A reader named Matt Radcliffe writes:
I’ve been working on a project concerning musical theater performance. I have a hypothesis which seems intuitive enough to me — that a lack of exposure to creative arts can lead to disastrous results for individuals (lack of education, poverty, etc).
I can find a plethora of research that proves the opposite (exposure to creative arts can lead to success), but I can’t find anything towards my hypothesis.
We’ve banged the drum quite a bit on the need for greater financial literacy. If you care about such things, you might want to take a look at a new working paper by Pierluigi Balduzzi and Jonathan Reuter called “Heterogeneity in Target-Date Funds and the Pension Protection Act of 2006” (abstract; PDF).
That isn’t the sexiest title ever, and if you don’t care at all about personal finance or investing then you probably shouldn’t go near it. But if you care even a little bit, the paper has some interesting lessons even beyond the fairly narrow focus of Target-Date Funds. A Target-Date Fund is, in a nutshell, a mutual fund whose asset allocation automatically shifts over time as the target date approaches.
1. C. Kirabo Jackson finds that college-prep programs — with payments — really do work for inner-city students.
2. The Stanford Technology Law Review digs deep into Intellectual Ventures’ role as “mass aggregator” of patents; Business Insider‘s writeup: “It’s an ugly business. But it’s also perfectly legal.”
3. A 3D printer that makes bowls and ceramics out of sand.
4. British medical students turn to prostitution.
Here’s an obvious but sobering thought: every one of us will someday get sick and die. And here’s a happier thought: with ever-advancing medical technology and research, we can now avoid many kinds of illnesses and add more years to our lifespan.
The oncologist David Agus lives halfway between those two thoughts. He is a professor at USC, the founder of Oncology.com, a co-founder of Navigenics, and now the author of The End of Illness
The End of Illness is Agus’s take on how the body works and why it fails. Along the way, he challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about health with academic studies and his own medical experience. Arguments in the book include: that taking vitamins may increase the risk of cancer; that sitting at a desk all day may be as damaging as smoking; and that you can tell something about a patient’s health based on whether she wears high-heel shoes. One review of the book reads: “A ‘rock star’ doctor says throw away the vitamins, load up on baby aspirin, and keep moving.”
As a writer, I tend to think about media bias from a different perspective than the average media consumer, and also different from academic researchers who try to identify media bias via data analysis, as described in our recent podcast “How Biased Is Your Media?”
I tend to think about subtle but telling things like word choice and sentence structure — what is the journalist emphasizing, or downplaying, and why? — but also an article’s placement, inclusion or exclusion of outside quotes, and choice of headline (which, for the record, is usually written by an editor and not the reporter him/herself).
Above all, I tend to compare articles from different newspapers that are based on the same event. This is to me one of the simplest but most powerful ways to take the pulse of a newspaper’s culture. If, for instance, two newspapers publish articles based on a simple event — a state comptroller’s report about Wall Street bonuses, for instance — one can read a little bit of institutional attitude into the two papers’ resultant articles.
We recently heard from John List, the economics-of-charity guru, about the use of lotteries in fund-raising.
Here now is a new List paper, co-authored with Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, called “Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving.”
Steve Levitt has made no secret of his desire to become a good-enough golfer to someday play the Champions Tour, for players 50 and older.
After watching his amazing performance last week, I now believe Levitt does stand a chance of landing on a senior professional tour. But not in golf.
I was out in Chicago for a couple of days to work with Levitt. After a long day, we went out for dinner at a place called Seven Ten. It has food, beer, and bowling alleys — just a couple of them and nothing fancy. Old-school bowling.
After the meal, I tried to get Levitt to bowl a game or two. He wasn’t interested. Said he was worried about hurting his golf swing. (Puh-leeze.) He said he’d watch me bowl. I can’t think of anything less fun than bowling alone except having someone sit and watch you bowl alone. So I lied and told him that bowling would probably be good for his golf swing — the heavy ball could loosen up his joints, yada-yada, etc.
He finally agreed when I suggested the loser pay for dinner.
We recently ran on a post on a reader’s query about the economics of a 50-50 fund-raiser. John List, the University of Chicago economics-of-charity wizard (related podcast here), wrote in with a comment:
The intuition of the reader is slightly off. Although not directly a 50-50 charity drive, we have explored the efficacy of lotteries both theoretically and empirically. As John Morgan (from Berkeley) has elegantly shown, under standard assumptions (no risk-loving or lottery-loving behavior is necessary), lotteries outperform the simple ask (what we call a VCM). Lotteries obtain higher levels of public-goods provision than a voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) because the lottery rules introduce additional private benefits from contributing.
1. Why people hate economists (HT: Ian McKay)
2. The Planet Money crew holds a live literary event, “Money Greed and Power.”
3. Excellent article by Howard Beck on Jeremy Lin‘s improvement over past two years; also explains why Golden State cut him:
Unfortunately for the Warriors, they hardly had a chance to assess Lin’s off-season transformation. The N.B.A. lockout prevented them from working with him until camps opened in early December. He was on the court for maybe 90 minutes before the Warriors cut him in a move to clear payroll room to chase a free-agent center.
