Tyler Cowen points fingers. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
A reader named Chuck Armitage writes in with a question about which I know nothing but which I’d like to know much more.
So what do you say, readers? What do you know, and think, and what can you tell us?
Here is my question… Why is shark fin soup still popular?
Ostentation is not a trait that is normally associated with Chinese culture and yet that is what shark fin soup represents. The more expensive it gets, the more it proves that your host honors you by serving the soup. And the more the West vilifies the barbarian finning practices of the shark fisherman, the more the Chinese seem to dig in their heels and say look at your own barbaric practices before you racially attack us. There is a huge disconnect between what are normally considered admirable traits of civilized Chinese society and what is going on with this tradition.
Are the activities of the ecology activists helping or hurting their cause? How do you change the sentiments of a seemingly positive tradition when the act is causing such an ecological disaster? Is seal clubbing or factory farming as bad as shark-finning?
It is a burning issue right now and many species of sharks will go extinct if it is not solved. No matter what we do in North America, the real issue is in Asia. Even if we ban the import of shark fin here, the growing wealth in China will end the shark as we know it in our oceans.
How can this be positioned in a way that will be championed by the Chinese populace?
1. How doctors die — “not like the rest of us, but it should be.”
2. Not a good idea to fake your mother’s death to get bereavement leave.
3. Another argument in favor of a low-carb, high-fat diet
4. SI poll confirms Freak Radio “boo” podcast: Philly fans the toughest.
5. Six double-yolk eggs in a row: what are the odds
6. The legacy — economic and otherwise — of forced sterilization
7. The rise, fall — and rise? — of peer-to-peer lending.
File under “Not Surprising But Still Interesting.” A new working paper by Matthew Kotchen and Matthew Potoski makes these claims:
Using individual coach ballots between 2005 and 2010, we find that coaches distort their rankings to reflect their own team’s reputation and financial interests. On average, coaches rank teams from their own athletic conference nearly a full position more favorably and boost their own team’s ranking more than two full positions. Coaches also rank teams they defeated more favorably, thereby making their own team look better. When it comes to ranking teams contending for one of the high-profile Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games, coaches favor those teams that generate higher financial payoffs for their own team. Reflecting the structure of payoff disbursements, coaches from non-BCS conferences band together, while those from BCS conferences more narrowly favor teams in their own conference. Among all coaches an additional payoff between $3.3 and $5 million induces a more favorable ranking of one position. Moreover, for each increase in a contending team’s payoff equal to 10 percent of a coach’s football budget, coaches respond with more favorable rankings of half a position, and this effect is more than twice as large when coaches rank teams outside the top 10.
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
It doesn’t take a genius to argue that injuries can have a massive effect on an NFL team’s fortunes. This season, we may be living through the most heightened example in history of that fact. The Indianapolis Colts, with Peyton Manning sidelined since Week 1 with a neck injury, currently stand winless at 0-12. Over the previous five seasons with Manning in charge, the Colts have gone 61-19 during the regular season.
How can the absence of one player, even a star quarterback, have such an impact? As Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders contends in the latest episode of Football Freakonomics: “Not only were they built around him offensively, but the defense was generally built around them getting the lead and then having defensive ends just tee off on the opposing QB while the other team has to pass to try to catch up.”
The Manning-less Colts are losing off the field too – attendance is down, Manning jersey sales are down, and some Colts fans have jumped on the “Suck for Luck” campaign, figuring that if the Colts are going to be bad they might as well be bad enough to snare Andrew Luck with the top pick in the draft.
A great reported essay by Nicola Twilley about a banana distribution facility in the Bronx. Excerpt:
[I]n order to be a global commodity rather than a tropical treat, the banana has to be harvested and transported while completely unripe. Bananas are cut while green, hard, and immature, washed in cool water (both to begin removing field heat and to stop them from leaking their natural latex), and then held at 56 degrees — originally in a refrigerated steamship; today, in a refrigerated container — until they reach their country of consumption weeks later.
What this means is that ripening must then be artificially induced, in a specialized architecture of pressurized, temperature- and atmosphere-controlled rooms that fool the banana into thinking it is still back on the plant in tropical Ecuador. New York City’s supermarkets, grocers, coffee-shops, and food cart vendors are served by just a handful of banana ripening outfits — one in Brooklyn, one in Long Island, a small facility inside the main Hunt’s Point Terminal Market, and our field trip destination: Banana Distributors of New York, in the Bronx.
