Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” is built around the premise that humans love to predict the future, but are generally terrible at it. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript here.)
There are a host of professions built around predicting some future outcome: from predicting the score of a sports match, to forecasting the weather for the weekend, to being able to tell what the stock market is going to do tomorrow. But is anyone actually good at it?
This week, why SpongeBob hurts kids’ willpower, a restaurant in Saudi Arabia fines you for unfinished plates, robots inventing their own language, Indonesia’s floating trash problem, jet packs are finally for real, and lie detectors that actually work.
Human-caused sea turtle deaths are down 94% since 1990 because of “fisheries-specific bycatch mitigation measures.” Basically, it means we’re getting better at not catching sea turtles in giant fishing and shrimping nets. A paper to be published in the November issue of the journal Biological Conservation compiles the first cumulative estimates of the number of sea turtles unintentionally caught across U.S. fisheries between 1990 and 2007 — before and after implementation of mitigation measures. The researchers are careful to point out, however, that they cannot account for off-the-books fisheries. They write in their abstract:
Our estimates represent minimum annual interactions and mortality because our methods were conservative and we could not analyze unobserved fisheries potentially interacting with sea turtles.
Before measures were put in place 20 years ago, 300,000 sea turtles were victims of bycatch, and 70,000 were killed every year.
It’s official: having a baby will lower your testosterone levels. If you’re a man, of course. And while this may seem scary and vaguely emasculating, it’s actually a good thing, according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University. While testosterone is good for some activities, like competing for a mate, it’s not great for other activities, like nurturing a newborn baby. Here’s part of the abstract:
In species in which males care for young, testosterone (T) is often high during mating periods but then declines to allow for caregiving of resulting offspring. This model may apply to human males, but past human studies of T and fatherhood have been cross-sectional, making it unclear whether fatherhood suppresses T or if men with lower T are more likely to become fathers. …Our findings suggest that T mediates tradeoffs between mating and parenting in humans, as seen in other species in which fathers care for young. They also highlight one likely explanation for previously observed health disparities between partnered fathers and single men.
For an upcoming Freakonomics Radio episode, we’ve been doing some research on media bias. We came across this paper by Northwestern researchers, part of a growing body of work that uses computational analysis to turn political speech into data. Simply by examining speech patterns, the researchers were able to predict the political affiliation of U.S. Senators with 94% accuracy.
They broke down the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs most common to each party. For instance: liberals use the adjective “gay” while conservatives favor “homosexual.” Adverbs preferred by liberals include “disproportionately,” “ecologically” and “indiscriminately”; conservatives favor “morally,” “objectively” and “constitutionally.”
This is a Freakonomics guest post by Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist, and Director of Human Cognition at 2AI. His new book Harnessed explores the evolutionary origins of language and music.
Rise of the Apes via Miracle Grow
By Mark Changizi
Add Miracle Grow to your tomato plants and you get tomatoes. Big tomatoes, but still tomatoes. What you don’t get are mobile, blood-thirsty tomatoes with a deep distaste for the classic tune, “Puberty Love.” That would require serious evolutionary design, something far more complex than Miracle Grow can handle.
Yet something very much like Miracle Grow works for giving chimps and gorillas human-level intelligence. Or, at least, that’s what you’d have to believe to accept the premise of the summer movie, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, where a grow-more-neurons drug aimed for Alzheimers is given to apes, who thereby become the cognitive equal of humans, replete with language.
Obviously, that can’t happen. Our human brain is not simply a bigger version of the same fundamental ape design. Rather, it possesses essential new software forged over millions of years of natural selection. Some believe there is new language software, a language instinct; while others believe, in contrast, that what’s new are general-purpose algorithms of the kind artificial intelligence researchers seek. A simple give-‘em-more-neurons mechanism can’t reproduce these sorts of designs.
The WSJ reports on a new study that finds that elected coroners report 15% fewer suicides than do appointed medical examiners. The researchers looked at 1,578 counties with elected coroners, and 1,036 with appointed medical examiners, adjusting for poverty, marriage, household income, education levels and gun ownership. Their reasoning for the difference in reporting? Stigma and politics:
“Elected coroners would feel pressure because they are elected by the public at large and would be worried about antagonizing local community stakeholders who might badmouth them,” said Joshua Klugman, PhD, first author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia. “For medical examiners, we think the pressure is still there, but it’s to a lesser degree. They feel insulated from that.”
In addition, the researchers looked at 174 appointed coroners and found that their reporting rate matched the medical examiners, instead of the elected coroners.
