New York City’s subways and buses carry roughly seven million passengers a day, which goes a long way toward explaining why New Yorkers have one of the smallest carbon footprints in the U.S. Doesn’t that mean that mass transit is inevitably good for the environment?
Yes, no, and sometimes.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Mass Transit Hysteria.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player in the post, or read the transcript below.)
Adding more train and bus lines looks like an environmental slam dunk. Until you start to do the math.
We recently released our third set of hour-long Freakonomics Radio programs to NPR stations across the country. If you regularly listen to our podcast, there isn’t much new to hear but if you prefer to take in your radio program via the actual radio, now is your chance. Check your local station for listings. If you’re in the New York area, you can hear Freakonomics Radio on our flagship station, WNYC, for the next five weeks at the following times:
The other day, Levitt and I participated in a brainstorming session on how to fight childhood obesity, sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. (FWIW, we recorded the event and will try to turn it into a podcast.)
One topic that got a lot of traction was a targeted tax on sugary drinks and fatty foods. (This is often called a “fat tax” but should not be confused with a tax on overweight people.) Many people in the session were in favor of the idea but a few were skeptical, primarily because such a tax will be tricky to implement well. One objection that I was surprised no one raised: the simple fact that taxpayers might hate the tax and rebel against it to the point where it becomes politically and economically impossible.
In support of the idea, one person reminded us that Denmark recently instituted a “fat tax” on foods containing more than 2.3 percent of saturated fat.
We recently put out a two-part podcast called “Freakonomics Goes to College” (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and together as an hour-long special). The main question we tried to answer was if, and on what dimensions, a college education is “worth it” — i.e., whether the returns to education are as robust as we’ve been led to think. (Short answer: yes.) Along the way, we talked to economists including David Card, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, and poked into the market for counterfeit degrees.
But let’s say you’re interested in the question from a practical, rather than a theoretical, perspective. That is, let’s say you’re an actual college student, or related to one, already deep in the throes of higher education, and that your primary question is: Okay, now what? Now that I’m here, what do I do to get the very most out of this expensive, time-consuming endeavor?
Glad you asked. Peter D. Feaver, Sue Wasiolek, and Anne Crossman are the authors of Getting the Best Out of College: Insider Advice for Success From a Professor, a Dean, and a Recent Grad, and they have agreed to field questions from Freakonomics readers.
From the inbox:
Gentlemen:
I am a big fan — one who especially appreciates your willingness to (perhaps enjoyment in?) exploring solutions that many would consider repugnant. In that spirit, I would love to get your thoughts on a seemingly unconscionable idea that I recently became aware of.
Every year the U.S. euthanizes approximately 3 to 4 million companion animals (mostly dogs and cats). To put it bluntly, what do you think about using these carcasses as a meat source? We expend enormous resources — land, money, and energy — in producing animal feed and ultimately meat. Given this expense, as well as the world’s need for protein sources, I’d love for you to weigh in on this rather repugnant idea.
Our recent podcast “The Cobra Effect” continues to draw listener/reader mail, with further examples of bounties-gone-wrong. This one, from Dan Banks in Indiana, may be my favorite:
How about a failed bounty on houseflies?I run a group home for criminal youth. They are generally manipulative and not too smart. We have a “point” system where they do work to earn points that they can spend on various tangibles and intangibles. It’s a great system as we print all the “currency” we want and exchange it for labor.
One summer we seemed to always have houseflies in the home. A frustrated staff offered 5 points for every fly carcass that was brought in and handed out flyswatters to the kids.
Yes, it could all go up in smoke — legal challenges, including from the Federal government, and all that — but among the interesting developments from last night’s election (do yourself a favor and look at this map) is the news that Colorado and Washington voters chose to legalize marijuana. Here’s how the issue was phrased on the Colorado ballot:
Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning marijuana, and, in connection therewith, providing for the regulation of marijuana; permitting a person twenty-one years of age or older to consume or possess limited amounts of marijuana; providing for the licensing of cultivation facilities, product manufacturing facilities, testing facilities, and retail stores; permitting local governments to regulate or prohibit such facilities; requiring the general assembly to enact an excise tax to be levied upon wholesale sales of marijuana; requiring that the first $40 million in revenue raised annually by such tax be credited to the public school capital construction assistance fund; and requiring the general assembly to enact legislation governing the cultivation, processing, and sale of industrial hemp?
Very interesting backgrounder on Stephen Salter, the British scientist who, in the course of trying to turn ocean waves into electric power, discovered a potential way to prevent, or at least limit, the impact of hurricanes:
Devastating tropical storms of the kind that battered the U.S. last week could be weakened and rendered less deadly using a simple and cheap technology based on a surprising component – old car tyres.
One of Britain’s leading marine engineers, Stephen Salter, emeritus professor of engineering design at Edinburgh university and a global pioneer of wave power research, has patented with Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold the idea of using thousands of tyres lashed together to support giant plastic tubes which extend 100m deep into the ocean.
