A few times a week, we get an e-mail like this one, from Oliver Breidenbach:
Hi guys,
I love the music you choose for the background of the podcast. Can you post a playlist on your site or let me know where I can find the music? I think many fans will enjoy that.
One reason we get this question so often is that the music in our podcasts is so good. So is, IMHO, the entire audio soundscape. All of that is primarily the doing of one man, David Herman, who is Freakonomics Radio’s sound engineer/technical director/trivia repository — and more.
As for where to learn about the music: we list it in each show’s transcript, which accompanies the blog post that is published with each episode. Our podcast archive page is here. Enjoy!
You never know what kind of useful information will turn up in your in-box. From a reader named Darin Haselhorst:
Steven and Stephen,
Thought this might be right up your alley. An analysis only a true cheapskate could love.
I get very frustrated trying to compare prices on “paper products” at my local supermarket, Safeway. They have various marketing terms meant to confuse the average consumer, regular, double, mega etc., making nearly impossible to compare prices on the spot. So, I threw together a little spreadsheet (attached).
The price as Safeway was not all that surprising until you compare it to the price for which Amazon is willing to deliver it to your front door. The Amazon Subscribe and Save program is about 30% cheaper than going to the store. Not too bad. If you have Amazon deliver 5 items on automatic delivery, they will take an additional 20% off the entire delivery. A deal any true economist simply cannot pass up.
Its surprising to me that Amazon is willing to deliver to your door for approximately half the price Safeway has on their shelf.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast is called “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” A listener named Mark Edmond wrote in to tell us about Nametrix, a names app he created:
I’m a new dad who was researching baby names and whipped up an app in spare moments over the last year that tells you stuff like this:
It turns out that Ellen is a disproportionately common name for:
- psychotherapists
- librarians
- activists
Ellens also overwhelmingly lean toward the Democrat party and have tended to be most popular in the northeastern part of the U.S.
You can also see names ranked within professions, e.g., these are the top three names for guitarists:
- Trey
- Rusty
- Sonny
I have no idea how good Nametrix works on these dimensions. Having seen a lot of bogus names “data,” I am always a bit leery — especially because it is easy to mistake certain naming patterns for destiny while ignoring the more basic indicators like age, income, education, race, etc. I asked Mark how he assembled his data; here’s his reply:
What happens when a firm starts a “dependent verification” program designed to make sure that its employees are carrying only legitimate dependents on their health insurance? The economists Michael Geruso and Harvey Rosen ask that question in a new working paper called “Fraud in the Workplace? Evidence from a Dependent Verification Program” (abstract; PDF). A few key sections are bolded below:
In recent years many employers, both in the private and public sectors, have implemented dependent verification (DV) programs, which aim to reduce employee benefits costs by ensuring that ineligible persons are not enrolled in their health plan as dependents. However, little is known about their efficacy. In this paper, we evaluate a DV program using a panel of health plan enrollment data from a large, single-site employer who implemented it several years ago. We find that relative to all other years, dependents were 2.7 percentage points less likely to be reenrolled in the year that DV was introduced, indicating that this fraction of dependents was ineligibly enrolled prior to the program’s introduction. These disenrollment effects were especially large for same-sex partners and older children. We show that the program did not induce employees to leave the employer’s plan and (say) put themselves and their dependents on the spouse’s plan. We also show that disenrollment occurred because dependents were actually ineligible, not because of compliance costs that might be associated with providing documentation. The DV program saved about $46 per enrolled employee. A considerable fraction of these cost savings came from removing older children who didn’t meet additional criteria. Therefore, the dependent coverage provision of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which essentially renders all children up to age 26 eligible in all employer health plans, will substantially limit the future cost saving potential of such programs. Hence, as the state governments and private employers that have implemented DV programs adapt to the new regulatory environment, the popularity of dependent verification programs may well diminish.
The next time you’re counting up all the reasons why employer-based healthcare insurance is a bad idea, you can include this one, too.
A kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?
That’s the question asked by an Australian reader named Peter Gartlan:
In 2004, the Australian government introduced a $4,000 lump sum payment for having a baby, known as the Baby Bonus. [Note: it was judged to be somewhat effective.]
The anecdotal evidence is that this instantly created a huge wave of young unmarried teenage mothers from lower socioeconomic communities who saw the BB as a great big “free money” sign. At the time it was also referred to as the “Plasma TV” bonus. Anyway, many teenage mothers had many babies, and received many payments. But obviously the motivation was money, not family. And $4,000 does not go very far when bringing up kids, as you know.
So after I read your “Abortion Reduces Crime” study, I wondered whether the BB would demonstrate the inverse scenario.
As you will note in this article from my local newspaper, it appears there is now evidence of the beginnings of a new juvenile crime wave.
