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.
We all know the cliché. Go ahead, put on your best John Facenda voice and say it with us:
DEFENSE. WINS. CHAMPIONSHIPS.
What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?
Or is the saying maybe the collective echo of some grizzled defensive coordinator in a long-ago championship game, trying to fire up his troops during halftime? “Men, you and I know that our teammates on offense are good men, tough men, talented men. And they helped get us here. But let me be clear, gentlemen: DEFENSE WINS CHAMPIONSHIPS!”
What’s that even supposed to mean? That defense is more important during the playoffs than the regular season? That defense is generally more important than the offense?
I’m so pleased to see that stand-up meetings are gaining ground (or at least exposure, in the Wall Street Journal). I am on the record as someone who dislikes meetings in general; I also work much of the day standing up (at a great adjustable desk that Ikea unfortunately no longer makes).
As Rachel Silverman writes:
Stand-up meetings are part of a fast-moving tech culture in which sitting has become synonymous with sloth. The object is to eliminate long-winded confabs where participants pontificate, play Angry Birds on their cellphones or tune out. …
Last week, we solicited your questions for Mark Cuban — serial entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, and blogger, who recently published an eBook called How to Win at the Sport of Business.
Here now are Cuban’s answers. A lot of answers. Granted, most of them are short but Cuban can pack a lot into a terse words (unlike a few million politicians and businessfolk we know). He has some strong words on financial engineering and, if you read carefully, lots of good career advice. My hands-down favorite: “Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort.”
From Elizabeth Stanton at Bloomberg:
The New England Patriots will win the Super Bowl by at least three points even though the New York Giants have the appeal of “a cocktail party stock,” according to a quantitative money management firm that’s correctly picked the team covering the point spread for eight consecutive years.
Analytic Investors LLC in Los Angeles has documented a tendency on the part of Super Bowl bettors to overestimate the chances of the team that rewarded them more during the regular season — the team with the higher alpha, in investment parlance. In 2008, that was the favored Patriots, who lost to the Giants 17-14. This year, it’s New York.
“Everyone thinks the Giants are rolling right now, a lot of people in my office even,” said Matthew Robinson, a portfolio analyst for global and Japanese equities at Analytic and the author of this year’s analysis. “They like the Giants, but they have faith in the model as well.”
On the other hand, do I label this “the least fun way” because I have a Giants bias and am blind to my blindness?
At least this is less ridiculous than the Super Bowl Indicator.
It is amazing how good we are — even the smartest, most rational people among us — at not recognizing our own biases. (Danny Kahneman
We recently put out a podcast called “The Truth Is Out There … Isn’t It?” about how people decide what to believe about everything from global warming and nuclear risk to UFO’s. It was inspired by the research of Dan Kahan and his colleagues at the Cultural Cognition Project; they have found that we systematically filter our beliefs through our personal and political filters. In other words, we allow our biases to influence what we think about theoretically non-ideological issues, but we aren’t aware of that influence.
A commitment device forces you to be the person you really want to be. What could possibly go wrong?
I blogged a few years ago about Amadu Jacky Kaba under the headline “A Scholar to Keep Your Eye On”:
Amadu Jacky Kaba is a Liberian-born striver who first came to Seton Hall University as a basketball player and, several degrees later, has returned as an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. Like our friend Roland Fryer, Kaba is a black scholar who studies a lot of racial issues with a perspective and a latitude that is unavailable to white scholars.
If indeed you had kept your eye on Kaba, you would have seen that he keeps writing lots (and lots) of interesting papers.
The Super Bowl has by now become such an institution – it’s practically a second New Year’s Day – that just about everyone feels compelled to watch it, even if they don’t care one bit about football. One consequence of this fact is that the broadcast of the game (on NBC this year; it rotates annually among NBC, CBS, and Fox) has turned into an another event entirely: the most massive real-time advertising opportunity in history.
This has had a few linked effects: the price of the ads has risen ever higher; advertisers spend more time and effort making better ads; and the ads have gotten so good that a lot of people time their kitchen or bathroom breaks to the game action in order to not miss the ads.
