We’ve written a good bit (in Chapter 5 of SuperFreakonomics and also the blog) about potential geoengineering solutions to global warming. This summer, with the SPICE geonengineering trials on hold in the U.K., two scientists are getting ready to try out a small-scale experiment in the U.S. From The Guardian:
Two Harvard engineers are to spray sun-reflecting chemical particles into the atmosphere to artificially cool the planet, using a balloon flying 80,000 feet over Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
From LiveScience:
According to new research from psychologist Heath Demaree, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, people who’ve experienced surprising outcomes in various situations — whether those outcomes were good or bad — are less likely to take risks in the future. In other words, it’s not whether you win or lose, but whether the outcome is expected. People appear to decrease their risk-taking levels after experiencing any surprising outcome — even positive ones.
“Surprising events are known to cause animals to stop, freeze, orient to the surprising stimulus and update their schemas of how the world works,” Demaree said. “Our recent research suggests that surprising events also cause people to temporarily reduce risk-taking.”
A new survey of 500 financial service professionals in the U.S. and the U.K. finds that 26 percent of survey respondents “had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace” and almost 25 percent “believed that financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct in order to be successful.”
Depending on your worldview, you may read that previous paragraph and think, Oh my goodness, that’s outrageous! Or, conversely, you might think Only 26 percent?!
We’ve had a lot to say about altruism, and how economists and others have tried to study it. A group of economists at the University of Zurich now claims to have found a spot in the brain associated with altruistic behavior. From Pacific Standard:
It’s called the right temporoparietal junction (or TPJ for short). Along with many other crucial functions, this neural crossroads gives us the ability to understand the perspectives of others—a prerequisite for empathy.
Swiss scholars report they have found a strong connection between the TPJ and a person’s willingness to engage in selfless acts.
An NBER working paper (full PDF here) by Meghan R. Busse, Devin G. Pope, Jaren C. Pope, and Jorge Silva-Risso explores the role of projection bias when choosing a new car or house. It turns out that weather conditions are a huge factor when consumers are debating big purchases like houses or cars. The abstract:
Projection bias is the tendency to overpredict the degree to which one’s future tastes will resemble one’s current tastes. We test for evidence of projection bias in two of the largest and most important consumer markets – the car and housing markets. Using data for more than forty million vehicle transactions and four million housing purchases, we explore the impact of the weather on purchasing decisions. We find that the choice to purchase a convertible, a 4-wheel drive, or a vehicle that is black in color is highly dependent on the weather at the time of purchase in a way that is inconsistent with classical utility theory. Similarly, we find that the hedonic value that a swimming pool and that central air add to a house is higher when the house goes under contract in the summertime compared to the wintertime.
1. Amazon now offering delivery lockers at 7-Eleven stores. (HT: SM Fishman)
2. New study: 84 percent of Americans will earn more than their parents.
3. 90 percent of criminals at 11 jails in China say they were abused as children.
4. The new elitists are “culture omnivores.”
5. The geography of school bus bullying.
An NBER paper by Michael L. Anderson looks into the how a university’s football performance affects its academic performance:
Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations. Testing this claim has proven difficult because success is not randomly assigned. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We then condition on these probabilities using a propensity score design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications, and enrollment. The resulting estimates represent causal effects under the assumption that, conditional on bookmaker spreads, winning is uncorrelated with potential outcomes. Two complications arise in our design. First, team wins evolve dynamically throughout the season. Second, winning a game early in the season reveals that a team is better than anticipated and thus increases expected season wins by more than one-for-one. We address these complications by combining an instrumental variables-type estimator with the propensity score design. We find that winning reduces acceptance rates and increases donations, applications, academic reputation, in-state enrollment, and incoming SAT scores.
New research (summarized in the BPS Research Digest) from psychologists Jonathan Weaver, Joseph Vandello, and Jennifer Bosson indicates that men whose masculinity is threatened become “myopic and more prone to take risks.” Here’s the abstract:
Among the conjectured causes of the recent U.S. financial crisis is the hyper-masculine culture of Wall Street that promotes extreme risk-taking. In two experiments, we found that threats to their manhood motivated men to take greater financial risks and favor immediate (vs. delayed) fiscal rewards. In Experiment 1, men placed larger bets during a gambling game after a gender threat as compared to men in an affirmation condition. In Experiment 2, after a gender threat, men pursued an immediate financial payoff rather than waiting for interest to accrue, but only if they believed their decision was public. When the decision was private, gender-threatened men did not show the same desire for immediate reward. These results suggest that gender threats may shift men’s financial decisions toward more risky and short-sighted public choices.