Season 2, Episode 1
We have just released a new series of five one-hour Freakonomics Radio specials to public-radio stations across the country. (Check here for your local station.) These new shows are what might best be called “mashupdates” — that is, mashups of earlier podcasts that have also been updated with new interviews, etc.
If you are a charter subscriber to our podcast (remember this one on the dangers of safety, or this one on the obesity epidemic?), then some of this material will be familiar to you. If you are one of the people who have heard these new shows on the radio and wondered when they’d hit the podcast stream — well, that time is now. We’ll be releasing all five hours over the next ten weeks.
This first episode is called “The Days of Wine and Mouses.” (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) Here’s what you’ll be hearing:
When you take a sip of Cabernet, what are you tasting? The grape? The tannins? The oak barrel? Or is it the price? Believe it or not, the most dominant flavor may be the dollars.
Do more expensive wines taste better? And: what does one little rodent in a salad say about a restaurant’s future? This is a “mashupdate” of “Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?” and “A Mouse in the Salad.”
This seems like a relatively hard way for a thief to earn a living, but a 38-year-old New Yorker has been arrested for siphoning off used cooking oil from a pair of restaurants in Connecticut. From the Westport News:
Until two or three years ago, restaurateurs had to pay to get rid of used fry grease. Now they are able to sell it to a few companies in the area, who turn it into bio fuel that can be used to heat houses or operate diesel engines. …
The Council of Economic Advisers last week released its annual Economic Report of the President. The CEA’s report, which dates back to 1947, aims to provide “an overview of the nation’s economic progress” while presenting “the Administration’s domestic and international economic policies.” This year’s report lays out the “defining issue of our time”:
One of the fundamental tenets of the American economy has been that if you work hard, you can do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little money away for retirement. That’s the promise of America.
The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do very well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Dilbert Index?” (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) It’s about workplace morale and the measurement thereof.
This segment was largely crowd-sourced from Freakonomics blog readers — so: thanks! It began with a blog post in which a reader named Tim Wadlow asserted that the direction you park in your company lot may say something about company morale. We then opened up the blog to further observations on company morale. One of the most interesting: the “Dilbert Index,” as described by a reader named Damon Beaven:
BEAVEN: I look for the number of Dilbert comics and that seems to be inversely proportional to the level of morale. A lot of Dilbert comics seems to be like a passive aggressive way of an employee complaining.
We also take a step back and ask the basic questions like: How much does company morale matter to a company’s bottom line? What’s the best way to measure morale? And, in the realm of unintended consequences, what happens when a company tries to cut down on sick days?
1. An early fan of Jeremy Lin.
2. How Boston Beer Co. gave beer-drinkers an IPO advantage.
3. A truck where students can stash their phones before school. (HT: Kottke)
4. Levitt once asked what WikiLeaks really affected. Bill Keller answers: “The most palpable legacy … is that the U.S. government is more secretive than ever.
5. Fewer cars are lemons; fortunately, Akerlof already got his Nobel.
In his first six NBA starts, Jeremy Lin averaged 24.3 points and 9.5 assists while leading the Knicks to six straight wins.
If those numbers were attached to someone like Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, you wouldn’t bat an eye. But until a couple weeks ago, Lin was little more than roster fodder, an undrafted player already cut by two teams and about to be cut by his third. That’s when a desperate coach who had run out of able-bodied point guards threw him into the fire. The rest – for the moment, at least – is history.
Let’s be honest: the reason we’re hearing so much about Lin is because he was overlooked. This might lead you to think he’s a true anomaly, a great game-time athlete who somehow slipped through a pro sports league’s finely-tuned talent-scouting machine. But if you look closely at the NFL, you’ll find Jeremy Lins all over the place.
Our recent podcast about commitment devices, called “Save Me From Myself,” continues to elicit responses from readers sharing their own experience. The other day, Amber told us about joining the Air Force as a commitment device.
Here’s another pair of stories. The first is from Philip Veysey, who lives in Madrid. He is looking for some advice:
Hi guys,
I listened with interest to your podcast about commitment devices and I thought I would share my own which I devised as a way to curb my unnecessary clothes shopping. I found that I was buying simply more clothing that I needed and although this wasn’t causing me any major problems, I realized that it was really wasteful and I decided to think of incentives to make me stop.
The left and the right blame each other for pretty much everything, including slanted media coverage. Can they both be right?
A podcast listener named Amber writes in to say:
I recently listened to your podcast on commitment devices, which finally gave a name to something that I recently had been contemplating and finally contracted myself to.
There is a lot of background to this story that neither would interest you nor better illuminate the value of my commitment device, so I shall skip that and instead tell you that I recently enlisted in the U.S. Air Force with the hope that the training and experience will not only make me into a better person for the benefit of my country and my state, but that it would replace some of my bad habits with more honorable ones.
