I’m happy to announce that Elizabeth Simpson won the Dad-or-Daughter Songwriting Contest by correctly identifying Friend Zone as the song that I coauthored with my daughter, as well as correctly identifying a line in that song that I composed (“But you just laughed it off and said we’d always be bros”), and a line in the song that Anna composed (“I bought a shirt today with your favorite band.”).
Elizabeth turns out to be a former student from my 2006 small group in contracts. In her email, she describes the method behind her entry:
You’ve just finished a dinner at a nice restaurant and you order decaf coffee instead of regular so that you won’t have trouble falling asleep. A few minutes later, your server brings you a steaming cup of Joe. You want to drink, but you’re worried it might have caffeine. At this point, I normally ask something like “Are you sure this is decaffeinated?”
But my friend (and newly tenured colleague) Yair Listokin tells me that Oprah suggests that we ask instead: “Is this regular coffee?” Or, “Are you sure this is regular coffee?”
It’s not fool proof, but asking “is it regular” will let you find out whether the waiter is willing to say “yes” to any question, possibly to avoid the extra work of having to go get a replacement? Framing the question doesn’t work if the restaurant follows the “after 8 p.m. or so, all the coffee is decaf” convention.
My daughter, Anna, spent a bunch of time this past summer writing songs. One thing led to another and we ended up coauthoring a song together. I have more than 50 academic coauthors, but this is the first time I’ve ever tried writing music with someone.
Is it easy for people to tell the difference between songs she wrote by herself and a song where I wrote most of the lyrics? Is it possible for a 52-year-old lawyer/economist to emulate the lyrics of a 14-year-old Gleek? I think a lot of people would have a surprisingly hard time. But the question is testable.
So today I’m announcing a contest where you could earn a chance of winning an iTunes gift card worth somewhere between $50-$500. To play, just click through and listen to these three songs – Friend Zone, Longer, & Your Way, and then leave a comment to this post or as a YouTube comment to one of the three songs saying: i) which of the three songs you think I coauthored; ii) identifying a line in that song you believe I wrote; and iii) identifying a line in that song you believe Anna wrote. Here they are:
If you enjoy this joke (which is discussed here, and comes from the folks at Spiked Math Comics) as much as I do, you might be a gearhead.
It illustrates one of the many surprising and subtle impacts of common knowledge. Yale’s John Geanakoplos provides an even more perverse version of the bar cartoon, in this incredibly helpful chapter :
Imagine three girls sitting in a circle, each wearing either a red hat or a white hat. Suppose that all the hats are red. When the teacher asks if any student can identify the color of her own hat, the answer is always negative, since nobody can see her own hat. But if the teacher happens to remark that there is at least one red hat in the room, a fact which is well-known to every child (who can see two red hats in the room) then the answers change. The first student who is asked cannot tell, nor can the second. But the third will be able to answer with confidence that she is indeed wearing a red hat.
A recent post of mine was addressed to the super-rich who are considering endowing a chair in order to garner public recognition. But what about the merely rich who wish to have their names recognized in perpetuity with an eponymous endowed chair at their university? Is there anything they can do?
Yes. There are two things.
First, a much larger swath of people can follow the Benjamin Franklin strategy and endow a delayed chair. Franklin famously bequeathed about $4,000 in 1790 to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Franklin:
instructed that [his bequest] be invested for two hundred years and at the end of that period, the money should be used to do good. Franklin died in 1790. In 1990, his gift had grown to over $2 million.
The U.S. just passed the first major patent reform in nearly sixty years – which includes as a central provision a change to the patent priority rule. Instead of awarding a patent to the first person to invent, we will join other nations in awarding patents to the first person to file an invention.
David Abrams and Polk Wagner have a great paper looking at whether the proposed change in our patent system from a “first to invent” regime to a “first to file” regime is likely to disadvantage individual inventors. The concern is that corporate inventors will have an easier time than the individual in gearing up to draft and file a patent application.
The paper ingeniously looks to see what happened when Canada introduced a similar reform in 1989. The paper is also a great way to teach yourself about the difference-in-difference approach to estimation. The paper first estimates the pre-reform difference between the U.S. and Canada in the proportion of patents going to individual inventors. It then looks to see whether this difference changed – that is, whether there was a difference in the difference – after the Canadian first-to-file reform went into effect.
