What we know — and don’t know — about the gazillions of dollars that never show up on anyone’s books.
If you think working from home offers too many distractions, just think about what happens at the office.
If you work in an office, do you ever find yourself thinking that you could get more work done at home?
That’s the question we address in our latest podcast, “There’s Cake in the Breakroom!”
You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.
There are at least two primary perspectives on this topic:
But there’s at least one more perspective to consider. A firm might look at the office rent it pays and think it might be worth the trade-off to let employees work at home instead.
A reader in Australia named Ian Lyons, in response to our “Herd Mentality” podcast, writes to say:
At the 2012 Sydney Festival, we created a sophisticated set of interactive dashboards showing which artists were buzzing (on Twitter and Facebook) in real time, where people were coming from, interesting facts and live photos.
To my astonishment the most popular tool simply allowed you to see which show other people from your postcode were going to see. Viewed through the lens of behavioral economics, this makes perfect sense but it’s the opposite of what I would have predicted instinctively. In fact it almost didn’t get deployed because it was too simple.
I blogged yesterday about a Department of State (N.Y.) government website page that only accepts information during business hours. You offered several other similar examples (many of them government sites as well) and possible explanations. We also received, via comment and e-mail, an explanation from Edison Alban, press officer for the D.O.S. (BTW, his name could be considered a pretty good aptonym, since Albany is the capital of New York.)
He begins by objecting to the post, particularly the headline, which was “This Website Only Open During Business Hours”:
The New York Department of State’s Division of Corporation website is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Division of Corporation does not shut down its website during non-business hours.
No comment.
An interesting e-mail from a reader/listener named Andrei Herasimchuk about what he calls “gamification”:
It’s a word and term that drives me nuts these days. I design software, and have done so for two decades now. Everyone is trying to add gamification features to their products these days in the tech industry. Think badges, achievements, and things normally found in a game like World of Warcraft. People in this industry lately seem to believe that these sorts of things drive engagement in their products. From everything I’ve seen, and from influences of your work, I’d assume what people really want to do is find ways to design incentives into products. Incentives versus Gamification? What works better?
Andrei (and I) would love to hear what you have to say on this question. I have a few superficial thoughts:
If you happen to manage a Limited Liability Corp (LLC) in New York State and need to file your Biennial Statement, you might follow the directions sent to you in the mail and go to the state’s website for conducting such business: www.ebiennial.dos.ny.gov.
But if you try this on, say, a weekend, here is the message you’ll see:
I assume this is only a coincidence but still, it’s a good one.
Shortly after putting out the first half of our “Freakonomics Goes to College” podcast, which included a segment on the market for fake diplomas from counterfeiters and diploma mills, I got the following piece of spam. It appears to be from a Norwegian e-mail domain:
I am not sure this is as meaningful as the authors think, but still it is an interesting experiment. From a new working paper called “Letter Grading Government Efficiency” by Alberto Chong, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer:
We mailed letters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country), and measured whether they come back to the return address in the U.S. and how long it takes. About 60% of the letters were returned, taking over 6 months, on average. The results provide new objective indicators of government efficiency across countries, based on a simple and universal service, and allow us to shed light on its determinants. The evidence suggests that both technology and management quality influence the quality of government.
I am happy to read that final sentence but surprised it needed to be said. This paper may tickle your memory with thoughts of Stanley Milgram‘s “small-world experiment” (better known as “six degrees of separation“) and Judith Kleinfeld‘s reassessment of that experiment as told in Duncan Watts‘s excellent book Six Degrees.
From a Q&A in the Times Book Review, in response to a question about literary appetites and guilty pleasures:
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. Pedophilia is a pleasure a person should have guilt about. Not chocolate.
On Yahoo! Sports, the football writer Jason Cole profiles Todd Haley, the Pittsburgh native who has returned to his hometown Steelers (yeah, they’re my team too) to take over as offensive coordinator. Cole writes about Haley’s notorious “screaming jags” and wonders if Haley and Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger can coexist:
Haley believes the outside world doesn’t understand the method to his madness. In previous stops, Haley was walking into rebuilding situations that required more attitude.
“The general public doesn’t know if that’s contrived or not contrived and over the years you have seen a lot of coaches who have shown emotion,” Haley said. “I take a great deal of pride in my passion for the game, but it was also what the situation dictated at the time.”
Okay, nothing so noteworthy about that. But then Haley reveals himself as a master of signaling theory:
College tends to make people happier, healthier, and wealthier. But how?