In general, suicide is a taboo subject. But not too taboo for us — if you haven’t already downloaded our latest podcast, do so and find out about “The Suicide Paradox.”
A short paper recently released by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb.com and FinAid.org, is shaking up the discussion of race and financial aid – specifically, Kantrowitz writes that white students are disproportionately more likely to receive financial aid than their minority counterparts. Kantrowitz’s intro reads as follows:
This paper presents data concerning the distribution of grants and scholarships by race. It debunks the race myth, which claims that minority students receive more than their fair share of scholarships. The reality is that minority students are less likely to win private scholarships or receive merit-based institutional grants than Caucasian students. Among undergraduate students enrolled full-time/full-year in Bachelor’s degree programs at four-year colleges and universities, minority students represent about a third of applicants but slightly more than a quarter of private scholarship recipients. Caucasian students receive more than three-quarters (76%) of all institutional merit-based scholarship and grant funding, even though they represent less than two-thirds (62%) of the student population. Caucasian students are 40% more likely to win private scholarships than minority students.
One of the biggest story lines of the 21st century is going to be the continued economic rise of China and India. According to the World Bank, both countries grew at a rate of 9.1% in 2009. Here’s a chart of their growth since the 1960s:
While their recent growth has been roughly similar, China and India also boast the two largest populations on the planet. But a new study by RAND shows the giants heading down different demographic paths. From the abstract:
Demographic contrasts between China and India will become more pronounced in the coming decades, and these differences hold implications for the countries’ relative economic prospects. China’s population is larger than India’s, but India’s population is expected to surpass China’s by 2025. China’s population is older than India’s and beginning to age rapidly, which may constrain economic growth, whereas an increasing percentage of India’s population will consist of working-age people through 2030, giving India an important demographic advantage. How much these demographic changes affect economic growth will depend on several other factors, including the infrastructure, education system, and health care systems in each country and how well each country integrates women into its workforce.
Along with a shaky currency, and fears of sovereign debt defaults, Europe has another problem on its hands: psychiatric disorders are now the biggest source of illness among Europeans.
A new study in European Neuropsychopharmacology shows that 38.2% of Europe’s population grapples with some kind of psychiatric problem. Depression, insomnia and anxiety top the list. Only one third of those afflicted receive treatment. Hans-Ulrich Wittchen from the Technical University of Dresden led the three-year study of mental health in 30 countries. Here’s part of the abstract:
No indications for increasing overall rates of mental disorders were found nor of improved care and treatment since 2005; less than one third of all cases receive any treatment, suggesting a considerable level of unmet needs. We conclude that the true size and burden of disorders of the brain in the EU was significantly underestimated in the past. Concerted priority action is needed at all levels, including substantially increased funding for basic, clinical and public health research in order to identify better strategies for improved prevention and treatment for disorders of the brain as the core health challenge of the 21st century.
September 10th is World Suicide Prevention Day. Timely, since our latest podcast is “The Paradox of Suicide.” It focuses on the specter of suicide and how, strangely, it tends to be more prevalent in rich societies than in poor ones.
One country not mentioned in the podcast is China, where suicide is definitely a cultural problem. Yesterday, China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that China’s official suicide rate is among the highest in the world. It’s so high, that someone tries to kill themselves every two minutes. Roughly 287,000 people commit suicide each year, out of a population of 1.3 billion. From the AFP:
This week, we solicited your questions for Peg Tyre, education journalist and author of The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve. You responded quickly, and so has she, with answers to a handful of your education-related questions, ranging from textbooks, to No Child Left Behind.
This turned into a smart conversation on a topic that affects all of us. Education policy and reform is certainly something we’ll keep coming back to on the blog. Thanks to everyone for participating.
According to a new paper by researchers at Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina, creative ideas make people uncomfortable. The paper, which is based on two studies from U. Penn. involving more than 200 people, is set to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. Here’s an earlier ungated version.
From the abstract:
People often reject creative ideas even when espousing creativity as a desired goal. To explain this paradox, we propose that people can hold a bias against creativity that is not necessarily overt, and which is activated when people experience a motivation to reduce uncertainty. In two studies, we measure and manipulate uncertainty using different methods including: discrete uncertainty feelings, and an uncertainty reduction prime. The results of both studies demonstrated a negative bias toward creativity (relative to practicality) when participants experienced uncertainty. Furthermore, the bias against creativity interfered with participants’ ability to recognize a creative idea. These results reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face as they attempt to gain acceptance for their novel ideas.
