Freakonomics Radio has been nominated as one of the top “edutainment” podcasts on iTunes, and the biggest vote-getter will be featured on iTunes in July. You can vote here. I will warn you, the competition is very stiff — we’re up against Radiolab (which would probably get my vote, to be honest), the TED Talks podcast, and some other formidables.
I realize it is the height of hypocrisy for us, the guys who say that voting is overvalued, to ask for your vote. But if you don’t mind voting for hypocrites, go ahead and tick the box.
To feed 7 billion people while protecting the environment, it would seem that going local is a no-brainer — until you start looking at the numbers.
I am not an avid runner but I do it pretty regularly because it is good, cheap, easy exercise. I often run in Central Park. The other day on my run there, it was hotter than usual and I ran further than usual, maybe 5 miles. So I really, really wanted to buy an iced coffee when this ordeal was over. I usually tuck a $5 or $10 bill into my running shorts but I’d forgotten. Oh well.
But then, just a few hundred yards from the end of my run I saw on the ground directly in front of me a suspicious little lump of green paper. I stopped. It was money. Three single dollar bills, crisply folded. Just enough for an iced coffee. I was grateful to whoever dropped it and I hoped it didn’t represent their last three dollars.
The New York Times Magazine‘s “Innovations” issue is a good read. Of the 32 innovations listed, the most interesting to me were Nos. 14, 15, and 16. The appeal of the middle, anyone? Or maybe I’m just a fan of Catherine Rampell, who wrote two of those three.
Here they are:
The Shutup Gun When you aim the SpeechJammer at someone, it records that person’s voice and plays it back to him with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This seems to gum up the brain’s cognitive processes — a phenomenon known as delayed auditory feedback — and can painlessly render the person unable to speak.
Kazutaka Kurihara, one of the SpeechJammer’s creators, sees it as a tool to prevent loudmouths from overtaking meetings and public forums, and he’d like to miniaturize his invention so that it can be built into cellphones. “It’s different from conventional weapons such as samurai swords,” Kurihara says. “We hope it will build a more peaceful world.” — Catherine Rampell
Last week, we solicited your questions for journalist Edward Humes, who seems to love trash as much as we do. His new book is Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash.
Below are his answers to some of your questions. He writes about New York City’s cleanup, the facts about burning trash and recycling, how incentives work (or fail) when it comes to trash, and, of course, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Thanks to Humes for answering so many questions, and to all of you for your good questions (and candor).
Al Roth, whom we’ve blogged about in the past, is known (to me, at least) as the King of Repugnance.
Not that Roth is himself in any way repugnant (quite the opposite), but he is masterful at thinking about the kind of transactions that we find morally or ethically or otherwise disturbing and how the trends of repugnance shift over time.
For a forthcoming book anthology called In 100 Years (inspired, Roth tells us, by a 1930 essay by Keynes called “Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren"), Roth has written an essay (PDF here) about the future of repugnance:
I have a friend named Barry Singer
He has now combined all these passions to write a book called Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill
Oh, internet, how I do love thee!
You deliver things daily to my doorstep that I didn’t know I wanted, that I didn’t even know existed, but which instantly put a lapidary glow on a humdrum day.
The latest example concerns my father. His name was Solomon Paul Dubner; he died when I was 10; he was a newspaperman; I wrote about him at length in my first book
But the internet — or, really, a blog post on the Schenectady County (N.Y.) Historical Society Library site — delivered this nugget about a fascinating place called the Dialogue Coffee House in Schenectady. It is described as:
“[A] non-profit organization aimed at creating dialogue among members of the local community. The organization’s coffee house hosted presentations and open dialogues about a number of topics, including social, economic, and political issues, local politics and government, civil rights, the war in Vietnam, visual and performing arts, health, religion and spirituality, psychology, labor issues, education, morality, and the nature of dialogue. While controversial topics were often featured at the Dialogue Coffee House, the atmosphere tended toward conversation rather than debate. In addition to open discussions and presentations, the coffee house also provided a space for underground films, musical performances, and plays as an impetus for dialogue.”
We are working on a Freakonomics Radio episode about the management-consulting profession. It was inspired in part by a Robin Hanson blog post about the industry and the fact that Steve Levitt worked as a consultant between undergrad and grad school and has lately rekindled the flame, starting up a firm called The Greatest Good.
We are looking to interview an experienced consultant, preferably with a top firm, who can freely talk about the industry broadly and his or her work specifically.
If you are that person or can recommend such a person, please shoot us an e-mail here. Many thanks.