People give to charities for all kinds of reasons – some more noble than others. But one important motivation is recognition. If Yale mandated that it would only accept anonymous donations, its fundraising would be decimated.
There are a lot of different ways to garner public recognition. If I had 3 million bucks to throw around, I’d think long and hard about trying instead to buy myself a Tony Award. For as little as $200,000, you might be able to purchase an 8% chance at winning a Tony.
Let me emphasize that this is at best a crude ballpark estimate. Over the last 5 years, 12.2 new plays have been produced on Broadway each year. For a play, which generally runs about $2.5-3 million these days, my friend Jack Thomas at Bulldog Theatrical tells me you can usually find yourself among those listed above the title for about $200,000. Some investors split this minimum ante and put up or raise just $100,000 each and get listed as Bulldog Theatrical / Cantab Theatrical.
This year, Daniel Kahneman has me wondering about what is the best way to organize my vacation time. In this great TED talk – The Riddle of Experience versus Memory, he talks about the tradeoffs we must make in increasing our moment-to-moment experience of happiness versus increasing our memories of happiness.
If you want to maximize your memories of happiness, you should spend more time taking pictures of your vacation and jam more events into each day. If you want to maximize your moment-to-moment experience of happiness, you spend less time recording your experience and more time experiencing them directly.
I got in trouble earlier this summer when a teacher caught me surfing the Internet during a “Safe Driving Practices” class I had to attend so that my son could get his Connecticut driver’s license. While a parent has to attend for 2 hours, a 16-year-old must attend for a mind-numbing 8 hours before qualifying to take a written test. The mandatory class is part of Connecticut’s graduated driver licensing requirements, which make it (i) harder for a 16 or 17-year-old to get a learner’s permit, (ii) harder to get a license, and (iii) severely limits the kinds of driving you can do with these licenses.
I was surfing the Internet during class, because something the instructor said about accident statistics since the program was rolled out in 2008 seemed defensive – so I started to look up Connecticut statistics online.
Having attended 2 hours of the training, I seriously doubted that the 8-hour classes serve an educational function. Nonetheless, surfing made me feel somewhat better about having to sit there because I learned that the new requirements are having an impact: they’re deterring young people from getting their licenses. Look, for example, at what happened to the number of 16 and 17-year-olds receiving learner permits in 2008 when the law took effect (which I calculated from this data):
Recent discussions of whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Public Debt Clause would allow the president to ignore the debt limit reminded me of a paper on the topic that a former student of mine, Michael Abramowicz, wrote under my supervision almost fifteen years ago. Michael has since become a prolific scholar on other topics, and this year he had the rare distinction of publishing articles in both the Harvard Law Review (here) and the Yale Law Journal (here). Meanwhile, he and I have recently coauthored twice, on randomizing law (also with my colleague Yair Listokin) and on using bonds as commitment devices. I tried to find Michael’s old article with Google and couldn’t, so I wrote to him asking about it. With his permission, I include here his reply:
Last week, I published an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting an “appoint and nominate” method by which President Obama could make a recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while still respecting the Senate’s confirmation process. I suggested that the president “should make a recess appointment of Elizabeth Warren and simultaneously nominate Sarah Raskin for the same position.”
One of the occupational hazards of teaching law is that I often take what Oliver Wendell Holmes called a “bad man’s view” of human motivation (my beloved spouse just told me this is the understatement of the century). Holmes, in his paradigm shifting “The Paths of the Law,” said :
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
I find that this cynical tool for legal prediction – which parallels a presumption of narrow economic self-interest – often guides the way I interpret actions and events.
In this final installment with BizIntelligence.tv (the first two installments can be found here and here), Bruno and I discuss my new seven-step diet plan, The $500 Diet, and how creating “layers of accountability” can enhance your chance of losing weight and keeping it off.
Watch a clip of Freakonomics contributor Ian Ayers speaking to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, about his book, Carrots and Sticks.
In this second installment of my three BizIntelligence TV episodes, you can see my dog, Chebyshev (named after the mathematician who derived Chebyshev’s inequality), and learn what she has to do with Carrots and Sticks.
Nate Silver has (another) truly insightful post demonstrating the possible perverse advantage of receiving an 11th seed instead of an 8th seed in the NCAA tournament.
