A new study in the Journal of Clinical Pathology from Ian Proctor, Vijay Sharma, Mohammad KoshZaban and Alison Winstanley, reveals doctor biases towards smoking and smokers. The researchers looked at 2,128 death certificates, and 236 postmortems issued at a large London teaching hospital between 2003 and 2009. They found that while alcohol was listed as a major contributor to 57.4 percent of death certificates, smoking was only listed as a cause of death in .5 percent of cases, and usually a secondary cause at that. Considering that 279 of those deaths included either lung cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — that’s a bit strange.
This study serves as a bellwether of the western world’s campaign to stop smoking. Cigarette packages in the UK carry punitive phrases such as “smokers die younger,” and “smoking can cause a slow and painful death.” More recently, every cigarette pack has been required to carry a graphic image as well: pictures of black lung, throat cancer, and even a corpse. Scarier messages and pictures are coming to the U.S. too. There’s no doubt that our attitudes towards smoking have changed immensely; so drastically, in fact, that the authors conclude that doctors would rather lie and spare a family the eternal shame of having a loved-one remembered as a smoking bandit:
Last week, we told you about our new project with the NFL Network called “Football Freakonomics.” We’ll be posting segments here as they air throughout the season. “Football Freakonomics” will explore the hidden side of the NFL with original research and insight from brilliant minds from sport, academia, and beyond. We’ll look at data, stats, performance, salaries, and much more. Here’s the first segment to clue you in on what “Football Freakonomics” is all about.
You can also check out the “The Quarterback Quandary,” a segment Dubner did prior to the NFL Draft.
We blogged recently about the challenges of communicating scientific uncertainty to the public, especially when it comes to climate science. The October 2011 issue of Physics Today contains yet another article addressing the very same concept. From the article:
Scientists typically fail to craft simple, clear messages and repeat them often. They commonly overdo the level of detail, and people can have difficulty sorting out what is important. In short, the more you say, the less they hear. And scientists tend to speak in code. We encourage them to speak in plain language and choose their words with care. Many words that seem perfectly normal to scientists are incomprehensible jargon to the wider world. And there are usually simpler substitutes.
We particularly like the table provided at the end of the article, titled “Terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public.” For example, the scientific term “uncertainty” translates to “ignorance” for the general public; the article suggests scientists use the word “range” instead. Error, which the general public reads as “mistake, wrong, incorrect,” might be better replaced by “difference from exact true number.”
What exactly happens when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues one of those ominous Public Health Advisories (PHAs) about a pharmaceutical product? A new paper by Rena M. Conti, Haiden A. Huskamp and Ernst R. Berndt investigates.
From the abstract:
We find firms targeted by an advisory have average stock price declines of 3% in three days and 11% in five days following the advisory release, and in turn appear to decrease total physician-directed promotion spending, journals ads and detailing visits significantly six months following the advisory release; the provision of free samples is unaffected. We find no changes among therapeutic substitutes unaffected by the advisory.
A new research report from the Pew Research Center reveals that while Americans get their local news from a variety of different sources, they far undervalue their local paper as a major source of that news. Authors Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell, Kristen Purcell and Lee Rainie write:
In all, the data in a new national survey show that the majority (64%) of American adults use at least three different types of media every week to get news and information about their local community—and 15% rely on at least six different kinds of media weekly.
The most interesting statistic is the mixed messages that people send about their local newspaper. While 69 percent of Americans claim that losing their local newspaper would have no impact, their reading habits show that people rely on print and online papers for 11 out of 16 major news topics. The authors write: “In other words, local TV draws a mass audience largely around a few popular subjects; local newspapers attract a smaller cohort of citizens but for a wider range of civically oriented subjects.”
Contrary to popular perception, most research yields very few conclusions with 100 percent certainty. That’s why you’ll often hear economists state their conclusions with “95 percent certainty.” It means they’re pretty sure, but there’s still a small margin for error. The science of climate change is no different, and, according to a Washington Post blog post, scientists are currently struggling with how to explain that uncertainty to the public. “What do you do when there’s a small but real chance that global warming could lead to a catastrophe?” asks Brad Plumer. “How do you talk about that in a way that’s useful to policymakers?”
Last week we got an email from a reader named Daniel Herrington. He had just finished listening to our podcast, “The Upside of Quitting,” and wanted to tell us about a big quit he’s been pondering recently.