From the shy and retiring (not!) Austan Goolsbee:
An editorial in Nature argues that geoengineering needs a charter if research on the topic is to move forward. The journal cites the recent cancellation of the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) experiment due to concerns about “intellectual-property rights, public engagement and the overall governance regime for such work.” Nature argues that resolving the intellectual-property concerns may be the easiest part:
More troubling is the lack of an overarching governance framework. Although the SPICE trial has been cancelled, other tests of geoengineering technology will surely follow. Other work, such as fiddling with clouds to make them more reflective or to try to bring on rain, touches on both climate-change mitigation and weather modification.
Geoengineers should keep trying. They should come together and draft detailed, practical actions that need to be taken to advance governance in the field. Regulation in these cutting-edge and controversial areas needs to be working before the experiments begin, rather than racing to catch up.
We touched on the very tricky governance questions in our SuperFreakonomics
Stitcher is a “smart radio” app that lets you listen to podcasts and live radio on demand. I only heard of it once Stitcher began advertising on Freakonomics Radio, but then I started using it and I have to say I do love it.
As of today, I love Stitcher even a little bit more because it has just launched a Stitcher List of top programs around the world, and guess which program resides at No. 1?
Thanks to Stitcher and thanks to all of you who gobble up our radio program via whatever distribution method you choose. It is most gratifying!
The N.B.A.’s superstars are suddenly sporting Urkel glasses — but is it more than a fashion statement?
We are quite fond of talking trash, literally: see our “Economics of Trash” podcast, and our “Weird Recycling” episode, and even the “Power of Poop.”
The journalist Edward Humes is also fascinated with trash. His new book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
Humes has agreed to field your trash questions, so ask away in the comments section and, as always, we’ll post his answers in short order.
How American food so got bad — and why it’s getting so much better.
When we began our Freakonomics Radio podcast back in early 2010, it was something between a lark and an experiment. But we have produced 75 episodes by now, so it seemed time to gather all the episodes in one place. Here’s our new Freakonomics Podcast Archive, color-coded for your convenience to denote our three types of content: original podcasts (usually between 20 and 30 minutes long); our regular Marketplace segments (5 or 6 minutes long); and our 1-hour specials that air on public-radio stations across the country. Among our most popular podcasts to date: “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” and “How Much Does the President of the U.S. Really Matter?”
You can of course subscribe via iTunes (where Freakonomics Radio occasionally hits the No. 1 ranking) or listen via our RSS feed.
Hope you enjoy; feedback welcome.
If you remember our podcast “Boo…Who?” (which was included in the hour-long special “Show and Yell“), you’ll know we love the topic of booing. David Herman, our sound engineer at Freakonomics Radio, experienced some first-hand booing last week. He wrote it up as a guest post:
How Does It Feel to Get Booed?
By David Herman
Last weekend, I visited the Bell House in Brooklyn to hear the Budos Band, an afrobeat-inspired 10-piece instrumental group from Staten Island. According to the venue’s online ticket page, the show was slated to start at 9:00 PM. But 9:00 came and went, and then 10:00… 10:30… Granted, I’ve come to accept that no band will ever go on less than 30 minutes late, but this seemed to be pushing the bounds of good taste.
At about 10:45, the band made its way onstage from the wings. The (sold-out) house was packed with around 300 people, each of whom had paid $15 plus drinks. So as soon as the group got into position, almost two hours late, what happened?
“BOOOOOO!”
A reader named Karim Kai Ani writes:
Guy walks into a bar and says, “We’ve got this math curriculum that everyone is saying is the bomb (a dangerous thing to say when you have my name, but go with me), and we’re Kickstarting a video series to offer teachers a new vision of what it means to teach math.”
And the waitress says, “You should see if the dudes from Freakonomics would tweet about it. Didn’t they mention Mathalicious on their blog once?”
Thanks to @PE_Mulroe via Twitter, here’s a story from the (Northwest Indiana) Post-Tribune that combines two of our favorite topics: elections and first names. It’s called “A Tale of Two Mike Browns in Lake County Politics”:
Did Mike Brown, the candidate for recorder, intentionally run on the name recognition earned by former recorder and Lake County Clerk Mike Brown?
The candidate says no. Incumbent Recorder Michelle Fajman and party boss Tom McDermott Jr. say yes. And the clerk with the same name? Well, as someone who backed Fajman in the election, he’s just sorry if anyone cast a ballot without knowing who was who.
An interesting e-mail from a reader:
Hello. My name is Thiago, and I am writing from Brazil. I always read freakonomics posts thru my rss reader and I saw a news today that inspired me to write to you.
Rio de Janeiro’s police started a new policy to incentivize cops to arrest the most wanted drug dealers. The prize: 15 days off and one weekend in a beautiful island at Angra dos Reis with all costs included.I wondered if this incentive will have a positive effect, whereas there are bad cops who are bribed by drug dealers. What if these bad officers began to been rewarded by drug dealer with tickets to Disney instead of arrest them?
