It’s time again to record another FAQ podcast (that’s “FREAK-quently Asked Questions”), and we need your help!
Every once in a while, we solicit questions from Freakonomics readers and answer them on Freakonomics Radio. Levitt always has a great time doing this, as evidenced by his answers to why “I don’t know” is so hard to say or why we vote (or don’t).
So fire away in the comments section below, and keep up with the podcast at iTunes or via the RSS feed to see if your question gets answered.
From a new working paper by David Yermack, an economist at NYU/Stern, called “Tailspotting: How Disclosure, Stock Prices and Volatility Change When CEOs Fly to Their Vacation Homes” (abstract; older version in PDF):
This paper shows close connections between CEOs’ vacation schedules and corporate news disclosures. I identify vacations by merging corporate jet flight histories with real estate records of CEOs’ property owned near leisure destinations. Companies disclose favorable news just before CEOs leave for vacation and delay subsequent announcements until CEOs return, releasing news at an unusually high rate on the CEO’s first day back. When CEOs are away, companies announce less news than usual and stock prices exhibit sharply lower volatility. Volatility increases immediately when CEOs return to work.
“Morality, by its very nature, makes it hard to study morality,” writes the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. “It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups.”
His new book is called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
I’m pleased to say that Haidt has agreed to take questions on his topic from Freakonomics readers, so ask away in the comments section and as always, we’ll post his answers in short order.
Fascinating article in today’s Times, by Anne Barnard:
Starting next year, New York will become the first state to require lawyers to perform unpaid work before being licensed to practice, the state’s chief judge announced on Tuesday, describing the rule as a way to help the growing number of people who cannot afford legal services.
The approximately 10,000 lawyers who apply to the New York State Bar each year will have to demonstrate that they have performed 50 hours of pro bono work to be admitted, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said. He said the move was intended to provide about a half-million hours of badly needed legal services to those with urgent problems, like foreclosure and domestic violence.
At a time when people worry about every mile their food must travel, why is it okay to import most of our cut flowers from thousands of miles away?
A reader writes:
You should do an article about how pop-ups drive people away from websites, even after the viewer opts out. You can start with me and how I won’t be returning to your site, or reading your next book, or promoting it by word-of-mouth, because of your annoying “recommended for you” pop-up.
Do not respond to this email.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Fascinating article in today’s Wall Street Journal, by Susan Carey and Angel Gonzelez: “Delta to Buy Refinery in Effort to Lower Jet-Fuel Costs.” Coupled with the news of Microsoft bankrolling B&N’s Nook business, the Delta deal shows how far and fast existing business models are shifting, and how vertical integration continues to not be dead.
May Day has already brought some rioting to San Francisco, and as Dashiell Bennett‘s Atlantic Wire piece points out, New York is bracing for the same:
Tensions are likely to be pretty high, especially in New York City, [where] some leading organizers were reportedly visited at home by New York police and FBI agents yesterday who interviewed them about their plans. (The high temperatures and 80% chance of rain won’t help either.)
Maybe my computer thinks I am in China (but I am not; I am in New York).
Maybe a Chinese hacker is just having a laugh (it has happened before).
Maybe the Chinese have bought all of our stock markets (although I seriously doubt it).
Or maybe, for whatever reason, Yahoo! Finance is simply some coding issues. Because when I checked the markets this morning, they seemed to have been renamed:
Season 2, Episode 5
Our latest podcast is called “Lottery Loopholes and Deadly Doctors.” (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) This is the final episode of five one-hour Freakonomics Radio specials that have been airing on public radio stations across the country. (Check here to find your local station.)
These hour-long programs are “mashupdates” — that is, mashups of earlier podcasts which we’ve also updated with new interviews, etc.
In two weeks, we’ll start releasing a series of brand new podcasts. Among the topics to listen for: the selling of souls, the value of college, and the strategic use of jerkitude (that is, acting like a jerk).