Daniel is a 25 year-old race car driver. He’s also an engineering graduate student at Duke. On the race track, he’s had enough success to keep at it: he’s won at Chicagoland Speedway, and had multiple top ten finishes. But it’s not quite enough to convince him that racing’s the right path. The sport is super expensive; plus, Daniel’s success has been a bit spotty. He’s only completed 2 full seasons in the last 7 years. Keep at it, and he might wind up a star. But he could also end up a middle-aged, burned-out race car driver with no other career to fall back on. So Daniel is hedging and pursuing a graduate degree.
Daniel agreed to answer some of our questions. The result is an honest, revealing piece, one that (especially given the tragic death of Indy Car driver Dan Wheldon last weekend) sheds light on the tough decisions many young drivers face, where they have to weigh the considerable risks of the sport against its obvious thrill.
A recent editorial in The New York Sun argues that all this political bickering about immigration among Republican candidates misses an important truth: America is actually underpopulated. From the article:
[N]ot a single Republican candidate has spoken up for the idea that America is an underpopulated country. In terms of population density, it is, at 83 persons a square mile, an impoverished country, barely a quarter of the rich density of China, which is running way behind India. America just has enormous room for population growth.
And a desperate need.
What do you think, readers? Is America under-populated? Would Montana and Wyoming, for example, benefit from a few more people?
(HT: Paul Kedrosky)
100-year-old man the oldest person to complete a full-distance marathon. Subject-object-verb: Linguists think we used to talk like Yoda. What percent are you? Use the WSJ‘s new calculator. Made in China: when a misreading results in a size 1450 monster slipper. Households under-report credit card debt by one-third. Egypt’s “Facebook Revolutionary” is now advising Occupy Wall Street. Will the world . . .
As part of our ongoing obsession with improving public education, we bring you a new study from Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia Business School and Cecilia Speroni, a former doctoral student at Columbia’s Teachers College, that explores the power of objective and subjective teacher evaluations. While an emphasis on merit pay and test scores can lead to widespread cheating (as covered in this week’s Freakonomics Marketplace podcast), not to mention the occasional Matt Damon outburst, Rockoff and Speroni offer a potential glimmer of hope for the old-fashioned approach: the study finds that subjective teacher evaluations for New York City teachers had strong predictive power for future student performance. Here’s the abstract:
Here’s some nerd humor. This one comes to us from the Fail Blog; it’s titled “It’s Not That Your Service Was Irrational, Just Your Tip Amount”:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of children living in mother-only households has risen from 8 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2010. Freakonomics has a long-standing interest in the role parents play in the lives of their children, and while we usually find no merit in helicopter parenting, a basic level of involvement is obviously important. Past research has shown that a father’s involvement with his children is linked to all kinds of beneficial outcomes, from higher academic achievement, improved social and emotional well-being, to lower incidences of delinquency, risk taking, and other problem behaviors.
A new working paper from authors Deborah A. Cobb-Clark and Erdal Tekin examines the relationship between juvenile delinquency and the role of a father in the household, particularly in terms of the different effects an absent father has on boys and girls. They discovered, among other things, that sons benefit far more from a father (or father-figure) than daughters do. From the abstract:
…we find that adolescent boys engage in more delinquent behavior if there is no father figure in their lives. However, adolescent girls’ behavior is largely independent of the presence (or absence) of their fathers.
A new working paper from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Opportunity series examines a major demographic shift in housing voucher recipients from the cities to the suburbs. Authors Kenya Covington, Lance Freeman and Michael A. Stoll write: “Just as the suburbanization of poverty has gathered momentum, Americans who use housing choice vouchers (HCV) to help pay for their housing have increasingly moved into suburban areas as well.” The authors studied data from 2000 to 2008 to see how this shift has taken place.
They found that:
Nearly half of all HCV recipients lived in suburban areas in 2008. However, HCV recipients remained less suburbanized than the total population, the poor population, and affordable housing units generally.
Black HCV recipients suburbanized fastest over the 2000 to 2008 period, though white HCV recipients were still more suburbanized than their black or Latino counterparts by 2008. Black HCV recipients’ suburbanization rate increased by nearly 5 percent over this period, while for Latinos it increased by about 1 percent. The suburbanization rate for white HCV recipients declined slightly.