The Phnom Penh Post reports on a Cambodian village that’s converting to Christianity for economic reasons:
At upwards of US$500, the cost of slaughtering a buffalo to revive a relative condemned to ill-health by the spirits has pushed the Jarai indigenous minority residents of Somkul village in Ratanakkiri to a more affordable religious option: Christianity.
In the village in O’Yadav district’s Som Thom commune, about 80 per cent of the community have given up on spirits and ghosts in favour of Sunday sermons and modern medicine.
1. Advances in “goatscaping.” (HT: Anthony Sculimbrene)
2. Thirty-six percent of Americans believe in UFOs, says National Geographic survey.
3. More Brazilian prison incentives: generate energy to reduce sentences. (HT: Eric M. Jones)
4. Are we too busy?
A new survey study by Amir Hetsroni (who has also studied the difference between real doctors and TV doctors) and Hila Levenstein looks at the relationship between TV viewing and crime perception. The study, to be published next year in Psychological Reports, found a difference between religious and non-religious participants. From Ynetnews:
Yet the data collected from the 778 residents of northern Israel who watched channels 2 and 10 during prime time viewing hours in 2009 revealed some unexpected information.
It soon became clear that among secular viewers there was a certain connection between television viewing and fear of falling victim to a crime. Whereas a situation called Counter-Cultivation was diagnosed among religious viewers. This means that the more they watched television, the less they feared becoming a victim of a crime.
Olympic athletes have become increasingly reliant on scientists as advisers. A Wired article by Mark McClusky explores the efforts of sports scientists to improve athletic performance as gains have become harder to achieve. The Australian Institute of Sport is leading the charge; its success is best-demonstrated by an example from the skeleton, a sledding event that was recently reintroduced as an Olympic event:
They determined that one significant predictor of success had nothing to do with the sled itself or even the skill of the pilot. The faster a competitor pushed the sled through the 30-meter start zone before jumping on it, the better they performed. So researchers set up a national testing campaign, looking for women with backgrounds in competitive sports who excelled at the 30-meter sprint. They also evaluated candidates to see how well they responded to feedback and coaching. Eventually, they picked a group of 10 athletes—including track sprinters, a water skier, and several surf lifesavers, an Australian sport that requires sprinting through sand.
A new paper from economist (and city-lover) Ed Glaeser argues in favor of a reevaluation of government policies towards homeownership. The abstract:
The most fundamental fact about rental housing in the United States is that rental units are overwhelmingly in multifamily structures. This fact surely reflects the agency problems associated with renting single-family dwellings, and it should influence all discussions of rental housing policy. Policies that encourage homeowning are implicitly encouraging people to move away from higher density living; policies that discourage renting are implicitly discouraging multifamily buildings.
Our recent podcast “Riding the Herd Mentality” featured Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, who, among other unorthodox methods, hired mimes to tame the city’s unruly traffic. The mimes ridiculed bad behavior and handed out thumbs-up/thumbs-down cards to help people shame bad drivers. Some photographic evidence:
A new NBER paper examines the effect of Stand Your Ground self-defense laws, which “eliminate the longstanding legal requirement that a person threatened outside of his or her own home retreat rather than use force.” Chandler B. McClellan and Erdal Tekin exploit cross-state variations in implementation dates to determine the effect of these laws on homicides. Their findings are grim:
Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males. According to our estimates, between 4.4 and 7.4 additional white males are killed each month as a result of these laws. We find no evidence to suggest that these laws increase homicides among blacks. Our results are robust to a number of specifications and unlikely to be driven entirely by the killings of assailants.