It is easy to see how a baby bonus, like a variety of bounties we’ve explored, can have unintended consequences. It is a good research question, to be sure. (Australia is hardly the only country to have tried this.)
Real tax reform may or may not ever happen. In the meantime, how about making the current system work a bit better?
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Tax Man Nudgeth.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
The U.S. tax code is almost universally seen as onerous and overly complicated. There is always talk in Washington about serious reform — Michigan Reps. Dave Camp (R.) and Sander Levin (D.) are currently working on it — but, Washington being Washington, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.
So in this podcast we decided to take a look at the tax code we’re stuck with for now and see if there are some improvements, however marginal, that are worth thinking about. We start by discussing the “tax gap,” the huge portion of taxes that simply go uncollected for a variety of reasons. We once wrote about a clever man who helped close the gap a bit. In this episode, former White House economist Austan Goolsbee tells us why the government doesn’t try too hard to collect tax on all the cash that sloshes around the economy.
You’ll also hear from Dan Ariely, who has an idea for turning the act of paying taxes into a somewhat more satisfying civic duty.
A very good report on WNYC by Sarah Gonzalez about the homeless people who live in New Jersey train stations, and how they’re generally allowed to stay as long as they have a valid train ticket:
“I have a ticket, okay. This is what you need to have to stay in,” [John] Williams says. “If you doesn’t have that you’re going to have to go out in the cold.”
He doesn’t need to buy a train ticket every night in order to sleep on the benches.
“No I don’t buy a ticket every night. I buy a ticket one time, as long as it’s not punched it’s good. As long as it doesn’t have a hole in it. I done had this for two months.”
Once you’re on a train, conductors, which cost taxpayers about $30 million a year, come by with a hole-puncher, manually punching two holes in every passenger’s ticket.
If you never get on a train to get your ticket punched, your ticket will never expire.
Some of the homeless people at Newark Penn Station have been there for years. One has been at the station for 19 years; another for 26 years.
Yes, the cruelest month has begun, marked at its dead center by tax day. We have a Freakonomics Radio segment tonight on Marketplace about some tax-collecting ideas. Here, from John Steele Gordon in today’s Wall Street Journal, is a compelling attack on the practice of treating carried interest as capital gains. Would love to hear in the comments from some private-equity and hedge-fund folks why/how Steele isn’t right:
To defend the favored treatment of carried interest, private-equity and hedge-fund owners argue that their share of the customers’ gains is analogous to “founders stock,” which is granted to the founders of a company when it goes public, even though they may not have personally invested money in the venture.
This analogy is bogus when the companies in which a fund is invested are not actively managed. A founder has a bright idea. He works hard to convince others of its worth so that they will invest in it. He works hard to get the company off the ground, investing his time and his sweat equity in the business (not to mention the forgone income from the 9-to-5 job he could have had instead). He is risking a lot: a substantial portion of his working life, his reputation, his potential current income, etc.
Our recent podcast on obesity has generated a lot of e-mail. (FWIW, one of the very first podcasts we ever did was also about obesity.) Here’s one interesting angle, from a listener named Mark Gruen:
I just listened to your podcast on 100 ways to fight obesity and while I think there were many quality ideas presented, too many neglected the bodybuilder or strength athlete. I am a lightweight strongman competitor and sometimes eat 10,000 calories in a span of 3-4 hours after training for 5+ hours. These meals are generally high in sugar to support the lost muscle glycogen from my day’s training. I am concerned that once you begin classifying foods as “good” or “bad” you burden people who you did not intend to. The government also does such a poor job with their diet recommendations; I wouldn’t trust them with anything regarding food and diet.
I do love the idea of teaching families and children at school about being malnourished. Unfortunately, I see this as just another way for junk food to add in some vitamins and tell you that you can meet your daily intake just eating their products. Ultimately, people need to wake the hell up and realize that they need to do their own research (not just read a magazine) and determine the right diet for their family.
That is the question asked in a New England Journal of Medicine column by Harald Schmidt, Kristin Voigt, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel:
Finding employment is becoming increasingly difficult for smokers. Twenty-nine U.S. states have passed legislation prohibiting employers from refusing to hire job candidates because they smoke, but 21 states have no such restrictions. Many health care organizations, such as the Cleveland Clinic and Baylor Health Care System, and some large non–health care employers, including Scotts Miracle-Gro, Union Pacific Railroad, and Alaska Airlines, now have a policy of not hiring smokers — a practice opposed by 65% of Americans, according to a 2012 poll by Harris International.
Freakonomics asks a dozen smart people for their best ideas. Get ready for a fat tax, a sugar ban, and a calorie-chomping tapeworm.
A couple times a year, we take reader/listener questions for an FAQ (FREAK–quently Asked Questions) episode of our podcast. We’ll likely put out next FAQ in mid-April, so ask us your questions in the comments section below. Thanks.