What do you do when smart people keep making stupid mistakes? And: are we a nation of financial illiterates? This is a “mashupdate” of “Is America Ready for a “No-Lose Lottery”?,” “The “No-Lose Lottery,” Part 2,” and “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?“
I have been lucky enough to visit the secret lair at the NFL’s headquarters where each year a crew of industrious people try to come up with an NFL schedule that pleases every team, player, TV network, fan, mayor, police department, religious official, and sports pundit in America.
This is of course impossible.
But they do try their best, and in today’s Times there’s a nice article by Judy Battista about how this year’s schedule was made by the NFL’s Howard Katz and his team.
After you look over the 2012-13 schedule, you might also want to take a look at the latest Football Freakonomics video we’ve done for the NFL Network. It considers the “body clock” factor on teams’ schedules:
A new study says that yes, it is — but try telling that to the United Nations officials who are preaching sustainability practices.
We’re working on a new Freakonomics Radio piece about what might best be called “retail etiquette.” It was inspired in part by this blog post, about how the quantity and quality of employees affects a company’s bottom line; and by this e-mail from a listener named Dawn Nordquist:
I’ve noticed that, at the beginning of the podcasts, a short banter between the two of you is included regarding thanking the listening audience. Thanking the listening audience aside, what are your thoughts/observations on thanking in commercial transactions? I have recently been struck by how often I am not thanked when purchasing something.
Jennifer Colosi runs a San Francisco executive search firm with a concentration in finance. Here’s what she wrote in to say about our analysis of the persistent female-male wage gap:
Agreed with all you wrote about wage gaps between women and men.
Why yes, women do love kids!
You are exactly right – a higher wage isn’t as important to some woman – because it comes at a “household” cost.
Encyclopaedia Britannica has declared that its latest print edition will be its last; from here on out, everything will be digital. Jim Romenesko rounds up coverage from the Times, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. I am not much of an impulse buyer, but when I read that there were only 800 sets remaining — that’s what they say, at least — I jumped right in and paid nearly $1,600 to have a set shipped to my home in New York.
Season 2, Episode 4
We have just released our second series of five one-hour Freakonomics Radio specials to public-radio stations across the country. (Check here to find your local station.) Now these episodes are hitting our podcast stream as well. These shows are what might best be called “mashupdates” — that is, mashups of earlier podcasts with new interviews.
This week: “Eating and Tweeting.” (You download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below).
Does the future of food lie in its past – or inside a tank of liquid nitrogen? Also: how anti-social can you be on a social network? This is a “mashupdate” of “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup, Part 1,” “Waiter, There’s a Physicist in My Soup, Part 2,” and “Is Twitter a Two-Way Street?”
We recently solicited your questions for Peter Diamandis, founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, and journalist Steven Kotler. They are co-authors of the new book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. Below are their answers about the need for jobs (it’s not what you may suspect), the distribution of wealth, and the technological breakthrough that led the price of aluminum to plummet. Thanks to everyone for participating.
Q. How did you come up with the book’s cover art? It’s very eye-catching — but not obviously related to the subject matter. –nobody.really
A. The cover is actually directly related to the book’s message. The book is “wrapped” in aluminum foil and the story of aluminum is what opens Abundance. In short, during the early 1800s aluminum was considered the most valuable metal in the world. This is why the capstone to the Washington Monument is made from aluminum, and also why Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.
If any other product failed 94 percent of the time, you’d probably stop using it. So why do we put up with burglar alarms?
There may be several appropriate answers to the question posed in the headline, but after reading Howard Kurtz‘s account of Olbermann’s split with Current TV in the Daily Beast, only one came to mind.
If you believe Olbermann’s camp — yes, that’s an “if” worth thinking about — the conflict came down to a simple issue: while Current was willing to pay its new anchorman $50 million, it wasn’t willing to spend the money to bring his show up to a professional standard:
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may know that I am devoutly anti-penny. This includes a rant on 60 Minutes in which I argue that the penny should be killed off, as inflation has rendered it worse than worthless.
The U.S. government remains unpersuaded, but our good neighbors to the north are about to take the leap (following the lead, it should be said, of several other countries).
