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.”
An interesting followup to our recent “Women Are Not Men” podcast, from a listener named Misty Touchette. This incident might more appropriately be called “Men Are Not Men”:
I have two female friends that are about 30 and 55 years old. They don’t know each other and have very different backgrounds. A few weeks ago, both gleefully told me about their new Facebook accounts. They’d made them under the guise of men. Both chose a similar figure head: a photo of a white, attractive man. The reason? They were tired of being unfriended by issues/cause/political groups when engaging in … civic discourse. When presenting themselves as women, their comments, even simple statements of alternate opinions on a topic, were flamed, trolled or deleted and then, of course, they were booted from some pages.
I realize that women penning under a man’s pen name is nothing new. As others have before them I’m sure, my friends have reported that the new manly persona are yielding an increase in support, silence/tolerance replacing backlash or a return in civil discourse. After listening to “Women Are Not Men” and considering my friends, I couldn’t help but wonder, hey, how many Wikipedians labeled as men are actually women?
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “When Is a Negative a Positive?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
So when is a negative a positive? When the negative is feedback. We focus on a clever research project by Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Stacey Finkelstein at Columbia. It argues that positive feedback certainly has its role — especially when someone isn’t yet fully invested in a new project or job — but if it’s improvement you’re after, then going negative is where it’s at:
FISHBACH: The more a person is committed to a goal — and by that I mean the more someone thinks that they absolutely have to do it, they like doing it, it’s important for them to do it — the more negative compared with positive feedback will be efficient.
Sure, we all like to hear compliments. But if you’re truly looking to get better at something, it’s the negative feedback that will get you there.
We’ve now been making Freakonomics Radio for three years. (Here is a complete archive; you can also subscribe at iTunes or get an RSS feed.)
We have a good sense of the number of listeners (we do roughly 3 million downloads a month) but when it comes to who those listeners are, we don’t know very much. So we’ve put together a listener survey, below. If you have five spare minutes, please fill it in. What can we give you in return? If all goes well, more free podcasts!
Thanks.
U.S. stock markets* are flirting with all-time highs (it may happen today) but I am hearing and reading very little about it. Why is that?
I can think of a few possible reasons, and am eager to hear yours.
1. After the spectacular meltdown of 2007-2009, a lot of people are generally gun-shy and/or inattentive.
2. Since so many people sold into the teeth of the meltdown, and stayed on the sidelines since, a new high is to them relatively bad news.
3. Because the economy itself is not quite roaring, a roaring stock market doesn’t seem legit (unless, of course, you consider it a leading indicator, which it usually is).
4. Just “getting back” to an all-time high from more than five years ago is, at best, a muted victory.
All that said, I remain surprised by the lack of chatter.
*The Dow and S&P 500, at least; the NASDAQ is still a very long way off its tech-bubble high.
In many ways, the gender gap is closing. In others, not so much. And that’s not always a bad thing.
Our Freakonomics Radio podcast “The Cobra Effect” looked into the unintended consequences of bounties. In one story, producer Katherine Wells described what happened at Fort Benning in Georgia, which was overrun with feral pigs. A listener in London, Alex Foster, turned that segment into a nice ‘zine comic. “Got to say,” Alex writes, “I didn’t expect this from a uni project.”
The gas tax doesn’t work well, and it’s only going to get worse. What’s next?
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Downside of More Miles Per Gallon.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The gist: the Federal gas tax is a primary source of infrastructure funding but, politically, it has proven a hard tax to increase. Furthermore, because the tax is a fixed amount (18.4 cents per gallon) rather than a percentage, gas-tax revenues don’t rise even when gas prices do — as has been happening lately.
Even worse, as modern cars travel further on a gallon of gas (good news, right?), they contribute even less money for the roads they travel. And cars are going to get even more fuel-efficient.
So what’s to be done? Some politicians want to get rid of gas taxes in favor of an increased sales tax — which, Eric Morris argues, is a bad idea, since it shifts the burden to non-drivers.
A reader named Jason Stauffer writes:
I live with four guys in a house. We had no cleaning schedule until about a month ago, but the house was never cluttered, and was more than clean enough for actual women to feel comfortable visiting. Even the bathroom was clean enough for the girls to freely use it without vomiting. However since we have implemented our cleaning schedule the house has gotten into worse and worse shape. The toilet downstairs is even looking so bad I don’t want to use it. What gives?
Okay, everybody, let’s hear what you have to say about private vs. public incentives, moral hazard, and the general cleanliness of men.
A new working paper (gated) from Decio Coviello and Nicola Persico:
We analyze data on NYPD’s “stop and frisk program” in an effort to identify racial bias on the part of the police officers making the stops. We find that the officers are not biased against African Americans relative to whites, because the latter are being stopped despite being a “less productive stop” for a police officer.