This week, the European debt crisis explained with lego, why American mobility causes uniformity, a new way of cheating in college, why we make drunken mistakes, an interactive map of the history of war, and why pro athletes are giving themselves frost bite.
To all you new parents out there: if you’re trying to decide whether to spring for that Mandarin-speaking nanny, the answer is yes. Signing up your child for Chinese language kindergarten classes will be far too late.
A study in the Journal of Phonetics about bilingual learning offers new insight into babies and their relationship to the spoken word. Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences compared the brain functions of babies raised in a monolingual household to those raised in a bilingual household, and found that bilingual babies are more likely to maintain their language learning ability for a longer period of time.
We recently got an email from Michael Klein, an economics professor at Tufts who’s currently on leave as chief economist at the Office of International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury. Klein, it turns out, has done the rarest of things: turned the dismal science (economics) into fodder for a humorous work of fiction. His new novel is called Something for Nothing. Klein wrote to tell Dubner and Levitt that the novel was (at least partly) inspired by Freakonomics. Quoting from his email:
At the center of its plot is a Freakonomics-like result that a young professor publishes which promises to launch his career (it concerns the efficacy of teenage abstinence programs – this is one meaning behind the book’s title).
…The novel’s focus is the challenges facing a young professor who faces tradeoffs in work vs. personal life, and intellectual integrity vs. career advancement.
Thanks for writing Michael, and good luck with the book!
You’ve heard it before, if not from Milton Friedman, then surely from a proselytizing grandparent or a macro econ professor: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). Of course, that’s not exactly true. Some 31 million low-income public school children in the U.S. get just that every year: a free or reduced lunch.
As Western countries tighten their belts and look to reduce social welfare spending, the city council in Seoul, South Korea is considering expanding free lunches beyond just the “proven” underprivileged, to all 810,000 of Seoul’s elementary and middle school students at a cost of $378 million annually.
When it comes to achievement, does it matter if a student and a teacher are the same race? And if so, how much? That’s the essential question posed by a trio of economists in a new working paper, the first to test whether minority instructors have a positive effect on the academic achievement of minority students at the college level.
Their results indicate an emphatic yes, and may hold a partial solution (although a tricky one to enact) to one of the most persistent and vexing problems facing the U.S. education system: the achievement gap between non-minority and minority students. Less than than one-fifth of African-Americans, and less than one-eighth of Latinos between 25 and 29 years-old have a college degree. According to the U.S. Department of Education, only 9.6% of full-time instructional faculty at U.S. colleges are black, Latino or Native American. And yet, these groups make up a third of the college-age population.
Our friend Annitra Morrison sent in this video the other day, and I’ve watched it at least a dozen times. It’s by professional BASE jumper, wingsuit flyer, and all around crazy person Jeb Corliss, whom you might remember from 2006, when he was arrested on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, restrained by the NYPD before he could BASE jump off of it. My question after watching this video is: how many physics calculations did Corliss and Co. do before he took the giant leap? And also, considering how close he comes (watch at the 1:19 mark, don’t worry you’ll get a few looks at it) was he correct?
A new paper from Chris Edmond at the University of Melbourne examines how the quantity and quality of information impacts regime change. This is particularly timely in light of the Arab Spring taking place across the Middle East, and the current goose chase for Muammar Gaddafi.
Edmond constructs a simple model to study how a regime’s chances of survival are a ffected by changes in information technology. He finds that information alone does not destabilize an oppressive regime. In fact, more information (and the control of that information) is a major source of political strength for any ruling party. The state controlled media of North Korea is a current example of the power of propaganda, much as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, where the state heavily subsidized the diffusion of radios during the 1930s to help spread Nazi propaganda.
Peg Tyre is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in writing about education policy. In her 2008 book, The Trouble with Boys, she delved into the growing academic achievement gap between boys and girls to examine why boys are falling so far behind in the classroom. In her new book, The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids The Education They Deserve, Tyre mines education research data to find out which programs and strategies give kids the highest probabilities of academic success. The result is a concise handbook for parents, one that applies a macro-economic view of education in an effort to create a more rational market around school choice.
As another school year kicks off, Tyre has agreed to answer your questions about The Good School, and anything else education-related. So fire away in the comments section. Before you do, take a look at the table of contents from The Good School printed below, and also read Tyre’s adapted excerpt from the book on the merits (or lack thereof) of teaching to the test.
