same methods to the later population, we found that the prevalence was 41.6 percent, which is roughly a 66 percent increase.

RYSSDAL: So that’s a lot, right? Sixty-six percent in 30-something years. Are we just getting older or what’s going on?

DUBNER: Well, you know, the causes are the subject of a lot of debate. Some researchers think it’s all the close-up work we do, like reading the myriad screens we’re tethered to. Others think it’s because we don’t get enough sunshine. Whatever the case, we asked Miami Heat superstar LeBron James if he actually needs those glasses to see.

Lebron JAMES: No, I don’t need glasses to see. No. That’s just fashion. It’s about fashion. If you wear them right, sometimes it looks good, sometimes it cannot look so good.

RYSSDAL: He’s faking, man! He’s wearing non-prescription lenses.

DUBNER: As millions of Americans do each day, we learned. Probably about four million. You know, they’re plain-os, or glasses with plain lenses.

RYSSDAL: Really?

DUBNER: Yep. Yes sir.

RYSSDAL: That’s — I don’t understand that. Well, he is so cool that he can look cool wearing glasses? I don’t even know.

DUBNER: I think that’s about right. The fact is, this trend has blown up all over the NBA, the NFL also. I asked the Harvard economist Roland Fryer about this, and he suspects — as only an economist could suspect — that this is what you’d call a ‘two-audience signaling mechanism.’

Roland FRYER: These guys are saying to one audience, ‘Hey I’m here, I’m an athlete.’ To the other one, ‘Look at my glasses, look at the way I’m dressed, look at the way I carry myself — I can promote your product.’

RYSSDAL: Oh my god, that is so cynical. That’s horrible. Right?

DUBNER: Well, it may be much more than that as well. Even Roland Fryer says that. Fryer has also studied the ‘acting white’ phenomenon, right? Which is when black kids who study too much get called out by their peers, as if there’s a stigma in trying to accomplish too much. So now, with all these black NBA and NFL stars wearing their big nerd eyeglasses, it may be that they’re sending a message that the ‘acting white’ stigma is over — or at least that it should be over. LeBron’s teammate Dwyane Wade told us that he doesn’t need his nerd glasses either, but he does like the message that they send.

Dwayne WADE: Yeah, it is cool. You try to go out and talk to kids, you try to let them know that it’s cool to be smart, it’s cool to be educated, you know? So it’s a message behind the madness, you know?

RYSSDAL: That’s actually great, ‘message behind the madness.’ It’s ‘acting smart is not acting white.’

DUBNER: That’s exactly right. Although I will tell you something very interesting: Roland Fryer, who’s also African American, told me that even he — a Harvard econ professor — that he wears glasses that he doesn’t need, also in order to ‘relax everyone,’ as he puts it. And I should tell you this also: The signaling at Harvard doesn’t end with eyeglasses, according to Fryer.

FRYER: A couple years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues here at Harvard, and they said to me — they confessed, let’s say to me — that they dyed their hair gray. And I said, ‘Why would anyone do that?’ He says, ‘Well I want people to take me more seriously.’

RYSSDAL: Wow. I will never understand people, can I just tell you that?

DUBNER: I understand you, though, Kai. I understand you.

RYSSDAL: Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. We’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

DUBNER: Thanks for having me, Kai.