1. Is the Chicago law and economics program too successful?
2. The Judgment of Princeton: more wine economics if you liked our wine podcast.
3. An elaborate bad customer service prank (video) from Belgium. (HT: Julian Morrow)
4. Some ambient noise improves creative cognition. (HT: JCB)
5. How Americans spend on alcohol: more at bars than at liquor stores.
6. Will rising temperatures bring more violent crime?
Prisoners in Brazil now have a path to reduced sentences: schoolwork. The Chicago Tribune reports that:
Inmates in four federal prisons holding some of Brazil’s most notorious criminals will be able to read up to 12 works of literature, philosophy, science or classics to trim a maximum 48 days off their sentence each year, the government announced.
Prisoners will have up to four weeks to read each book and write an essay which must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins and legible joined-up writing,” said the notice published on Monday in the official gazette.
If Brazil is bribing its prisoners to do schoolwork, can bribing students be far behind?
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
A new paper from P. Jeffrey Brantingham, an anthropologist at UCLA, uses a mathematical model for hunting to map street gang territory. From the UCLA Pressroom:
“The way gangs break up their neighborhoods into unique territories is a lot like the way lions or honey bees break up space,” said lead author P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a professor of anthropology at UCLA.
Using police records, the researchers mapped the activities of 13 gangs in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of Los Angeles. They found the most dangerous place to be wasn’t the heart of a gang’s territory, but near the borders:
Economists Ceyhun Elgin and Oguz Oztunali are researching the size of shadow economies, or black markets, around the world. Using a dataset with 7,395 observations for 161 countries from 1950 to 2009, they’re looking into how the size of black markets differs in rich and poor countries.
They estimate that shadow economies account for 22.67 percent of world GDP, with a generally downward trend that seems to have been interrupted by the global recession:
For almost all country groups (except for the post-Socialist one), we observe a declining trend over time. However, the pace of the reduction seems to lose some momentum in the last decade. Somewhat more interestingly, we observe a spike staring in 2007. Considering the emergence of the global economic crisis, this could give further support for the hypothesis that the size of the shadow economy is countercyclical, as suggested by Roca et al (2001) and Elgin (2012).
1. ABC repeats Roland Fryer’s resume experiment and finds that “white-sounding names were actually downloaded 17 percent more often by job recruiters.”
2. Groupon offer: a baby name for just $1,000.
3. New study says old people are more likely to die on their birthdays. (HT: Eric M Jones)
4. A conversation with neuroeconomist Colin Camerer.
5. Are people using the new Israeli organ donation cards to game the priority system?
6. The Nobel Prize Committee is tightening its belt: the prize is now only 8 million Swedish kronor (U.S $1.12 million). (HT: V Brenner)
Our “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?” podcast poked into various reasons for the decline of hitchhiking, including rising car ownership and the feature of strangers.
A Wall Street Journal article now highlights one scenario where hitchhiking is on the rise: at the George Washington Bridge, which links New Jersey and New York. The rise in hitchhiking (or, really, carpooling) is driven by a desire to escape the GWB’s high toll: vehicles carrying three or more passengers get a $6 toll discount. “There are no official meeting points or matching services for carpoolers,” writes Spencer Jakab. “So drivers approach the bridge and pick up pedestrians at a bus stop just before the toll plaza, giving a free ride to two commuters who would otherwise pay $2.00 to take a jitney into town.”
Arabic Knowledge@Wharton interviews Tyler Cowen about food and economics. Here’s a particularly interesting bit about why Wal-Mart’s presence in places like Africa might actually make it easier for the poor people to buy food there:
Cowen: If you look at wheat and rice, there have been price spikes over the last five years and they’ve made food a lot harder for poor people to afford. The so-called “Green Revolution” has somewhat slowed down. This is an unreported story. Crop yields are stagnant. It isn’t a problem we can solve overnight but it’s really one of the biggest problems in the world. It hardly gets any publicity. But for poor people in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it really matters.
Some of the problems are we don’t have enough trade. It could be either legal barriers or just costly to transport or trade things. If there could be a shortage of rice in one place, it actually not that easy to ship a lot of rice in there because of bad roads and so on.
