Is putting a juvenile offender in jail a useful deterrent or one big step in the wrong direction? That’s the question asked in a new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle. It appears that the deterrence argument doesn’t hold much water:
Over 130,000 juveniles are detained in the U.S. each year with 70,000 in detention on any given day, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts social and human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on high school completion and adult recidivism. Estimates based on over 35,000 juvenile offenders over a ten-year period from a large urban county in the US suggest that juvenile incarceration results in large decreases in the likelihood of high school completion and large increases in the likelihood of adult incarceration. These results are in stark contrast to the small effects typically found for adult incarceration, but consistent with larger impacts of policies aimed at adolescents.
A new working paper (gated) by Angus Deaton and Arthur A. Stone is called “Grandpa and the Snapper: the Wellbeing of the Elderly who Live with Children”:
Elderly Americans who live with people under age 18 have lower life evaluations than those who do not. They also experience worse emotional outcomes, including less happiness and enjoyment, and more stress, worry, and anger. In part, these negative outcomes come from selection into living with a child, especially selection on poor health, which is associated with worse outcomes irrespective of living conditions. Yet even with controls, the elderly who live with children do worse. This is in sharp contrast to younger adults who live with children, likely their own, whose life evaluation is no different in the presence of the child once background conditions are controlled for. Parents, like elders, have enhanced negative emotions in the presence of a child, but unlike elders, also have enhanced positive emotions. In parts of the world where fertility rates are higher, the elderly do not appear to have lower life evaluations when they live with children; such living arrangements are more usual, and the selection into them is less negative. They also share with younger adults the enhanced positive and negative emotions that come with children. The misery of the elderly living with children is one of the prices of the demographic transition.
An e-mail from a reader named Eric Durchholz:
Too smart? Yes and it sucks. I am smarter than everyone I know. I hate it. I had to “come out” as smart recently because for years I dumbed myself down just to be able to communicate with people. I constantly quote books and blogs and podcasts to keep from sounding crazy. Between Freakonomics and the works of Malcolm Gladwell, my relationships have suffered from being smart because thanks to you I see the hidden side of everything. Most people don’t want to see or know the hidden side. The more I quote, the crazier I sound. Is this the downfall that Levitt touched on?
I moved to Chicago from Nashville to study improv and it broke my brain. I came to improv late in life and all those years of study and life experience are available for quick access at all times in my brain. Not only that, when I see things now, I see the hidden side automatically and it has made functioning in the world (of non-academia mind you) very difficult. I worked for big tobacco in promotions for years and we couldn’t promote smoking or cigarettes so I learned the value of the hidden side from the front lines.
Our latest podcast, “Should Tipping Be Banned?,” has stirred up a lot of response. Below are a few interesting e-mails from listeners. First one is from Spencer Doren:
Like Levitt, tipping makes me uncomfortable. He’ll be happy to know that Sushi Yasuda (my favorite sushi in NYC) doesn’t accept tips in order to stay true to Japanese tradition. In Japan, tipping isn’t practiced as it is considered rude.
A listener named Heather Rush doesn’t like tipping reform at all (and plainly didn’t know me back when I bussed tables, and worse):
As someone who has spent her whole life working in an industry that offers servers no job security, tolerates rampant sexual harassment, long unregulated work days and no fringe benefits, your suggestion that tipping should be banned because it’s unfair seems trite. Try standing on wet mats for 12 hours while enduring abusive customers, crooked managers, criminal owners, no sick leave, no unemployment and no job security and then I’ll listen to your musings on what the real value of a tip is to the people that served you dinner. Until your first bus-boy shift, however, perhaps you ought to research the real cost of service and why people are content to ignore the “unfairness” of an entire industry so long as their drinks and appetizers arrive on time.