Excerpts:
New York City’s stop-and-frisk program disproportionally impacts minorities. The New York Civil Liberties Union makes this point forcefully by documenting that, in 2011, 52.9 percent of stops were of blacks, 33.7 percent were of Latinos, while whites accounted for only 9.3 percent of the stops. This disparate impact is unfortunate, but should not be surprising if we believe that crime and therefore policing are disproportionally concentrated in minority-rich neighborhoods.
However, mere disparate impact is not the same as impermissible behavior. Discrimination law in the United States generally does not prohibit disparate impact, as long as it does not reflect an intent to discriminate. Therefore, if one is interested in impermissible behavior, it is helpful to have an empirical strategy which goes beyond merely documenting disparate impact, and can detect racial animus on the part of the police.
A friend writes:
In my job, I have to deal with a few people I really can’t stand. Most of my co-workers are fine, and they are good at their jobs. The people I can’t stand aren’t good at their jobs but they are good at ingratiating themselves with the top bosses. When I say I “can’t stand” them, I should explain that this feeling started out professionally. I got frustrated at how lazy and sloppy and stupid they are in their work. But then my feelings snowballed and now I can’t stand them personally either. But it’s not that big of a company and I have to deal with all of them all the time, especially in meetings. I would love to hit them in the faces with frying pans but I don’t think that is a good idea. Any useful and hopefully peaceful suggestions?
This note caught my attention because we have just begun working on a podcast about spite. I am eager to hear your suggestions.
We’ve noted before that the U.S. decline in smoking (among teens as well as adults) has likely contributed to the rise in obesity. In a new working paper (gated), John Cawley and Stephanie von Hinke Kessler Scholder consider the degree to which smoking is a conscious effort to avoid weight gain:
We provide new evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight control (i.e. weight loss or avoidance of weight gain). We utilize nationally representative data [the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES)] that provide the most direct evidence to date on this question: individuals are directly asked whether they smoke to control their weight. We find that, among teenagers who smoke frequently, 46% of girls and 30% of boys are smoking in part to control their weight. This practice is significantly more common among youths who describe themselves as too fat than those who describe themselves as about the right weight.
The derived demand for cigarettes has important implications for tax policy. Under reasonable assumptions, the demand for cigarettes is less price elastic among those who smoke for weight control. Thus, taxes on cigarettes will result in less behavior change (but more revenue collection and less deadweight loss) among those for whom the demand for cigarettes is a derived demand. Public health efforts to reduce smoking initiation and encourage cessation may wish to design campaigns to alter the derived nature of cigarette demand, especially among adolescent girls.
From a reader we’ll call O.X.H.:
I listened to your podcast on letting a coin decide your future – and wanted to make my own, small contribution to your piece. I am an attending physician now – but back when I was in medical school (early 2000s), I helped out with the admissions process by interviewing prospective candidates. On one day of interviews, my faculty colleague and I conducted six interviews – and by the end of the day, our job was to rank each of the candidates that we had interviewed. We independently agreed on No. 1 and No. 2 (and No. 5 and No. 6), but neither of us could decide between No. 3 and No. 4. He asked me how we should resolve this – and I (jokingly) suggested that we should flip a coin. Ironically, he loved the idea – and pulled out a coin, and then we assigned each candidate to heads/tails. We said that whoever won the coin toss would get 3rd. (Interestingly, we flipped the coin only once – not two out of three.)
From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a webcomic by Zach Weinersmith (well done, Zach!).
No one wants mass shootings. Unfortunately, no one has a workable plan to stop them either.
The next time your bank or credit-card company frantically calls and texts and e-mails you (all at the same time) to say it has noticed “suspicious activity” on your account — like buying gas in a ZIP code a bit poorer than your own — and says it has suspended your account “for your protection,” tell them to read this paper, by Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research. A key passage:
We show that, in spite of appearances, password-stealing is a bad business proposition. … It is worth, at the outset, dispelling a widely-held misapprehension about password-stealing. Thieves certainly steal passwords, and money is certainly a large part of their motivation, but when they successfully extract money from financial accounts individual consumers do not pay. In the US, Regulation E of the Federal Reserve limits consumer liability, in the event of fraud, to $50 (this is separate from the $50 limit for credit-card fraud, Regulation CC) and covers “any electronic transfer that is initiated through an electronic terminal, telephone, computer or magnetic tape.” In the US banks, brokerages, and credit unions are governed by this regulation and most go beyond it and o ffer a zero liability policy to consumers.
(HT: Peter Baehr)
From the Independent:
A law banning horses from Romanian roads may be responsible for the surge in the fraudulent sale of horsemeat on the European beef market, a French politician said yesterday.
Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.
The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.
… when you see a byline like this:
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