As part of The Decolonizing Diet Project, a new study at the School of Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University, a group of 25 volunteers will spend the next year eating primarily foods that “were part of the Great Lakes diet prior to the year 1600.” As the blog Found Michigan explains:
The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between humans and regional native foods; components include an ethnobotanist (for native plant identification), a physician (to check up on participants’ physical changes), group outings and potlucks, daily journaling for research subjects, and a master list of “DDP-eligible” foods. So, things like squash, bison, and wild leeks are in; things like tomatoes, cheese, and chocolate are out. What can’t be bought from local suppliers must be grown, hunted, fished, or foraged—meaning your next meal might be waiting in the woods as opposed to the grocery store.
Notwithstanding the ongoing controversy over rising college tuition costs, there’s one group of people who think that college is worth the cost: people who haven’t gone. Catherine Rampell of Economix blogs about a new survey of recent high school graduates:
Seven in 10 of these recent graduates said they would need more education if they were to have a successful career. Despite their belief in the value of post-secondary education, though, only 38 per cent definitely planned to attend college to get more education in the next five years. Barriers included skyrocketing tuitions and family obligations.
Many of the respondents felt differently at the start of high school — 35 per cent thought they would “definitely” go to college and 28 percent believed they would “probably” go. Minority students were even more optimistic at the start of high school:
1. Public profanity now costs $20 in Middleborough, Mass.
2. San Francisco tries to disincentivize panhandling with puppies.
3. Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson chat with Gallup Business Journal.
4. Is “big data” a new class of economic asset?
5. L.A. subway system tries to stop fare cheaters.
A new paper from Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts analyzes “millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable.” Here’s what they found:
Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future — and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.
Scientists are working on genetically altering bugs to eliminate the spread of diseases like malaria and the West Nile virus. A Pacific Standard article describes the research:
Some researchers, including the Australians and groups at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, are smuggling a hitchhiking bacteria into the dengue-carrying mosquitoes that prevents them from passing on the virus. A British team is tinkering with DNA to either significantly reduce the lifespan of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (known as Anopheles) or kill females when they are just embryos. Either method would cause a population crash. In James’s lab in Southern California, scientists are working on similar techniques.
What these methods all share is the promise of blanket protection: they can theoretically kill or disable mosquitoes that insecticides miss—bugs nesting in hidden pools of water, for instance, or that lay eggs in storm drains or flower pots. What’s more, bioengineering bugs is relatively cheap and doesn’t require toxic pesticides.
According to a new study, people do. Even when they know that the advice is useless.
Researchers Nattavudh Powdthavee and Yohanes E. Riyanto investigated why people pay for advice about the future, particularly since the future is generally unpredictable (see our “Folly of Prediction” podcast on this topic). Their starting point:
Why do humans pay for advice about the future when most future events are predominantly random? What explains, e.g., the significant money spent in the finance industry on people who appear to be commenting about random walks, payments for services by witchdoctors, or some other false-expert setting?
Reader Peter Danza tipped us off to the way Sweden is trying to incentivize its citizens to return bottles. The reward: free music:
Sweden has a deposit bottle system similar to many other countries – plastic bottles and metal cans carry a deposit value (“pant” in Swedish) of usually 1 or 2 Swedish crowns, equal to about 15 to 25 US cents. This system should take care of itself: Most consumers should return their bottles (to retrieve their money back), and if they carelessly throw them away, there are a whole lot of poorer people who gladly look for bottles in the trash. That’s exactly how it works in Germany. (In fact, when you go out at night with a beer bottle and you’ve emptied it, you’re usually nice enough to put it next to a trash can rather than inside.)
That same system seems to be facing troubles in Sweden, however. So much so that now the bottle deposit organisation Pantamera commenced a campaign to promote returning bottles: If you return a bottle, take a photo of the receipt and send it to their website, you will receive free songs by a well known Swedish DJ.
An article in Chronicle of Higher Education explains how the increase in online courses has made cheating a lot easier. For example, Bob Smith (not his real name) successfully arranged a test-cheating scheme with several friends. The tests “pulled questions at random from a bank of possibilities” and could be taken anywhere, but had to be taken within a short window of time each week:
Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice, with the two results averaged into a final score.
“So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we’re all guaranteed an A in the end,” Mr. Smith told me. “We’re playing the system, and we’re playing the system pretty well.”
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