A reader named Mark Weitzman calls our attention to a Yomiuri Shimbun article with a provocative claim:
Quake efforts blamed for rise in snow mishaps
This winter’s heavier snowfall has seen more than 500 people across seven prefectures die or become injured in snow-related accidents, including cases in which they had been trying to remove snow, it has been learned.
People are trying to remove snow themselves using shovels and other tools because of delays in municipal-led snow removal. The delays have been caused by a shortage of dump trucks–many of which are being used in areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake for reconstruction work–to transport snow.
According to data compiled by the Akita, Aomori, Ishikawa, Nagano, Niigata, Toyama and Yamagata prefectural governments, the death toll from such snow-related accidents had reached 31 as of Wednesday, while 479 people had sustained injuries.
I have probably seen and listened to more opera than the median American, but that’s not saying much. In other words, I am not very knowledgeable about opera itself, or its history and mores, etc. If I were, what I’m about to tell you probably wouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Not long ago, in an airport far from home, I met a nice fellow who turned out to be a Spanish-born tenor now living in the States, named Alvaro Rodriguez. We kept in touch and he let me know that he’d be performing with the New York Lyric Opera, playing Don Jose in Carmen. So I bought my tickets and decided to read up on Carmen since: a) I didn’t know the story all that well; and b) my French is spotty at best; and c) this would be a scaled-down production, with no subtitles, etc.
More evidence of the relationship between the housing market and the overall economy:
Construction makes up less than 5 percent of employment but accounts for more than 40 percent of the large swings in the job-filling rate during and after the Great Recession.
That’s from “Recruiting Intensity During and After the Great Recession,” by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John C. Haltiwanger (abstract; PDF).
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Playing the Nerd Card.”
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
It’s about the rise in basketball players (and other athletes) showing up at press conferences wearing the kind of eyeglasses usually associated with Steve Urkel and Buddy Holly. Among the practitioners: LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, and Robert Griffin III.
What’s going on here? Has the rate of myopia exploded, even among premier athletes?
We talk to Susan Vitale, a research epidemiologist with the NIH’s National Eye Institute, who worked on a large study on myopia in the U.S. There has indeed been a huge spike in recent decades, and it’s especially pronounced among blacks.
As someone in a mixed marriage — that is, in our home we read on Kindles
Hi guys, read your 1st book and I’m on my way to finish SuperFreakonomics, today it happened something that I thought you would be interested. First a little introduction:
Two months ago I purchased a Nook simple touch e-book reader, these gizmos aren’t that popular here in Argentina compared to USA, so my wife’s 1st reaction was, why you spent money on that thing? So I loaded it with some books, she likes and not a day passed then she said: this Nook is mine, you should get a new one for yourself. Strategic error on my side, I should had purchased two to start with.
1. President Obama is reading The World America Made
2. Austan Goolsbee is on Twitter, and has lots to say. (This will surprise no one who read this.)
3. If you have a Godfather-obsessed kid, as I do, you may want to read The Godfather Effect.
4. “Is economic repugnance closely related to biological disgust?” Yes, this is from our friend Al Roth. More here on disgust and food.
Have any of you seen Sleep No More? And if so, did your experience as an audience member make you think (as it did me) of the social experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo (though without the sadism)? And — bonus question — is anyone actually working on a social-science research project involving Sleep No More?
The other day, we woke up to realize that we were about hit our 400,000th follower on Twitter. So we put out the following tweet, offering some swag.
Innocent enough, no?
But we had walked right into an incentive trap.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “Olympian Economics,” with Tess Vigeland sitting in for Kai Ryssdal this week.
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
With the 2012 Summer Olympic Games getting underway this week in London, we ask a simple question: do host cities really get the benefits their boosters promise, or are they just engaging in some fiscal gymnastics?
If you’ve read what we’ve posted in the past about the Olympics, you may already have a glimmer of a hint of a possibility of the answer to that question.
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