The ideal outcome of this device is that, by the end of basic training, I would be a more compassionate leader, a more resilient individual, and a more capable collaborator. There is something tremendously beautiful about surrendering to such an extreme situation as basic training.
Antonia writes in with a conundrum:
As a graduate of three private schools (K-8, high school, and college), around this time of year I receive a slew of letters, emails, and phone calls asking me to pledge to various annual funds. I’ve always been told by my parents that I should support my former schools financially because alumni giving rates directly correlate to the prestige of any private institution. In other words, by giving even the minimum of $20, I’m ensuring the value of my diploma. Is this true?
A reader named Xavier Fan writes:
Would love to see some commentary on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon in the NBA. Is this not a classic Moneyball-style “undervalued player”? Indeed, one of the best parts of the whole feel-good story (and there are many) is how consistently teams and coaches at the college and NBA level overlooked him before his breakout week. Even the Knicks were ready to release him a few days before his first big game against the Nets. Was he overlooked because he didn’t “look the part”? Will this impact how scouts and coaches evaluate players? What is the current status of sabermetrics for basketball?
The phenomenon is indeed phenomenal, and there has already been a lot of interesting stuff written about it (including his overseas marketing potential and an anti-Asian joke-gone-wrong).
Are you the kind of person who loves to hunt for undervalued stocks that are ready to pop? Or maybe you cruise tag sales and flea markets hoping to find an old stamp collection or oil painting that’s worth millions?
If so, you may like our latest Football Freakonomics episode. It’s called “Dough Bowl.” It is our tribute to the NFL’s best bargains, the players who lit it up this year for far fewer dollars than their counterparts. (We had a lot of help on this one, since it isn’t always easy to get good salary and cap-hit data. Big shout-outs to Scott Kacsmar and to Spotrac.com founder Michael Ginnitti; also: a big hat tip to the Ravens’ Domonique Foxworth for suggesting the idea.)
We put together an entire offensive and defensive roster of Dough Bowl stars:
In SuperFreakonomics
A reasonable person might never go near the ocean again. But how many shark attacks do you think actually happened that year?
Take a guess — and then cut your guess in half, and now cut it in half a few more times.
During the entire year of 2001, around the world there were just 68 shark attacks, of which 4 were fatal. Not only are these numbers far lower than the media hysteria implied; they were also no higher than in earlier years or in the years to follow. Between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 worldwide shark attacks each year, with a high of 79 and a low of 46. There were on average 5.9 fatalities per year, with a high of 11 and a low of 3. In other words, the headlines during the summer of 2001 might just as easily have read “Shark Attacks About Average This Year.” But that probably wouldn’t have sold many magazines.
We seem to be in the midst of a national obsession with obesity. Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is about some of the surprising contributors, and possible economic solutions, to the problem. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
One suspected contributor to obesity, for instance, is the drastic decline in smoking in recent years. It’s great news that fewer people smoke but, according to Vanderbilt economist Kip Viscusi, people who quit smoking tend to gain weight.
Philip J. Cook and Christine Piette Durrance have published a working paper called “The Virtuous Tax: Lifesaving and Crime-Prevention Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol-Tax Increase.” It makes a substantial argument for the upside of higher alcohol taxes:
On January 1, 1991, the federal excise tax on beer doubled, and the tax rates on wine and liquor increased as well. … We demonstrate that the relative importance of drinking in traffic fatalities is closely tied to per capita alcohol consumption across states. As a result, we expect that the proportional effects of the federal tax increase on traffic fatalities would be positively correlated with per capita consumption.
A reader named Philip Serghini writes in:
Great podcast about financial literacy and clean hands. I’ll try to refrain from sending hate mail to the attorney who espoused not teaching kids about it.
It would be an interesting experiment if (in, say, Buffalo) every kid entering the first grade were given a $100 savings deposit (paid for by a private foundation). They wouldn’t be allowed to withdraw the money at any time up until they graduate, but they’d be able to add if they wanted. Each grade they ascended, another $100 would be added. If you dropped out or failed out, you’d forfeit everything (except anything you’d voluntarily put in). By the time they graduated from high school, each student would have saved a nice tidy sum to spend as they please: college, car, suit.
1. Son preference in action: boys in India get more childcare, breastfeeding, vaccinations, and vitamins than girls.
2. Who was the most disappointing rookie on every NFL team this season?
3. “Everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong.” (HT: Van Brenner)
4. Another argument (here’s an earlier one) that heavier people should pay more to fly. (HT: Colin Eichenberger)
Last year, we put out a podcast called “Death By Fire? Probably Not.” It was about the remarkable decline in fatal fires in the U.S. over the past century, and explored some of the contributing factors.
Joseph M. Fleming, a deputy fire chief with the Boston Fire Department, has now written in with a guest post that challenges what we think we know about smoke alarms. Fleming has more than 30 years of experience in the fire industry (in both firefighting and management), and suggests that people think a little harder about smoke alarms.
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