He explains: “[An average] team like Arizona would have a considerably better chance — about two-and-a-half times better, in fact — of winning its second round game and advancing to the Round of 16 as a No. 12 seed than as a No. 8 or No. 9 seed. This, of course, is because it has not yet had to face the No. 1 seed.”
Back in January, on the day of one of the year’s particularly crippling blizzards, I was scheduled to travel to New York City to tape a segment of BizIntelligence TV with Bruno Aziza. The trains that day were running massively late, and I somewhat sheepishly called to cancel. For me, this was a non-discretionary snow day. But Bruno wouldn’t accept defeat. He heroically spent several hours with his camera crew and came to New Haven. They ended up taping three episodes at various places in my house.
A “Smart Bribe” can be a lot cheaper than a “Smart Bomb.”
Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that in 2005 I coauthored an article with Jonathan Macey which made explicit predictions about the future of democratization in Egypt. In 2005, Jonathan and I wrote: “We also posit that economic reform will bring increased pressure for democratization in countries such as Egypt and Syria. For this reason, economic reform of the kind we discuss in this Article (simplifying and reducing the costs of business formation) will be a good “leading indicator” of political leaders’ real interest in implementing meaningful democratic reforms that go beyond mere public relations gimmicks.”
I awoke last week to another foot of snow adding a third blanket of winter to our city of Elms. I am reminded of the joy I felt as a child waiting to learn if school was canceled. Something has been lost in our age of instant information — who can forget huddling around the radio, holding your breath while the radio announcer lists the seemingly endless roster of closings? Today, we received the decidedly less romantic robo-calls at 5:33 in the morning.
Which markets exhibit this kind of trend in Google searches?
Several years ago, Matthew Funk and I proposed a mechanism for moving beyond the all-or-nothing choice of the do-not-call list to a system where you also could choose how much you would like to be paid for telemarketing calls.
When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.
To my mind, WeightWatchers is the industry leader in performing rigorous testing of their services. Under the leadership of Karen Miller-Kovach, its chief scientific officer, it has sponsored several randomized control trials comparing the effectiveness of the WeightWatchers point system to other diet approaches. For example, Miller-Kovach is a co-author of this 2003 JAMA study (which showed that after 2-years WeightWatchers helped overweight dieters lose about 3 percent of their body mass – reducing their average weight from 207 to 201 pounds).
But I’m troubled by the current advertising campaign that accompanies the rollout of the New PointsPlus system.
A few years ago, a colleague of mine off-handedly mentioned that he “tried not to use” his spouse’s disability placard to park in handicapped spaces when she wasn’t in the car. Frankly, I was appalled. The implication was that he sometimes succumbed to the temptation to use the placard to park in a handicapped place.
Apparently, he isn’t alone.
Last fall, I saw my recidivist coauthor, Barry Nalebuff, and was struck by how much weight he’d lost. He had a clearly different body shape. I told him he looked great. Barry turned to my spouse (and coauthor) Jennifer Brown and said, “I’m doing it on my own, so I don’t have to use that [expletive] stickK.com.”
If oversight is when a superior has the right to disapprove of an underling’s decision, what is “undersight”?
It’s my term for when an underling has the right to disapprove of a superior’s decision. It’s not surprising to see principal-agent contracts with oversight provisions, but in two recent statutes the lame duck Congress has arguably imposed undersight provisions on the President acting as our commander-in-chief.
My colleagues Jacob Hacker and Daniel Markovits have created a cool website called www.GiveItBackForJobs.org that not only includes a useful tool to let you calculate the size of your tax cut, but suggests that “Americans who have the means should collectively give back our Bush tax cuts, by making donations to organizations that promote fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class.” Here’s a post from the creators themselves that gives more details.
Harvard Professors Jim Greiner and Cassandra Pattanayak have posted a remarkable randomized experiment (“What Difference Representation?”) with evidence showing that offers for free legal representation from the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB) ended up hurting unemployment claimants.
The behavioral revolution in economics and psychology has successfully identified and named close to three dozen biases (my favorite behavioral folk song defines them in verse). I had thought that these biases transcended issues of culture. Indeed, both neoclassical and behavioral economists were united in a belief that cultural variables were of secondary importance when it came to the deep drivers of behavior. But a series of experiments now has me thinking that the underlying heuristics are less universal.
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