On Halloween this year, the world’s population will hit seven billion — or so estimates the United Nations Population Fund. Spooky, considering we hit six billion only a little more than a decade ago. Elizabeth Kolbert offers a brief history of population growth in a recent New Yorker article:
Depending on how you look at things, it has taken humanity a long time to reach this landmark, or practically no time at all. Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.”
Of course, we all know that Malthus was a little off the mark.
A three-day Blackberry service outage last week in parts of the United Arab Emirates once again demonstrates the value of “distracted driving” laws. According to an article in The National, an English-language paper in Abu Dhabi, traffic accidents in Dubai last week fell 20 percent from average rates on the days when BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents last week fell 40 percent, and there were no fatal accidents. According to the article, on average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, and a fatal accident every two days in Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi recently launched a campaign against cell phone use while driving and plans to use electronic evidence in traffic cases.
We included this in last week’s FREAK-est Links, but thought it was worth a full blog post. A recent study of 1,734 married couples in the U.S. finds that money, indeed, can’t buy you love. According to an article about the study, couples who don’t value money very highly score “10 to 15 percent better on marriage stability and other measures of relationship quality than couples where one or both are materialistic.”
“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said Jason Carroll, a professor at BYU, and the lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.” Interestingly, materialistic couples’ perception of their finances seems to matter more than their actual financial status: “Though these couples were better off financially, money was often a bigger source of conflict for them.”
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?” has a pretty obvious premise. You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed or read the transcript here.
What may not be super obvious to everyone out there is the meaning of the graphic above. So let’s play name that reference and throw in some swag for good measure!
We haven’t forgotten that your preferred method of giveaway is “random,” and we’ve had a contest before on this blog where the prize is contingent on your comment number. So here’s how it’s going to work this time: the 42nd comment will win if it bears the correct answer. If comment 42 has the wrong answer, the winning number doubles and the 84th comment will win — but again, only if the answer is correct. The winning number will triple, quadruple, etc. until we get a winner.
So tell us, what does 42 signify and where is it from? Hint: the title of this post.
There’s a new trend emerging in academic research: more retractions. According to a recent article in Nature by Richard Van Noorden, “[i]n the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see ‘Rise of the retractions’) — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.”
The article suggests that the increase is a result of ‘an increased awareness of research misconduct” and “the emergence of software for easily detecting plagiarism and image manipulation, combined with the greater number of readers that the Internet brings to research papers.”
While scientists and editors support the change, they point to various problems with the system: policy inconsistencies across journals, “opaque” explanations for retractions, ongoing citation of retraction papers and the stigma surrounding retraction. “[B]ecause almost all of the retractions that hit the headlines are dramatic examples of misconduct, many researchers assume that any retraction indicates that something shady has occurred,” writes Van Noorden.
This week, a new study says materialism ruins marriages; Italian PM Berlusconi thinks drugged-up stock traders cause market volatility; a scientist says memory, not practice, matters for success; does impatience make us fat? Russia’s coming population crisis; and an $18 million sunken treasure.
Sure, serving in the military long-term will likely make you a decent living, but what about the other effects military service has on veterans today? A new research paper from the Pew Research Center takes a look at the attitude of and challenges to American veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A total of 1,853 veterans were surveyed, and the poll shows some surprising things.
The behavior of children continues to be of interest for both economists and Freakonomics. Back in May, we looked at research by the German economist Martin Kocher showing that young children are generally less risk-averse than adults.
Now, a working paper by Juan-Camilo Cardenas, Anna Dreber, Emma von Essen and Eva Ranehill at the Stockholm School of Economics compares the cooperative behavior of Swedish children and Colombian children using the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, which explores how two parties cooperate in the absence of communication.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know we write a lot about organ donation and incentives. Like whether registered organ donors should get priority when it comes time to get in line themselves. Or whether the transplant market is too restrictive.
A recent Bloomberg column by Virginia Postrel highlights the difference between goodwill and cold hard cash as incentives to donate, not to mention the legal limits that exist to prevent transplants going to the highest bidder.
