Freakonomics Radio is a weekly podcast that also airs on public-radio stations across the country. Below is a sort-of-complete list of those stations (it changes periodically and we try to keep up); click on yours to find the day and time our show airs. And if your station isn’t on this list, call them immediately! Freakonomics Radio also airs on . . .
Given the risk of dislocating an elbow while patting oneself on the back, we don’t usually print fan mail. But this one, from James J. Krefft (also an author himself), needed to be shared: Recently I borrowed a copy of your book from a friend (so basically pure benefit for me) and I must say I am impressed. I am well-read, . . .
David Brooks, in his Times column today (emphasis added):
When I started covering presidential primaries, the best part was getting to know the candidates. We journalists would ride around in vans and buses with them and get an intimate look at what it’s like to endure this soul-destroying process. But the ubiquity of Web cams and tweets has ended that off-the-record culture. As the technology gets more open, the lines of political communications become more closed.
True enough, and I’m surprised that more people don’t consider this paradox.
1. No, Brian Williams is not Walter Cronkite
2. Cory Doctorow: “The Coming War on General Computation” (video; transcript; interesting!)
3. Whole Foods has been thriving in a down economy.
4. Open-sourcing the scientific process.
We have long argued (most recently in this Marketplace podcast) that campaign spending isn’t nearly as influential in elections as the conventional wisdom holds.
This week, with the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls in South Carolina spending lots of money (and time and effort) and everyone’s talking about “super PAC” spending, we thought it was a good occasion to air this question out further. We’ve convened a Freakonomics Quorum on the topic, soliciting replies from a few folks with expertise in the realm. Thanks to all of them for participating.
Are you bummed out that you might have to postpone retirement for financial reasons?
Well, there may be a silver lining: it looks like retirement may be bad for your health. That’s the topic of our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, “Retirement Kills.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The Great Recession has put a lot of retirement plans on hold, often at the behest of governments who can’t afford to pay pensions. Germany, the U.K., and France have all upped their retirement ages. And the U.S. is seeing a lot more older workers as well. Lisa Boily of the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that people 55 and older are expected to represent 25 percent of the labor force by 2020.
Part of this is simple demographics — the graying of the baby boom — but Americans are also working longer.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “A Cheap Employee Is … a Cheap Employee.”
(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 question of whether low-paid employees are indeed a good deal for a retailer’s bottom line as the conventional wisdom states.
The piece begins with a couple of stories from blog readers, Eric M. Jones and Jamie Crouthamel, which were solicited earlier here. (One of the true pleasures of operating this blog is having a channel by which to turn readers into radio guests — thanks!)
Well, it’s January. And even though my team stumbled into inglorious, injury-plagued defeat, the most exciting football is yet to be played — some of it in very cold weather.
So we thought it was time to take a look at the various effects, and hidden side, of cold weather. That’s the focus of our latest installment of Football Freakonomics.
It is no secret that weather, cold or hot, has a significant effect on athletic performance. I don’t want to start an argument here about what constitutes a sport and what doesn’t, but I will say that the most frustrating six hours of my life was spent on a lake in upstate New York trying to coax some walleye through a hole in the ice. Brrr!
In a recent Football Freakonomics video about Tim Tebow, I made a connection between his faith and performance: Tebow is hardly the first NFL quarterback to be demonstrative about his religious faith. But he’s very demonstrative – and it’s worth considering how that faith may affect his play. By definition, faith often translates into a kind of fearlessness. Tim Tebow . . .
Encouraging news via the Associated Press: For the first time in almost half a century, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation’s top 15 causes of death. In Mexico, meanwhile, the murder trend continues to move in the opposite direction: During the first nine months of 2011, some 12,903 people were killed in drug-related violence—11% more than the . . .
1. Are world finances being run by an MIT fraternity?
2. A Bronx high-school teacher talks about teacher cheating.
3. Is the Mafia the biggest bank in Italy? (HT: Eric Jones)
4. Tyler Cowen‘s new Twitter feed on food, a must-follow; our related podcast is here.
5. Is more stress good for cops’ decision-making?
Mitt Romney won big in New Hampshire, but his opponents are vowing to push on in South Carolina. Which means stepping up their pleas for cash. In an e-mail to supporters, Rick Santorum wrote:
We must show real progress tonight and redouble our efforts … That’s why my campaign launched the “Game On” Moneybomb, and why we need your help right now. As you already know, we are facing serious and well-funded opposition for the nomination.
That’s the kind of language that confirms one of the biggest truisms in politics: money buys elections.
But how true is that truism?
We all know the answer is yes. But the data — and Rudy Giuliani — say no.