Season 2, Episode 3
We have just released our second series of five one-hour Freakonomics Radio specials to public-radio stations across the country. (Check here to find your local station.) Now these episodes are hitting our podcast stream as well. These shows are what might best be called “mashupdates” — that is, mashups of earlier podcasts which we’ve also updated with new interviews, etc.
This episode is called “The Power of the President — and the Thumb” (download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below). The first half is an overhaul of our 2010 podcast “How Much Does the President Really Matter?” We’ve mashed it up with our 2011 episode “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?” to create an hour of radio that shows, among other things, how “attribution errors” work.
How much does the President of the United States really matter? And: where did all the hitchhikers go? A pair of “attribution errors.” This is a “mashupdate” of “How Much Does the President Really Matter?” and “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?”
A radio listener named Eugene Kim, a psychiatrist, writes with some good feedback about our “Boo … Who?” podcast (which we recently updated in an hour-long podcast called “Show and Yell”):
Loved the “Show & Yell” episode, and had a few laugh out loud moments in the car as I was driving (i.e. the “boo” Giants baseball piece). However, as a fellow explorer of the unseen, the unconscious, and seemingly irrational decisions of fellow human beings, I was disappointed at the cursory attempt to explain why we do and don’t boo. To that I shout: BOO!!!!! 😉
As Terry Teachout pointed out, no, we are not just polite people.
But Mr. Teachout’s best guess was off target as well. The endowment effect? Marginal and not encompassing enough!
Yesterday we published a post about how some retailers spend a lot of money and effort on their employees, how other retailers spend much less, and how that difference affects shoppers.
I mentioned finding long lines and few cashiers at the arts-and-crafts store Michaels. And I wrote this too:
FWIW, critics — especially Democratic critics — may note that Michaels is a chain that went public a long time ago, expanded widely, and was taken private in 2006 when it was acquired by two investment firms: the Blackstone Group and, yes, Bain Capital.
On an early episode of Freakonomics Radio, we interviewed Peter Diamandis, founder and CEO of the X Prize Foundation. He was a great (and inspirational) guest. Now he has written a book with journalist Steven Kotler called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. From the flap copy:
Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing — fast. The authors document how four forces — exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion — are conspiring to solve our biggest problems.
1. Adam Davidson on high-end nannies.
2. Nathaniel Penn with a snapshot of a recent class of college grads (depressing).
3. Alicia Tugend with a fascinating piece about how we remember and process criticism/bad events more forcefully than praise/good events. It’s a psychological take on loss aversion, with good examples from Clifford Nass, Roy Baumeister, and Teresa Amabile.
A reader named Quinton White points us to an interesting article by Jim Surowiecki in The New Yorker about how retails firms are succeeding by hiring more workers and spending more money training and rewarding them. Surowiecki writes:
A recent Harvard Business Review study by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. professor, looked at four low-price retailers: Costco, Trader Joe’s, the convenience-store chain QuikTrip, and a Spanish supermarket chain called Mercadona. These companies have much higher labor costs than their competitors. They pay their employees more; they have more full-time workers and more salespeople on the floor; and they invest more in training them. (At QuikTrip, even part-time employees get forty hours of training.) Not surprisingly, these stores are better places to work. What’s more surprising is that they are more profitable than most of their competitors and have more sales per employee and per square foot.
We once put out a podcast called “Reading, Rockets, and ‘Rithmetic,” about how competition and prizes help drive innovation. Among the examples were the federal education program Race to the Top; Google’s “20 percent time” policy; and the X-Prize Foundation, whose founder and chairman, Peter Diamandis, remains one of my favorite radio guests ever, full of vigor and wisdom and optimism. (We’ll soon be featuring a Q&A on this blog with Diamandis and Steven Kotler, coauthors of the new book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
I’m happy to report that I am hardly the only person to be inspired by Diamandis. We recently got the following e-mail from David Sedgwick, an executive with a nursing-home company called the Ensign Group.
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