That is the surprising question asked (and answered) by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald in a new working paper. If this effect is real, and if the mechanisms by which it occurs are true, then this paper is hugely important for policymakers, civic planners, and the rest of us:
We explore the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. Our results are relevant to, and may be worrying for, a range of policy-makers and researchers. We find that rises in the home-ownership rate in a U.S. state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state. The elasticity exceeds unity: a doubling of the rate of home-ownership in a U.S. state is followed in the long-run by more than a doubling of the later unemployment rate. What mechanism might explain this? We show that rises in home-ownership lead to three problems: (i) lower levels of labor mobility, (ii) greater commuting times, and (iii) fewer new businesses. Our argument is not that owners themselves are disproportionately unemployed. The evidence suggests, instead, that the housing market can produce negative ‘externalities’ upon the labor market. The time lags are long. That gradualness may explain why these important patterns are so little-known.
Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist who regularly writes for the Independent (U.K.), recently published an op-ed in that paper which applied these findings to the European situation:
It’s awkward, random, confusing — and probably discriminatory too.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Baby, You Can Program My Car.” Yes, it’s about driverless vehicles. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript here.)
I recently had the good fortune to go for a ridealong in a self-driving Cadillac SRX4 with three of the engineers responsible for making it go: Raj Rajkumar, John Dolan, and Jarrod Snider, all key players in the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab. We rode around a large track that the university has built on the site of an abandoned steel plant in Pittsburgh.
What was most remarkable, to me at least, was how unremarkable it felt to ride in a vehicle that no one was steering or braking. In other words, it felt normal — not like a science experiment or a rocket ride — and, as amazing a feat of engineering as a driverless car is, I also realized how much of the technology to go driverless already exists in the modern cars we’ve been driving for years (cameras, sensors, automation, etc.).
A new paper in JAMA Pediatrics finds that a small number of children are showing up in Colorado emergency rooms having unintentionally ingested marijuana. It seems they are gobbling up their grandparents’ medical-marijuana candy. The paper is gated but Medical News Today summarizes:
As background information, the authors, from the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center, Denver, explained that medical marijuana has higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than when used recreationally. They added that medical marijuana is sold in candies, soft drinks and baked goods. … There is concern that parents/grandparents may not disclose their use of medical marijuana because of the perceived stigma associated with the drug.
A podcast listener named Amy Young writes in with interesting comments about our recent “Can You Be Too Smart For Your Own Good?” episode:
As I hold a Ph.D., I too feel well qualified to speak on topics I know nothing about. Actually, the Ph.D. is in psychology, I am somewhat qualified to speak about the topic; however, most of my info comes from having a very bright son and having to do a lot of research to try to figure out how to raise him.
Dubner and Levitt talk about circadian rhythms, gay marriage, autism, and whether “pay what you want” is everything it’s cracked up to be.
From the (Saskatoon) Star-Phoenix:
When Jason Childs and his colleagues went about devising a new course in economics at the University of Regina, they wanted to find a focus that didn’t involve the overused and fictitious widget.
What they arrived at was a product that was historic and central to people’s lives – and something most undergraduate students are familiar with: beer.
Childs, an associate professor of economics, said the Economics of Beer course had 80 seats, and they were filled in about two weeks. The course began in early May and finishes near the end of June.
“Basically, it’s an exploration of some economics concepts, in particular microeconomic concepts, and the brewing industry,” he said. “Beer is a really neat example because it allows you to talk about just about every fundamental concept in economics.”
For years, we’ve been giving away free autographed bookplates that readers can stick in their copies of our books. (We’ve taken a break from this practice recently but will resume when we publish our next book.) I would estimate that we’ve mailed out between 20,000 and 30,000 bookplates — all of them really signed by the two of us and all absolutely free, including postage. Why did we do this? It just seemed like a good idea, and a nice way to thank people for reading.
But what suckers we are! As a reader named TL recently let us know, there’s good money to be made on eBay selling signed Freakonomics bookplates.