We’ve written a few times about what we call reverse incentives: comedian and activist Dick Gregory‘s use of the N word; Planned Parenthood turning abortion protestors into a fund-raising scheme; and the “pledge-a-picket” drive.
The latest instance comes from fashion designer Marc Jacobs. It began when the graffiti artist Kidult vandalized Jacobs’s SoHo shop by scrawling “ART” across the storefront. A Twitter war followed, but Jacobs wasn’t done. As The New York Observer reports:
In response to James McWilliams‘s still-reverberating post about why more environmentalists don’t promote veganism, a reader named Mary writes:
I have always wondered why environmentalists are so reluctant to promote veganism, but eager to promote alternative transportation. Many residents of the U.S. are currently locked in to their car-dependent lifestyle, with large mortgages in suburbs with no safe sidewalks or bike lanes and inefficient transit. Ditching their car is logistically much more difficult to do than buying beans instead of meat at the grocery store. Currently, the infrastructure for reducing car use is lacking in many communities, though vegan foods, like beans, grains, fruits, and vegetables, are much more easily obtained.
It’s an interesting point. A few related thoughts come to mind:
Sure, we all dream of leaving the office forever. But what if it’s bad for your health?
We recently solicited your questions for social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Below are his responses about confirmation bias in religion, the “score” of our morals, the power of branding, how his research has made him a centrist, and how the search for truth is hampered by our own biases. Big thanks to him and all our readers for another great Q&A.
From a reader named Becca Levin:
Hi, I just listened to your podcast with NPR on the impact of shipping flowers. May I suggest, if you should ever air it again, you consider the song “Plastic Roses“
by the Chenille Sisters. A sample line: “He sent me plastic roses, the kind that never fade … ” A touching love song about lasting memories.
We blogged a while back about how some retail firms succeed by hiring more, not fewer, floor employees, and by treating them particularly well. Among the examples: Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods; among the counterexamples: Michael’s.
This prompted an e-mail from Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. (If you don’t know of Hal you should, as he’s an impressive and fascinating guy — check out the Q&A he did here a few years back.) His e-mail reads:
Saw your piece about Trader Joe’s et al. Here’s one reason to pay people more than their market wage (from my textbook):
Gabor Varszegi has made millions by providing high-quality service in his photo developing shops in Budapest. (See Steven Greenhouse, “A New Formula in Hungary: Speed Service and Grow Rich,” New York Times, June 5, 1990, A1.)
Varszegi says that he got his start as a businessman in the mid-sixties by playing bass guitar and managing a rock group. “Back then,” he says, “the only private businessmen in Eastern Europe were rock musicians.” He introduced one-hour film developing to Hungary in 1985; the next best alternative to his one-hour developing shops was the state-run agency that took one month.
Michael Specter has written a good and interesting New Yorker article about the history and current state of geoengineering, called “The Climate Fixers: Is There a Technological Solution to Global Warming?”
Let me rephrase:
Michael Specter has written a good and interesting New Yorker article about the history and current state of geoengineering, called “The Climate Fixers: Is There a Technological Solution to Global Warming?,” which is essentially a New Yorkerized version of Chapter 5 of SuperFreakonomics
A reader named Olaf Winter writes in with a problem that perhaps you all can help solve?
Hello Dubner & Levitt,
During a Parent Teacher Association meeting in my son’s high school in Essen, Germany, I heard complaints about a growing problem with unbelievably dirty toilets, or to be more precise, with the problem of adolescent girls smirching, soiling, polluting, dripping and littering at the restrooms.
I’m talking about unrolled packs of toilet paper stuffed into the toilet; about smearings on the walls (with pens in the best case). I forgo the more unsavory details. You probably have an idea of what I mean. The school I am talking about is one of the best schools in town. It is a newly built complex with beautiful architecture, lots of space and light. The pupils have an upper-middle-class background. And still, when they are in the restroom at least some of them behave like savages.
“It is conventional wisdom that it is possible to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution, improve health outcomes, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in the rural areas of developing countries through the adoption of improved cooking stoves,” write Rema Hanna, Esther Duflo, and Michael Greenstone in their new working paper “Up in Smoke: The Influence of Household Behavior on the Long-Run Impact of Improved Cooking Stoves” (abstract; Washington Post coverage).
But, as the scholars discovered, what seems like an obvious technology fix doesn’t always work. Because, remember, human behavior can be a lot harder to change than we think.
Or, put another way: bummer.
In a world where nearly everything is for sale, is it always okay to buy what isn’t yours?
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