Wave action on the ocean surface would force warm surface water down into the deeper ocean. If non-return valves were used, he says, the result would be to mix the waters and cool the surface temperature of the ocean to under 26.5C, the critical temperature at which hurricanes form.
This is the same hurricane-prevention invention we discussed in a brief Freakonomics Radio segment and in greater depth in SuperFreakonomics
Today is the last day to vote for Freakonomics Radio in the 2012 Stitcher Awards. Freakonomics is running in the “Most Original Journalism” category. The price of a vote is a Facebook “like” for Stitcher. And yes, we appreciate the irony of asking for your vote in a season when we’ve been talking about the worthlessness of voting.
Turkey sex and chicken wings, selling souls and swapping organs, the power of the president and the price of wine: these are a few of our favorite things
Our recent podcast “The Cobra Effect” explored the unintended consequences of bounty programs. The episode was inspired by a visit to South Africa not long ago, where I was told about a rat problem in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra. For whatever reason, that story didn’t make the episode. But now the Guardian comes to the rescue, reporting on Alex’s efforts to fight off the rats by offering a cellphone for every 60 rats caught:
[C]ity officials have distributed cages and the mobile phone company 8ta has sponsored the volunteer ratcatchers.
Resident Joseph Mothapo says he has won two phones and plans to get one for each member of his family. “It’s easy,” he told South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper, wielding a large cage containing rats. “You put your leftover food inside and the rats climb in, getting caught as the trap door closes.”
But there were signs that the P.R. stunt could backfire, as animals rights activists criticised the initiative on social networks.
Will this lead to rat farming or other shenanigans? The Guardian reports that owls have also been distributed to help hunt down the rats.
(HT: Joe Sternberg)
Is it as simple as going to the richest neighborhood you can find? Of course not …
A few weeks ago, we got an e-mail from a reader Vishal Dosanjh, who lives in St. Louis:
My daughter asked me this morning why the fancy neighborhoods are the best places to go trick-or-treating. It puzzled me for a moment and then realized it was an economic question. I gave her an answer about disposable income and societal expectations. Anyway I thought it might be up your alley, and I wonder if it’s even true. Do wealthy neighborhoods/people actually give out better candy? She’s 8 by the way.
We set out to answer Vishal’s question in our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast.
Politicians tell voters exactly what they want to hear, even when it makes no sense. Which is pretty much all the time.
We are working on a Hall of Fame project that will pay tribute to people who have used a “freakonomical” way of thinking to better the world in some way large or small. Since a lot of people have a lot of interpretations of what it means to “think like a Freak,” we will leave the criteria up to you. It may have something to do with a creative use of data, or understanding incentives, or challenging the conventional wisdom.
The person you nominate for this Hall of Fame might be prominent or totally obscure. You may know them personally or perhaps you’ve only read about them. They might work in academia, sports, medicine, philanthropy, entertainment, development — or even politics!
We have tried to feature such people on the blog over the years but now we need your help in coming up with the best pool possible. Please send this request to everyone you know!
We recently solicited your questions for Hanna Rosin, author of the new book The End of Men (and the Rise of Women).
Q. What do you think about the feminization of higher education; that is, more female faculty and administrators resulting in more policy creation by women or influenced by them? –Gary
A. This has been the conservative explanation for why boys are having trouble in schools. It was advanced, for example, by Christina Hoff Sommers in her 2000 Atlantic story “The War Against Boys.” I think it’s a valid but somewhat limited explanation. For one thing, it’s not new. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall began promoting this theory in 1908 in his influential essay “Feminization in School and Home.” The problem with it is it implies a kind of coordinated conspiracy by women to influence young minds. The truth is that women have taken over teaching because, as has happened often in our economy, once women start to enter a profession the men tend to flee. That’s really the men’s problem, as I see it, not the women’s. It would be fabulous and solve a lot of problems if more men would become teachers. It also has to do with the fact that teaching is one of the rare profession in the U.S. that allows for enough flexibility for a parent to be able to spend a reasonable amount of time with his or her family, both on a weekly basis and on summer vacations. That’s the fault of the American workforce, which is so resistant to flexible working and a reasonable amount of vacation time.
In the heat of a Presidential campaign, it can be hard to pay attention to other news. But a small-seeming story out of Italy yesterday has, to my mind, the potential to shape the future as much as a Presidential election.
As reported by ABC, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere, an Italian court has convicted seven earthquake experts of failing to appropriately sound the alarm bell for an earthquake that wound up killing more than 300 people in L’Aquila in 2009. The experts received long prison sentences and fines of more than $10 million.(Addenum: Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the “mischaracterizations” of the verdict.)
There is of course the chance that the verdict will be thrown out upon appeal, discredited as an emotional response to a horrible tragedy.
Today’s smartphone, it is often said, has more computing power than an Apollo rocket.
So it should not be surprising that is it disrupting daily life left and right. Every day or two I seem to notice another common item whose usage is plummeting, perhaps bound for oblivion.
I will likely never buy an alarm clock again since my phone can handle the job better. Are clocks and wristwatches on the way out? Has anyone bought a road atlas lately — or even a dedicated GPS system for your car?