In a Yahoo! Sports column about Brooklyn Nets G.M. Billy King, writer Kelly Dwyer notes that if New York is “the city that never sleeps,” then Brooklyn is “the borough that never shaves.” This is not a wholly original phrase but pretty close, and, from personal observation, I’d have to say pretty accurate too, at least for a certain demographic. I can’t think of the last white Brooklyn male under 40 I saw without a full Grizzly Adams, a set of muttonchops, or at the very least a patch of second-cut-rough stubble. Bad borough for razor sales.
From the Onion, “Nation’s Economists Quietly Evacuating Their Families”:
As employment stagnates, manufacturing continues its slump, and overall confidence in the U.S. financial system wavers, the nation’s economists have begun abandoning their homes and sending their loved ones overseas. “We’ve noticed a trend among the leading economic thinkers, be they Keynsians, supply-siders, or students of the Austrian school—they’re putting their families on one-way flights out of the country, often leaving half-finished survival bunkers behind them,” Paul Klement, an analyst with the Brookings Institute, told reporters Tuesday.
This, meanwhile, is not a joke: Economists for Romney today announces that its statement in support of Mitt Romney for President has been signed by more than 400 economists, including Nobelists Gary Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes.
(HT: Dave Domingo)
I saw this late yesterday afternoon when looking over the financial news.
Wait a minute, you think — I knew Groupon is a big deal (or used to be, at least), but $568 billion in revenues in the second quarter? Billion with a “b”? That would rank Groupon in the top 70 countries for GDP.
Okay, of course not. It should have read $568 million, with an “m.” Hey: people make mistakes, no biggie.
But here we are many hours later and, as I type this, the CNBC article remains uncorrected even though many commenters have pointed out the mistake (some quite kindly, others less so).
Yesterday we blogged about Mark Bittman’s acrid comment about the death of a Chick-fil-A executive. (It would make a good postscript to our “Legacy of a Jerk” podcast.) Bittman has now apologized and removed the offending language from the original article.
We know that summertime brings far too many fatal accidents. But you may be surprised if you dig into the numbers.
A few months back, Levitt and I were asked help put together a TV cop show based on the concepts of Freakonomics. The gist: a big-city police force, in crisis, hires a rogue academic (sound familiar?) to help get crime under control.
It struck us as a totally crazy but also strangely appealing idea. The concept had been hatched by Brian Taylor, a young exec at Kelsey Grammer‘s production company, Grammnet, which then partnered with Lionsgate; and the acclaimed writer Kevin Fox was brought on board. The show would be called Pariah.
A couple weeks ago, Levitt and I went to Los Angeles to help pitch the show to the TV networks. Since we know nothing about TV, we tried to not talk too much and let Kevin, Brian, and Kelsey do their thing. And they did! Here’s the news, from Deadline.com:
A reader named Gustav, a.k.a. the Modern Nomad (a nice blog, by the way) writes to say:
Hi! I’ve just left Buenos Aires after a five-month long nomadic visit there. Reflecting on my time there, I remembered something an Argentine friend told me, and I think you might like the economic spirit behind it.
Gustav is right. I do like the economic spirit behind the story he tells, and I think you will too:
In short, this is a government scheme created to discourage driving under the influence. When you and your friends drive to a disco, you enter the club as normal and pay your entry. But when you leave, the group walks up to the cashier and presents the designated driver, sober and fit for driving. Everyone in the group gets their entry fee back at that point! The club then gets the lost money back from the government who, I presume, find it cheaper to pay the entry fee for clubbers in the company of designated drivers than have them in the hospitals. To me, this is a beautiful economic point of view where the practical reality and cost of things is more important than not to be seen ‘supporting clubbers.’
We recently put out a podcast called “Legacy of a Jerk,” which deals in large part with the ancient injunction against speaking ill of the dead. For the most part, this injunction is still widely obeyed. So I was quite surprised to see what Mark Bittman recently wrote on his N.Y. Times blog:
Sysco is the latest food giant—it’s the largest food distributor in the country—to come out against gestation crate confinement of pigs. The National Pork Producers Council’s communications director was quoted in the National Journal saying: “So our animals can’t turn around for the 2.5 years that they are in the stalls producing piglets…I don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around.” Really.
Speaking of pigs, the VP of PR for Chick-fil-A dropped dead of a heart attack the week after the chain’s latest homophobia/anti-gay marriage scandal. Here’s an obit, and here’s more about him. Meanwhile, Chick-fil-A had record-breaking profits after its President, Dan Cathy, drew a line in the sand over same-sex marriage.