“It’s extremely difficult for me to tell you the secret of anything,” says Bill Kalush, 47 years old, founder of the center. “Real secrets are psychological and deep. To take a simple secret and perform it in a way that looks like magic is extremely difficult.” He offers as an analogy: “This is a scalpel. See how sharp it is? That’s how to do surgery.”
Great observation, from an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Demetria Gallegos about the Conjuring Arts Research Center, a magic library for magicians only.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “How Money Is March Madness?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The gist: the annual NCAA basketball tournament grabs a lot of eyeballs, but turning them into dollars hasn’t always been easy — even when the “talent” is playing for free.
Last year, March Madness reportedly earned its highest TV ratings in 18 years. This year’s Super Bowl, meanwhile, was the third most-watched broadcast in TV history (behind two earlier Super Bowls), despite (or because of?) an electrical blackout. Interestingly — to me, at least — these two premier TV sporting events are sold very differently: the Super Bowl rotates annually among one of three networks while the NCAA is in the midst of a 14-year contract with CBS and Turner Sports. How does that difference affect ad revenue?
The N.C.A.A. basketball tournament grabs a lot of eyeballs, but turning them into dollars hasn’t always been easy — even when the “talent” is playing for free.
A reader named Ralph Thomas observes the following:
It has been my gut-level (sorry, pun) feeling for a while now that the McDonald’s McDouble, at 390 Calories, 23g (half a daily serving) of protein, 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and iron, etc., is the cheapest, most nutritious, and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history.
Who would like to argue against him? And if you attack on the “nutritious” dimension (I suspect you will), be very specific.
FWIW, here, from the McDonald’s website nutrition page, is a complete list of ingredients:
If so, you’ve had a nice run lately. The Nikkei is up nearly 50 percent in the last few months. Might have a little something to do with a weak yen.
Fascinating story, told straight-ahead here by Reuters, and by Bezos himself here, with great photos and some commentary. From the Reuters article:
A recovery team funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has plucked two rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that were used to send astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago.
And from PCMag.com:
Located several hundred miles off the east coast of the United States (see this cool GeoHack map identifying the location of S-IC wreckage from the Apollo missions), the engines remain the property of NASA. Bezos said when he announced the salvage mission last March that if one engine was recovered, the space agency would likely want it displayed at the Smithsonian but that he’d asked NASA to allow a subsequent recovery by his privately funded team to be housed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., where Amazon is headquartered.
In a few weeks we’ll be putting out a Freakonomics Radio episode about baby names. To hold you over until then, here’s an article about a naming-rights story that is amusing and has the added benefit of appearing to be true: a men’s room named after law professor Bill Falik. Yes, that would appear to be an aptonym.
(HT: Michael Jones)
Reading today’s finest newspapers, one learns it is possible to wear see-through pants from Lululemon (the supplier and the store blame each other), a faux-fur collar that is in fact made of real fur, and to wrack up $70,000 in “phantom I.T. charges” (a story that was broken here).
The world is definitely a bit more interesting this morning than it was yesterday.
Joseph Stiglitz writes an economic valentine to Singapore that is full of interesting facts and conclusions. In a nutshell: for the past few decades, Singapore has pursued a strong economy that is also concerned with equality from top to bottom. The piece is interesting throughout, especially for anyone whose mind still summons the words “chewing gum” as soon as the word Singapore appears. The piece is hard to excerpt — you should read the whole thing — because there are so many discrete points. But here are a few samples:
Singapore has had the distinction of having prioritized social and economic equity while achieving very high rates of growth over the past 30 years — an example par excellence that inequality is not just a matter of social justice but of economic performance. Societies with fewer economic disparities perform better — not just for those at the bottom or the middle, but over all.
And:
The government mandated that individuals save into a “provident fund” — 36 percent of the wages of young workers — to be used to pay for adequate health care, housing and retirement benefits. It provided universal education, sent some of its best students abroad, and did what it could to make sure they returned. (Some of my brightest students came from Singapore.)
I love spoonerisms. What’s a spoonerism, you say? It’s a phrase in which letters or syllables are swapped to make a new, punny meaning. The best spoonerism I’ve ever heard, by a long shot, is courtesy of Anu Garg, the editor of Wordsmith.org:
Rev. William Archibald Spooner, the father of spoonerism, not only gave the English language a new word, an eponym, but also an artful device for repartee. The story goes that a member of parliament cut off another calling him a shining wit, and then apologized for making a spoonerism.
In this CNBC interview with Warren Buffett, the interviewer makes a nice (if inadvertent) spoonerism, when she tries to say that “average retail investors feeling that they can’t get a fair shake” in the stock market because the game is weighted toward special interests. But instead of “fair shake,” she says “share fake.” Which pretty perfectly summarizes what those retails investors are afraid of getting.