Quite a few readers and listeners have written in with their own versions of “the cobra effect,” as described in our recent podcast of the same name. Here’s one particularly entertaining one, from Eblyn Miguel Angel:
I would like to bring a comment that came to mind when I heard your podcast on the “Cobra Effect,” in particular when Levitt mentions that for any scheme presented a government must come to the realization that there will be schemers who will break the system or get around it.
I bring this up because my family is Dominican and growing up my father told me a folk tale of something very similar to this involving electric meters in his home country.
A few weeks back, we posted a query from a young economist who, before heading for the job market, was looking to pick up freelance work. She (yes, she) promised to report back with her progress, and now she has:
Thank you for posting my email. I received a decent handful of responses, but was not flooded with emails. I did get one big project that I am very excited about and will carry me through to the job market, so it worked out very well for me, but is probably not a good career strategy. I had no idea what to charge, so started with the rate I would have received from the employer that didn’t work out, which was clearly too high. I tried to make it clear that it was negotiable, but fear I may have scared off a few people.
We rely on polls and surveys to tell us how people will behave in the future. Too bad they’re completely unreliable.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Lying to Ourselves.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player in the post.)
The episode was inspired by a recent poll I saw on Yahoo! Finance (at left).
Does anyone believe for a minute that this many people would actually leave the U.S. if taxes (whatever that means, exactly) were to rise to 40 percent or even 70 percent?
A new working paper by Felipe Kast, Stephan Meier, Dina Pomeranz combines two of our favorite topics, both explored in recent podcasts: our inability to save money and the efficacy of commitment devices. The paper is called “Under-Savers Anonymous: Evidence on Self-Help Groups and Peer Pressure as a Savings Commitment Device” (abstract; PDF), and it reports a remarkable near-doubling of savings among those who submit to peer pressure:
We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microentrepreneurs in Chile. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of deposits grows 3.5-fold and the average savings balance almost doubles). Conversely, a substantially higher interest rate has no effect on most participants.
Legendary primatologist Frans de Waal presents a video in which two capuchin monkeys are given unequal pay for equal work. One of them gets paid in cucumbers, the other in grapes. Can you guess which one is happier?
1. Just published: Rough Beasts, Charles Siebert‘s new e-book on the Zanesville Zoo Massacre.
2. Chris Sprigman on software patents.
3. 36 bizarre economic indicators. (HT: V. Brenner)
4. Nathan Myhrvold‘s absurdly prolific and diverse output can now be sampled in one place, on his new website. Also, his award-winning six-volume $625 cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
We have just released five hour-long Freakonomics Radio episodes that will be airing this fall and winter on NPR affiliates around the country. Because these hours are mashups of earlier podcasts, we will not be releasing the hours into our podcast stream (iTunes version; RSS feed version), but you can download or listen to them here.
This is our third season of radio hours (the first two can be found here and here). You can look for your local station here, but I will warn you that this list is neither complete nor up-to-date. What I do know is that our last season was carried by roughly 220 stations. Your best bet is probably to check the website of your favorite NPR station — and, if they’re not yet carrying Freakonomics Radio, send them a sweet, imploring note, perhaps with a crisp $20 bill tucked inside. Public-radio folks are as honest as the day as long but they are also underpaid, so a small bribe just might tip the scales.
Hope you enjoy!
Season 3, Episode 5
Since the beginning of civilization, human waste has been considered worthless at best and quite often dangerous. What if it turns out we were wrong? In this episode of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner explores the power of poop, focusing on an experimental procedure called a fecal transplant (some call it a “transpoosion”), which may offer promising results not only for intestinal problems but also obesity and neurological disorders. We’ll talk to two doctors at the vanguard of this procedure and a patient who says it changed his life.
Season 3, Episode 4
Is a college diploma really worth the paper it’s printed on? In this episode of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner breaks down the costs and benefits of going to college, especially during an economy that’s leaving a lot of people un- and underemployed. The data say that college graduates make a lot more money in the long run and enjoy a host of other benefits as well. But does that justify the time and money? We’ll hear from economists David Card, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, as well as former Bush adviser Karl Rove, who made it to the White House without a college degree. Amherst College president Biddy Martin describes what an education provides beyond facts and figures, while Steve Levitt wonders if the students he teaches at the University of Chicago are actually learning anything. Finally, a former FBI agent tells us about the very robust market for fake diplomas.
Season 3, Episode 3
Until not so long ago, chicken feet were essentially waste material. Now they provide enough money to keep U.S. chicken producers in the black — by exporting 300,000 metric tons of chicken “paws” to China and Hong Kong each year. In the first part of this hour-long episode of Freakonomics Radio, host Stephen Dubner explores this and other examples of weird recycling. We hear the story of a Cleveland non-profit called MedWish, which ships unused or outdated hospital equipment to hospitals in poor countries around the world. We also hear Intellectual Ventures founder Nathan Myhrvold describe a new nuclear-power reactor that runs on radioactive waste.
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