In response to our recent podcast called “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” a reader named Timothy McCollough writes in with a most interesting story. He teaches at a private international school in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His courses include two sections of AP microeconomics, sociology, and “regular economics.” Because it’s a private school, he adds, “we have freer reign to set up classroom incentives and engage students as we see fit.” For instance:
In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point). The rationale is that if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess. “I don’t know” leads the questioner to ask someone who hopefully is knowledgeable.
We’re working on a new podcast episode about morale in the workplace, and need your help. The episode was inspired a recent blog post in which a reader posited an interesting theory: morale is higher at companies where a lot of employees park nose-in (indicating they’re eager to get to work) rather than nose-out (indicating they can’t wait to get home).
My request here is two-fold:
1. We’ve started poking into the academic literature on company morale but haven’t gotten very far, so please let us know any good leads.
2. We’re also interested in hearing stories about morale at your workplace, be it high or low, and especially any clever/strange indicators of morale and unusual methods that have been used to measure morale.
Thanks in advance!
1. A lovely obituary for a lovely singer, Cesaria Evora.
2. Nathan Myhrvold makes an appearance on Top Chef
3. Halting your newspaper delivery to thwart burglary can backfire (when the delivery guy is the burglar). (HT: MediaWire)
4. Remember our “Who Owns Trader Joe’s?” post? If you want more info, read this.
5. I am writing an essay for Jewish Jocks book, joining authors Larry Summers, David Remnick, and Buzz Bissinger.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “What’s Wrong With Cash for Grades?”
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
In it, Steve Levitt talks to Kai Ryssdal about whether it’s effective to pay kids to do well in school. Levitt, along with John List, Susanne Neckermann, and Sally Sadoff, recently wrote up a working paper (PDF here) based on their field experiments in Chicago schools. Levitt blogged about the paper earlier; here’s the Atlantic‘s take.
Reader Melissa Belvadi writes in with a question about preferences on fundraiser incentives:
Here in northeastern Canada, there is a very popular form of local fundraising called the “50-50.” Basically it’s a raffle, where 50% of the total money collected is then randomly given to one of the donors (odds weighted proportionately by the donation size), and the other 50% goes to the original ’cause’ of the fundraising, whether it be a local homeless shelter, a recent victim of something, or whatever that is of interest to the local community.
This strikes me as an incredibly bad deal, but a bit complicated to explain why, as it contains two components:
- As a gamble: poor expected value. I am not sure how to calculate this, but from my experience in Las Vegas where slot machines boast being set to 97% return ratios, a gamble where 50% goes to the “house” seems unlikely to be a good EV.
- As a charitable donation: poor “program ratio” — at most, 50% of my donation will go to the “program” (charitable cause) – this is considered a very poor ratio in the philanthropic world where typically 60% is the bare minimum acceptable – the BBB requires 65%.
Our most recent podcast, “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” continues to draw interesting replies. Here’s one from Erich Knobil, who works in the finance office of the Falls Baptist Church & Academy in Menomonee Falls, Wisc.:
A couple of minor notes about “I don’t know” —
Someone (a consultant) once told me the “Consultant’s Motto” was “Maybe wrong, but never in doubt.”
Someone else (female) once called it “Male Answer Disorder (MAD),” where men seem compelled to always have an answer for everything.
Anyone know of any good empirical work on whether MAD is real?
We’re working on a new Freakonomics Radio podcast about financial illiteracy, a topic we’ve visited a few times on this blog. Two guests you’ll hear from in the episode have held the same title: chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors.
First up is current chairman Alan Krueger, whom I asked what would improve if Americans were more financially literate:
KRUEGER: I think first and foremost, we’d probably have greater savings. People are often in a situation where they have to live paycheck to paycheck. That’s something I think we need as a country to work to improve. Most importantly I think we can improve income growth for the broad middle class. But many people who seem to have the wherewithal to save for the future find it difficult to save.
We should probably start a Strange Name Hall of Fame at some point to chronicle all the weird, wonderful, terrible names that readers have passed along to us since we first wrote about names in Freakonomics. This one, from Joyce Wilson, would probably make the cut:
I thought of Freakonomics when I was at a St. Louis area grocery store and saw cut-out paper snowflakes taped to the window with the makers’ names on them. The name I particularly noticed? Demonica.
Levitt’s reply when he saw this e-mail: “Perhaps the little girl’s mother is just a heavy metal fan.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Jared Diamond (not this
The caption reads “Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, who was hired last week as Penn State’s new football coach.” That’s not quite right. The Bill from the Patriots who was hired by Penn State was the Patriots’ offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien, as Diamond’s article makes clear in the first paragraph. Belichick is still very much the head coach of the New England Patriots.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Season of Death.” The gist: Summertime brings far too many fatal accidents. But the numbers may surprise you.