Do you have any good spoonerisms for us?
A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Tanja Artiga Gonzalez, Markus Schmid, and David Yermack looks for the telltale signs of corporate fraud. The paper is called “Smokescreen: How Managers Behave When They Have Something To Hide”:
We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 216 U.S. companies accused of price fixing by antitrust authorities. We document a range of strategies used by these firms when reporting financial results, including frequent earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors who are likely to be inattentive monitors due to their status as foreign or “busy.” When directors resign, they are often not replaced, and new auditors are rarely engaged. Cartel managers exercise their stock options faster than managers of other firms. While our results are based only upon firms engaged in price fixing, we expect that they should apply generally to all companies in which managers seek to conceal poor performance or personal wrongdoing.
The authors are wise to note that these findings aren’t necessarily generalizable, and it is also worth wondering if this method could be applied prophylactically to identify fraud. Note: Yermack is the same man who brought us “Tailspotting: How Disclosure, Stock Prices and Volatility Change When CEOs Fly to Their Vacation Homes.”
In our “Legacy of a Jerk” podcast, we told a story about how Roberto Clemente‘s earthly reputation was burnished forever by his saintly death. It wasn’t that Clemente was a jerk — far from it — but the story emphasized how a certain kind of death can smooth out the rougher parts of a person’s reputation.
So I read with interest this fantastic ESPN article by Kevin Guilfoile about the bat that Clemente used to get his 3,000th hit. Guilfoile writes about the time he spent as an intern working for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Clemente’s old team, and his interactions with the Pirates’ rising star Barry Bonds. If we ever make a sequel to “Legacy of a Jerk,” we should probably talk about Bonds and to what degree his damaged reputation — as a reputed long-time steroid user — is a product of his personality:
Barry wasn’t the kind of jerk who was nice to people only when he needed something from them. As far as I could tell, Barry was pretty much an ass to everybody all the time. Instead of berating me directly or just ignoring me, Barry would sometimes talk about me like I wasn’t there. Sometimes he would tell Bobby Bonilla, who had the locker next to him, that I was lying to them and these autographs weren’t for fans and that I was just selling these pictures to professional dealers, that I was another no-talent white man exploiting black men who possessed real ability.
There ain’t no such thing as a free parking spot. Somebody has to pay for it — and that somebody is everybody.
Last week we posted a survey for Freakonomics Radio listeners. Your response was fantastic — nearly 2,000 listeners — and very helpful. In return, we thought it’d be nice to share some of the data with you. As a big believer in negative feedback, I have just one regret: that we didn’t ask you to tell us what you don’t like about the podcast. Maybe next time.
WHO YOU ARE:
Our listeners are, in a nutshell: rather male (77%); relatively young (45% are 25-35 years old, another 24% are 35-44); well-educated (38% have a graduate degree; another 43% have a bachelor’s degree); and — according to the survey data at least — pretty well-off (17% earn more than $150,000 and another 23% earn between $100,000 and $150,000; then there are the 14% who earn between $0 and $30,000, most of whom are likely students).
WHAT YOU DO:
Here is a look at top occupations:
A high-school economics teacher named Steve Fortna writes from Colorado with a clever solution:
The Spirit Week (formerly known as Homecoming) Dance is upon us. This Friday I will be pressed into service to monitor the dress and dance of around 150 kids while a DJ, who does not care about the moral development of young adults in their formative years, plays whatever music they want to hear. Loudly. I really do not want to be there. I am not alone in that sentiment.
My school has tried various methods of determining which teachers should be on chaperone duty at each dance over the years without much success. Either we all go (way too many people but at least we’re all in the same boat), or only a select few (more efficient use of faculty, but it’s not fair). While most teachers don’t particularly enjoy monitoring dances, there are different levels of unease. What’s an equitable way to determine who’s on duty?
From Science World Report:
The participants were told to achieve the goal of losing 4 pounds per month up to a predetermined goal weight. The researchers kept track of their body weight every month for almost one year. The researchers told the participants in the incentive groups that they would receive $20 per month if they achieved the goal. And those who failed to achieve the goal would need to pay $20 each month that gets into the bonus pool. Participants in both incentive groups who finished the study were entitled to win the pool by lottery.
The researchers noticed that 62 percent of the participants in the incentive group achieved the goal, while just 26 percent from the non-incentive group hit the target. The mean weight loss of participants from the incentive group was 9.08 pounds and the mean weight loss for the non incentive group was 2.34 pounds.
“The take-home message is that sustained weight loss can be achieved by financial incentives,” lead author Steven Driver, M.D., an internal medicine resident at Mayo Clinic, said in a press statement. “The financial incentives can improve results, and improve compliance and adherence.”
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