In our podcast “100 Ways to Fight Obesity,” Steve Levitt and David Laibson discuss the possibility of using tapeworms to fight weight gain. (Seriously.) That prompted a reader named Scott Genevish to send us a real-seeming (?) old advertisement for “Sanitized Tapeworms, Jar Packed” (below). It was accompanied by a bunch of other old ads that are all, from the perspective of 2013, radically outdated for one reason or another. I have no idea if all the ads are real; I’m sure most of them have made the online rounds before. Still, it might be worth a look — especially when you think about how the line between repugnant and not repugnant can shift over time, sometimes faster and more dramatically than you’d ever predict.
While it is true that human waste can indeed be recycled — as a medical “transpoosion,” as auto fuel, as heat for your home — that is not what’s happening in Portland, Oregon. People are indeed placing human waste in Portland’s recycling bins — in the form of baby diapers — but not because they want are recycling nuts. They just want to get rid of it, but the city has made trash pickup less frequent:
“It started when the city went to every other week garbage pickup,” said Far West Fibers President Keith Ristau. “Prior to that you’d get a dirty diaper maybe once a month. Now we get 60 pounds per shift. It’s not pretty.”
When the city of Portland launched its curbside composting program in October 2011, it simultaneously reduced trash pickups from once a week to once every two weeks. But recycling and compost bins are still emptied weekly.
(HT: Scott Hendricks)
We recently received an e-mail from one Glenn Harris in response to our “How to Think About Guns” podcast. He is right — we should do a podcast episode or book chapter on hoarding. It is certainly a great topic, especially in that economists see hoarding (and price gouging) very differently than most regular people (a point I touched on here). Anyway, below is Glenn’s e-mail. The subject line was “There are no bullets in the United States …”
…for sale that is.
Gents,
I’m interested in hoarding behavior, its economic impacts, and the freak’s point of view.
I live in New York. When hurricane Sandy came along the top-of-the-list item my friends with children hoarded was milk. They gave no thought to the fact that the probability that they would lose power and the milk would spoil. Over one million homes lost power and surprise, perishable foods spoiled. The post-storm hoarding behavior quickly moved to gasoline. There was plenty of gasoline in the northeast but no electricity to pump it out of the ground. The result was a run on the gas stations that did have power. The ability to hoard gasoline is clearly limited by one’s ability to store it. With gas cans quickly selling out drivers waited in lines for hours just to top off their tanks with a few gallons.
The damage in the northeast was extensive. Many roads and businesses were closed so there really was nowhere to go. And children can sustain life without cow’s milk quite nicely. I survived our last five extended power outages with half a tank of gas and no milk.
If you care even a little bit about the late lamented TV show Arrested Development (I do), then you probably know that Netflix has produced a new season of the show, due for release on May 26. In case you didn’t know, however, some clever folks at Netflix (or its ad agency/P.R. firm etc.) are covering all the bases: here’s a screenshot for a new New York restaurant I came across yesterday while ordering lunch from Seamless.com. Personally, I think the delivery minimum is a tad high:
An interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog, by Justin Fox, on a topic that most investors already have a strong feeling (or should I say “bias”?) about. It may not, therefore, change anyone’s mind — but the fascinating lead shows the active-management roots of passive-management legend Jack Bogle:
Writing under a pseudonym in the Financial Analysts Journal in 1960, mutual fund executive Jack Bogle made “The Case for Mutual Fund Management.” Bogle took the track records of four leading mutual funds going back to 1930 and compared them to the performance of the Dow Jones Industrials. Not only had the four beaten the Dow, handily, but during the period from 1950 through 1956, for which the brokerage Arthur Wiesenberger & Co. (the Lipper/Morningstar of its day) had calculated mutual fund volatility, all but one of them had fluctuated less than the Dow.
“[M]utual funds in general have met the test of time, and performed in keeping with their stated policies and goals,” Bogle concluded.