(You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
If you’re a longtime reader, you probably already have an idea of what we’re talking about. Human beings are, in general, quite bad at assessing risk. We tend to be scared of big, noisy, anomalous events – like shark attacks, which in an average year kill fewer than five people worldwide — while overlooking the seemingly quotidian reality of, say, drowning deaths (about 4,000 per year in the U.S. alone) and motorcycle fatalities (about 4,500 U.S. deaths annually). We have been exploring this idea since Freakonomics, where we asked whether a gun or a swimming pool is more “dangerous.”
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “It’s Not the President, Stupid.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.) The gist: it’s time to admit that the U.S. economy doesn’t have a commander-in-chief.
Over the years, we’ve regularly visited the question of how influential the president of the U.S. really is. This segment focuses on the president’s influence over the economy — which, if you believe polling data, will be the central concern for many voters as the 2012 election unfurls.
In this Marketplace segment, you’ll hear from Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist who has served President Obama as both campaign adviser and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers:
GOOLSBEE: I think the world vests too much power, certainly in the president, probably in Washington in general for its influence on the economy, because most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government.
The preliminaries are finally over. As we head into the first weekend of NFL playoffs, the conversation shifts. No longer are we talking about the long arc of the season – about working out the kinks, getting schemes in place, or jockeying for position. Now, with every game a do-or-die game, we’re talking about which team is peaking at the right time. Because no matter how good (or bad) your record may be, the final summit is in sight and it’s time to turn on the juice.
In the latest installment of “Football Freakonomics,” we look at the art and science of peaking. What’s the best way to assess a team’s peak position?
1. “Why tornadoes take the weekends off.” (HT: Michael Teague)
2. Who knew that glove-making, of all sorts, was such a Jewish field?
3. A “twin-town” in Ukraine: interesting and a little bit bizarre — especially “the terrors of grade 6.” (HT: Kelly Fawke)
4. Freakonomics in an Ohio State Univ. court case.
5. The most gracious I’ve-been-fired note ever?
In our latest podcast, “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” Levitt talked about how it is practically forbidden in the business world to say that you don’t know the answer to a question, lest you be deemed incompetent or irrelevant.
That idea has generated some reader feedback that I thought was interesting enough to share. First, from Mike Wrubel, an office manager for a medical practice in Elkhart, Indiana:
I would generally agree with the notion that people in business are very much inclined to not say “I don’t know.” I have worked in the same hospital for 20 years, and while I am very comfortable saying it, not everyone else is. I think people fear being perceived by others as they are not paying attention to their work, or being seen as incompetent, or that it’s their job to “know.”
1. Danny Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow
2. Is “big data” really ready for primetime?
3. An economist (Laurence Kotlikoff) is running for President. (Did he listen to this?) His books include The Coming Generational Storm and Spend ‘Til the End: Raising Your Living Standard in Today’s Economy and When You Retire
(HT: Peter Coy)
4. Active trading — of military products! — between countries at war. (Especially interesting in light of Iran’s blockade threat.) (HT: David Wigram)
Research in Motion, the Waterloo, Ontario, company that makes BlackBerrys, has been hemorrhaging market share in North America. But a blog reader named Jon Markman, a lawyer living in Washington, D.C., has discovered a land where the BlackBerry still dominates:
I wanted to send along an interesting thing I noticed on a recent trip to the Dominican Republic to visit my in-laws.
In the past when I’ve been there, I’ve noticed that everyone uses a BlackBerry; my wife and I were the only people I’d ever seen using anything else (other than a “dumb” phone, but those are pretty rare these days everywhere!). I figured it was only a matter of time; trends and technology seem to often lag a little when making it to the island. Given that BlackBerry has fading for years, I thought, soon it would fade there, too.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast is called “The Hidden Cost of False Alarms.” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen via the media player above, or read the transcript below.)
The central facts: between 94 and 99 percent of burglar-alarm calls turn out to be false alarms, and false alarms make up between 10 and 20 percent of all calls to police.
There are at least three things to consider upon learning these facts:
1. If a particular medical screening had such a high false-positive rate, it would likely be considered worse than worthless; but:
2. With more than 2 million annual burglaries in the U.S., perhaps it’s worth putting up with so many false positives in service of the greater deterrent; as long as:
3. The cost of all those false positives are borne by the right people.
Can you already figure out whether No. 3 is in fact the case?
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