I read that “speaking of pigs” line three or four times to make sure I understood. At first I thought that Bittman was speaking metaphorically — that no one had in fact died. (But he did: the man’s name was Don Perry.) Then I thought maybe the Times page had been hacked, but that doesn’t seem to be the case either. FWIW, here’s a screenshot:
Here’s a fascinating new working paper from Yale economist David G. Atkin, called “Endogenous Skill Acquisition and Export Manufacturing in Mexico” (abstract here; PDF of an earlier version here). The gist:
This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms, the years 1986-2000, altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across municipalities to show that school dropout increased with local expansions in export manufacturing. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every twenty jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by the least-skilled export-manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin.
It makes sense, of course, that students on the margin might happily abandon school in favor of a good job. But is that necessarily a bad thing? How should a society balance jobs and educational ambition? And who should be thinking harder about this issue — India or China? Or perhaps the U.S.?
It’s been nearly 18 months since we relaunched this website, and we continue to try to improve it. Many of the improvements were spurred on by reader suggestions — so: thanks!
Here are a few changes we’ve recently made:
1) We’ve added a Freakonomics Radio Archive page to make it easier to find or listen to any particular episode. Let us know how this page is working for you, and any further improvements we should consider. Also, on our Radio page, we have grouped our one-house specials by season. We have so far released two seasons (each with five one-hour specials), and a third is on the way this fall.
2) We have reconfigured the blog’s comments section by adding a “view all comments” button and paginating the comments so that you can skip to a particular page of coments.
3) There is now a “print” button on the blog so that you can print out individual posts.
A podcast listener named Susan Guttentag, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, writes in to say:
I was compelled to email you after the following incident on our recent visit to Whitefish, Montana. My husband and I had finished a terrific bike trip through Glacier and Waterton Parks, and we were spending a couple of extra days in Whitefish, a very lovely town in the Flathead River Valley. We noticed that there was a terrific hike to the top of the local ski resort on Big Mountain and decided to venture out. Sadly, the trail starting point was a hefty distance away — too far to tack onto what proved to be a 4 h hike to the top– but the lodge did not provide shuttle service to this area. My husband suggested that we — wait for it — hitchhike! In nearly 53 years on the planet, I had never once hitchhiked but my husband is 6’3″ so I thought “why not?” I had listened to your podcast on hitchhiking and was somewhat comforted by the data.
This is a guest post by Matthew Watson, a lecturer in geophysical natural hazards at the University of Bristol and the lead researcher for the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project (SPICE), whose experiments are currently on hold. He blogs at The Reluctant Geoengineer.
The Case For Climate Engineering Research
By Matthew Watson
As project lead for the SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), I have been on quite a journey over the last eighteen months. SPICE is important, challenging, socio-politically charged, and high-profile: a heady mix for a youngish researcher like me. It looks to answer the question “Can we emulate the cooling observed after large volcanic eruptions to ameliorate the worst effects of global warming?” Despite playing to my apparent Messiah complex, the trials and tribulations of steering the project through rough seas has been more than enough to keep my feet on the ground. That is a challenge that faces all who research such grand things.
Do host cities really get the benefits their boosters promise, or are they just engaging in some fiscal gymnastics?
Sam Lee of NYU and Petra Persson of Columbia send an e-mail:
We have written a research paper [“Human Trafficking and Regulating Prostitution”] that theoretically analyzes the impact of prostitution laws on voluntary sex work and sex trafficking. The central message of the paper is a new policy proposal (see Q6 below). Here are some of the questions we ask and the answers we find:
Q1: Which regulatory approach, legalization or criminalization, is more effective against trafficking?
A1: Neither. Either approach can increase or decrease trafficking, depending on the appeal of voluntary sex work, which in turn depends on things such as the female-male wage gap.Q2: What about studies that document higher trafficking inflows into countries that legalize prostitution?
A2: In the presence of sex tourism (which is, for example, non-negligible for Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands), the increase in trafficking in the legalizing country can be more than offset by a decrease in trafficking in the neighboring countries. Thus, overall, trafficking can actually decrease.
A reader named Mark Kozel writes to say:
I heard that Chicago will be pouring up to $14 million into police overtime to prevent murder and violent crime.
It got me thinking: is it cheaper to prevent this kind of crime, or to just let it happen and clean up the mess afterwards?
It would be hard to find many people, even economists, who would arguing that “just letting it happen” isn’t an outcome that society should even think about accepting.
What happens to your reputation when you’re no longer around to defend it?
I overlapped a little bit at the New York Times with Charlie LeDuff and let me just say that his reputation as a one-of-a-kind reporter is thoroughly deserved.
He now works for the Fox TV news station in Detroit. If you have ten minutes to spare, you should check out his recent piece: “Charlie LeDuff Golfs the Length of Detroit”.
Is it a) one of the most interesting pieces of reporting you’ll ever see? b) a kind of cultural criticism that almost never shows up in mainstream journalism? c) a golfing adventure that even the most adventuresome golfers have never considered?
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