E-mail has been around long enough for most of us to fall in love and hate and love with it at least a few times. Problems arise and are quashed, or dealt with. Innovations come along; customs evolve. But one grisly bad habit won’t go away: the “reply-all” dilemma. You know what I’m talking about. Someone sends you a group e-mail. Maybe it’s your company’s marketing boss, or the head of your bowling league, or the parent-teacher liaison in your kid’s school. And even if that e-mail was meant to be simply explanatory, or to garner responses only to the sender, inevitably a few of the people on the receiving end simply hit “reply all” and suddenly your in-box starts to fill up with a chattering storm of crap. Sure, you could mark all those senders as spam but then you might miss something important later. Sure, you could politely tell people not to use “reply-all” when it’s unnecessary but plainly they don’t think it’s unnecessary, and you’ll come off sounding like a jerk. Sure, you could just deal with it and chalk it up to a downside of a great invention. But does anyone have any better ideas?
If any other product failed 94 percent of the time, you’d probably stop using it. So why do we put up with burglar alarms?
A reader named R.E. Riker alerts us to the progress of an experimental ocean restoration project (more here); the ringleader is one Russ George, who has proven controversial. Before your knee jerks in one direction or another, take a look:
This summer the crew has been aboard ship engaging in what is surely the most substantial ocean restoration project in history. In a large ocean eddy west of Haida Gwaii the project has replenished vital ocean mineral micronutrients, with the expectation and hope it would restore ten thousand square kilometers of ocean pasture to health. Indeed this has occurred and the waters of the Haida eddy have turned from clear blue and sparse of life into a verdant emerald sea lush with the growth of a hundred million tonnes of plankton and the entire food chain it supports. The growth of those tonnes of plankton derives from vast amounts of CO2 now diverted from becoming deadly ocean acid and instead made that same CO2 become ocean life itself. For weeks the men and women, on this village team toiled in stormy overcast weather and fog without a hint of blue sky. In mid-August the skies cleared and revealed the wonder of the mission on which they have laboured. Satellites focused on ocean health that monitor and measure plankton blooms sent back stunning images. Far offshore in these Haida salmon pastures a vast plankton bloom is revealed matching the health and vibrancy of blooms seen in rich coastal waters. The return of such blooms is “the stuff dreams are made of” for all ocean life.
We’ve written in the past about how weather can have a surprisingly strong effect on things like civil war and riots. (Short story: rioters don’t like getting rained on and droughts can start a war.)
The political scientist Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard has a new paper on the topic in Public Choice (abstract; PDF) called “It’s the Weather, Stupid! Individual Participation in Collective May Day Demonstrations.” The bolding is mine:
“We investigate the possible explanations for variations in aggregate levels of participation in large-scale political demonstrations. A simple public choice inspired model is applied to data derived from the annual May Day demonstrations of the Danish labor movement and socialist parties taking place in Copenhagen in the period 1980–2011. The most important explanatory variables are variations in the weather conditions and consumer confidence, while political and socio-economic conditions exhibit no robust effects. As such accidental or non-political factors may be much more important for collective political action than usually acknowledged and possibly make changes in aggregate levels of political support seem erratic and unpredictable.”
A look at whether spite pays — and if it even exists.
A reader named Desmond Lawrence writes from London with further commentary on our “How Much Does Your Name Matter” podcast — specifically, about Harvard computer scientist Latanya Sweeney‘s research which found that online searches for people with distinctively black names was 25% more likely to produce an ad suggesting the person had an arrest record – regardless of whether that person had actually been arrested:
So when I was listening to your podcast on “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” I was surprised to hear about Latanya and her story about these Google Ads that were being served.
Now as much as the company Instant Checkmate would like to say that they are not at fault here, I can guarantee that I know what has happened with their AdWords campaign.
When you set up an AdWords campaign you tend to do a fair bit of research. From there you will build a campaign around Broad match, phrase match or even exact match.