Last week, we posted an essay by University of Chicago economist Allen R. Sanderson on why he thinks a “sin tax” should be levied against Division I college football. His basic point is that student-athletes essentially serve as unpaid labor, and since most of them never make it to the NFL (or end up out of the league after just a few years), the extra tax revenue should go toward supporting them in their effort to finish their education.
You responded quickly with a variety of comments and opinions; though not so many direct questions. So Allen has written a response that’s broadly aimed at some of the points brought up by a number of readers. Overall, it’s a good (and provocative) read that focuses on the bizarre economics of Division I college football.
Taxing College Football
By Allen Sanderson
First of all, thanks for all the great comments, suggestions and complaints. Good conversations!
In terms of Alex’s comment about “where’s the harm” (or the negative externality), I think the best way to look at it is not unlike the Antebellum South and slavery. To be sure, today’s Division I college athletes are not slaves, nor were they drafted; they volunteered, and expected to benefit more by playing football for Big State University than from their next best alternative.
New research (summarized in the BPS Research Digest) confirms an old cliche: you are what you eat. A team of psychologists recently found that not only are sweets-lovers perceived as more agreeable, but they may actually be more agreeable:
Students who rated their own personality as more agreeable also tended to have a stronger preference (than their less agreeable peers) for sweet foods and drinks. Among a different set of students, a stronger preference for sweet foods correlated positively with their willingness to volunteer their time, unpaid, for a separate unrelated study – considered by the researchers as a sign of prosocial behavior.
Last week we posted about Harvard’s Nobel Prize Pool, where people could place bets predicting this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for $1 per entry. The Harvard economics faculty ran the site for a few years, dubbing it, “the world’s most accurate prediction market.” Apparently, Harvard wasn’t too keen on the idea, as the following notice now appears on the site:
Unfortunately, we have been advised by Harvard University to immediately shut down the Nobel pool due to legal reasons, and we have decided to comply with this request. We will fully reimburse the money of all participants, and we apologize for any inconvenience this creates for you. All participants will be contacted by email.
For anyone who watched the site closely over the last week, do you remember the odds for the actual winners, Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims?
A new research paper by Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney from the University of Maryland examines whether the fluctuation in home prices affects fertility rates. The authors used Vital Statistics data from 1990 – 2007, and Federal Housing Finance Agency Price Index (and alternately the Case-Shiller Index) to simulate equity/fertility correlations.
From the abstract:
Our estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in house prices would lead to a 4 percent increase in births among home owners, and a roughly one percent decrease among non-owners.
A new article in MIT’s Sloan Management Review written by marketing professors Wendy W. Moe, David A. Schweidel and Michael Trusov sheds some light on how people use the internet to interact with products and with each other, specifically in terms of what spurs and defines social media comments. In recent research, the authors examined the comment ratings and sales of a popular unnamed company, studying 2,436 individuals writing about 200 products. They ask: “[H]ow accurately do these conversations represent the true underlying sentiment of a product’s customers?” Here’s what they found:
Freakonomics is no stranger to studying prostitution, as discussed in Superfreakonomics. We are slightly less familiar, however, with a gray area of prostitution — “dating websites” that connect rich customers with attractive poor customers. Though these are by no means a new phenomena, a website has recently come to our attention that uses a dating website platform to ask what we all wonder about in one context or another: what’s your price? Whatsyourprice.com auctions off dates and claims to be inspired by the charity dating model. It is divided into two halves: “Date Generous People” and “Date Attractive People” — apparently you’re either looking for one or the other. Upon a cursory read, the generous users seem to be overwhelmingly male, and the attractive users overwhelmingly female (and pictured in bathing suits). Each profile includes an “About Me” section and a “First Date Expectations” section. Several “attractive” members, it should be noted, specify that they will not fly Economy Class.
The Daily Beast reports on an interesting phenomenon: sperm donors who donate for free. One couple, stymied by the $2,000-and-up cost of acquiring sperm the usual way (sperm bank), started exploring alternative options online…
A recent study in the Journal of Finance by Zhi Da and Paul Gao of the University of Notre Dame shows that data from public Google searches can be used to beat the stock market by up to ten percentage points per year. Similar findings were released last month by researchers at the University of Kansas.
The Notre Dame authors argue that the frequency of Google searches received by a stock (its SVI number) is a better, more direct method of measuring investor attention (a precursor to buying the stock) than traditional, indirect methods of measurement, such as news and advertising expense.
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