Usain Bolt has set another world record, this time with his Jamaican teammates in the 4 x100-meter relay. Bolt ran the anchor leg. A week earlier, Bolt false-started in the 100 final of the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, an infraction that comes with the harshest of penalties: disqualification.
Check out our previous pieces on the statistical anomaly that is Usain Bolt by Justin Wolfers and Ian Ayres.
Usain Bolt: It’s Just Not Normal
Who’s the World’s Fastest Runner?
How Impressive is Usain Bolt? A Freakonomics Quiz
Usain Bolt is No Takeru Kobayashi
Well, it’s actually happening. An idea reported on extensively in SuperFreakonomics has come to fruition, and some mad scientists are getting their way (and a little government funding) to build a garden hose to the sky – and save the world by cooling it down.
A team of British researchers called SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), is attempting to pump particles of water into the atmosphere as a test run before moving onto sulfates and aerosols that would reflect sunlight away from earth, mimicking a volcano effect. SPICE is building the garden hose at an undisclosed location, with £1.6 million in UK government funding and the backing of the Royal Society.
So the jobs numbers from August are out and they’re not pretty. Employers added no net new jobs last month, the first time that’s happened since February 1945. In early trading, the Dow is down some 200 points.
Thankfully, today is a heads day for Justin Wolfers in his Twitter experiment, which he’s been at for a month now (Follow him @JustinWolfers). As soon as the numbers hit the fan this morning, Wolfers posted some brief thoughts to Google+, which we share below:
This week, Cornell’s robots talk to each other, Linkedin mines its own data for stats on what makes an entrepreneur, Dan Ariely thinks algorithms should replace financial advisors; how old is human brain chemistry? And a Rutgers study shows most unemployed Americans wish they were younger.
Casinos are designed for a single purpose: to separate you from your money. And they’re good at it. Commercial casinos in the U.S. made nearly $35 billion in revenue last year, up a percent from 2009.
While they represent just a fraction of that revenue, slot machines are the casino gateway drug for the least savvy gamblers. It’s why they’re by the door. More than any other casino game, slots condition people to keep playing through positive reinforcement (bells and whistles). And the odds have gotten worse as technology has improved.
Though today’s sophisticated multi-line machines have a higher “win-rate,” the amount won is negligible, and often less than what was originally gambled. A recent study by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, finds that these multi-line machines are more effective than their single-line predecessors at taking money from the gambler by disguising losses as wins.
The school uniform debate isn’t exactly raging these days, but there’s still data to be gathered and examined as to how slacks and blazers affect school kids. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Houston, school uniforms seem to be decently effective at improving student attendance and teacher retention, but have no real impact on improving student achievement. For their data, researchers looked at the effects school uniforms had on a large urban school district in the Southwest United States.
Here’s the abstract:
Two weeks ago, Steve Sexton wrote about the bankruptcy of Evergreen Solar in Massachusetts. Today it’s California’s Solyndra that’s shutting down.
From the Washington Post:
The unexpected announcement raised questions about whether taxpayers would be responsible for the entire $535 million in loans that the company used to build a Silicon Valley factory. The wisdom of loan guarantees granted to the company by the Obama administration had already been questioned by government auditors and been the target of a subpoena from House Republicans.
The start-up venture has long been an administration favorite, and its Fremont, Calif., factory received visits from both the president and Energy Secretary Steve Chu. Both used their visits to praise the company for creating jobs and leading the way into a new economy fueled by green energy businesses.
A new NBER working paper by Brian Jacob, Jens Ludwig and Douglas Miller examines how improved housing conditions impact child mortality rates in Chicago. The improvement in child mortality seems to apply only to girls, and not boys. The data come from Chicago’s resuscitated housing voucher system, from 1997 through 2005. Here’s the abstract:
The study builds on the findings of the federal government’s Moving to Opportunity experiment, which started in the mid-1990s and offered randomly chosen residents of public housing the chance to move to a wealthier neighborhood (poverty below 10%). Among adults, rates of obesity and mental health problems declined, but the effects were mixed on the risky behaviors of kids. Girls did better, while boys did worse.
For our latest podcast, “The Economist’s Guide to Parenting” (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player, or read a transcript here), we asked for parenting advice from a most unlikely group of people: economists. The roster of guests includes our very own Steve Levitt, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers; and also features economist parents Bruce Sacerdote, Melissa Kearney, Valerie Ramey, and Bryan Caplan.
As a bit of extra fun, we decided to make a photo gallery out of the cute family pictures they sent us. Take a look at these proud economist parents!
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