You can also do a thing called Dynamic keyword insertion. Now this is where I would suggest that Instant Checkmate went wrong. If you place the Dynamic keyword call code into an ad, it will place the keyword that has called the ad into the ad, thus increasing the effectiveness of the ad.
A reader named Ari writes from Israel:
Recently the Israel Government voted to change the minimum age for getting a driver’s license. Here is a snippet from an article in Ha’aretz (headlined “Israel to Lower Driving Age, but Tack on Period of Mandatory Supervision”):
The earliest age to start driving lessons will remain 16 and a half. The period of driving accompanied by an adult will have to cover at least 50 hours, 20 of them on urban streets, 15 hours on inter-urban roads and 15 hours of driving at night. The novice driver will have to have an adult chaperone at all hours of the day during the first three months but only at night during the second three months. After the novice driver and the accompanying person sign a declaration that the accompanied driving requirement has been fulfilled properly, the new driver will be given a young driver’s license.
I’m curious as to how the honor system is going to work here. If my child’s license were to depend on my declaration, what are the chances that I would fudge? How would the governing agency know? It seems to be unverifiable. I assume that there will be some internet-based form with a checkbox and maybe some number to fill in (number of hours driven night / day / rain / …) I believe that forcing a person to write his own declaration would make it more difficult for him to lie.
Saw this ad for peanuts in the subway this morning. It was doubly jarring. First, because I am not used to seeing the word “peanut” in public unless it is followed by the word “-free,” as in “peanut-free school,” “peanut-free party,” “peanut-free environment,” etc. And second: because the kid in the ad is holding a couple of toy guns! Many parents I know don’t let their kids play with any sort of toy gun, ever. (I happen to not be one of those parents.) As a result, their kids — their boys, mostly, to be clear — just make guns out of sticks, rulers, broomsticks, pens, fingers, etc.
I guess if you’re making an ad for one product that people are squeamish about, you might as well double down and go for the full effect.
A long time ago, I played in a rock band, called The Right Profile. It was a great deal of fun. We wound up getting a record deal with Arista. Here’s a picture of us with Clive Davis, who was willing to take this picture pretending we’d already gotten a gold record (I’m the guy shaking his hand):
But I quit the band about a year later. We were in the middle of making our first record. I decided I didn’t want to try to be a rock star after all, as much fun as it was. Writing suits me better.
I pretty much went cold turkey and have performed almost no music since then. But all these many years later, The Right Profile is set to ride again, if only for a few songs. We were asked to participate in a concert by the Vagabond Saints’ Society at a centennial celebration for the city of Winston-Salem, N.C., on Fri., May 7, from 7-10 pm.
Our latest podcast, “Crowded at the Top,” presents a surprising explanation for why the U.S. unemployment rate is still relatively high. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
It features a conversation with the University of British Columbia economist Paul Beaudry, one of the authors (along with David Green and Benjamin Sand) of a new paper called “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks“:
Why is unemployment still so high? It may be because of something that happened well before the Great Recession.
We recently ran a listener survey for Freakonomics Radio. Among the interesting findings: only (or should that be “only”?) 18 percent of the respondents are members of a public-radio station. A reader named Steve Cebalt wrote in to ask about the nature of public-radio membership:
So it’s pledge week at my local public radio station, when they interrupt my favorite news programs with appeals for money. Funny, I used to be on the board of directors of this station, so I have a great appreciation for it.
But I am not a member. I don’t pay. I am supposed to feel guilty, but I don’t. You know why?
Because I am not really causing a negative externality on others — am I ?
Whether I listen or not, they’ll still broadcast right? And others contribute freely of their own volition. So is anyone harmed if I listen (or don’t listen) without donating?
I’d love to see your blog readers rip into this question from a Freakonomics perspective:
So go ahead, people. Rip. Remember everything you’ve ever thought about free-ridership, slippery slopes, and critical mass on issues like voting.
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