You should at least read her whole essay before you chime in with “There’s always money in the banana stand.” More banana reading here; and Rich Cohen has a forthcoming book called The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King — a.k.a. Samuel Zemurray.
In SuperFreakonomics, we catalogued some of the collateral costs of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, including roughly 1,000 extra traffic deaths in the U.S. in the three months after 9/11, the result of so many people driving instead of flying:
Such trickle-down effects are nearly endless. Thousands of foreign-born university students and professors were kept out of the United States because of new visa restrictions after the September 11 attacks. At least 140 U.S. corporations exploited the ensuing stock market decline by illegally backdating stock options. In New York City, so many police resources were shifted to terrorism that other areas — the Cold Case Squad, for one, as well as anti-Mafia units — were neglected. A similar pattern was repeated on the national level. Money and manpower that otherwise would have been spent chasing financial scoundrels were instead diverted to chasing terrorists— perhaps contributing to, or at least exacerbating, the recent financial meltdown.
The Wall Street Journal now reports on a most unlikely unintended consequence of the attacks and the ensuing hunt for Osama bin Laden:
In a society steadily moving toward a cashless future (if not yet a penniless one), we may be seeing a return to cash transactions in some cases, for a surprising reason:
A new law that was supposed to reduce costs for merchants that accept debit cards has instead sent Mr. Scherr‘s monthly processing bills much higher and forced him to reassess the way he does business.
That’s from an interesting Wall Street Journal article about an unintended consequence of the Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul legislation.Vendors used to pay on a sliding scale for debit-card transactions; Dodd-Frank set a flat fee, which can lead to higher payments on small transactions:
Many business owners who sell low-priced goods like coffee and candy bars now are paying higher rates — not lower — when their customers use debit cards for transactions that are less than roughly $10. … “Overnight, the variable costs of a transaction have tripled,” says Mr. English, who runs a marketing company that devises payment programs for vending machines. Some machine operators will raise prices and offer 25-cent discounts for cash starting in January, he says.
Our latest podcast, “Weird Recycling,” is about the unlikely reuse of cast-off items. A reader named Gavin Castleton just happened to write in with an appealing riddle in the same vein:
Has there ever been a good/product whose value was reduced to zero, but somehow rose again? If so, could you shed any light on the market dynamics or social catalysts that revived it?
To put my question in context: I’m researching the music industry’s rocky transition from goods to services (download/physical goods to streaming music subscription services). Journalists, industry folk, and consumers are all quite fond of declaring “Music will be free. It’s obvious and inevitable.” But I started to wonder if it really was all that inevitable. So I started looking for other examples of a product that lost its monetary value completely, but somehow returned from the dead.
A nice analytic giblet from a Times profile of new Nobel economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims:
Because of his father’s College Board connections, Mr. Sims got hold of an old SAT exam, which he and Mr. Willoughby used to conduct a statistical analysis. They found that on multiple-choice questions in English and social studies, the “longer answers tended to be correct.” In math, they determined that the number that was “closest to all of the other numerical choices” was probably the right one.
I do wonder if those patterns still hold true in standardized tests. Of course, you can always pay someone else to take the test for you.
In response to our post about the Amazon.com price difference for Caucasian and African-American dollhouses comes this interesting e-mail from a reader named Stephen Fidele:
Back in the day, I used to work at CD-Now, which was the largest retailer of music on the internet right around 1999-2002. For some strange reason, I was placed in charge of “pricing.” Say our normal price for a CD was $17.99 … but if that CD hit the “Top 100” we reduced the price to $13.99. Now imagine that we have a CD by a rap artist that has some pretty strong lyrics in it. We also have a “toned down” version, so that parents can protect their children. Invariably, the hardcore version would hit the Top 100 and the price would automatically fall, and I would receive boatloads of complaints from parents asking why the “toned down” version cost more … just one of the problems when you automate a system. We had a similar problem when Joey Ramone (of the Ramones) died. All of their old stuff went back to the Top 100, and the system automatically lowered the price … I fixed that in a hurry! Anyhow, I am not sure if the “powers that be” at Amazon are aware of even the possibility of this situation. Again, it’s more of a systems problem than anything else.
It pleases me to no longer be the only guy complaining about the penny.
This anti-penny rant was quite good.
But this one is even better:
In the comments section for a Q&A with professional skeptic Michael Shermer, a reader named Caleb B. writes:
Here’s my question: what is it about the idea of a soul that even people who confess to not have one are hesitant to sell it? I have been trying, for the better part of ten years, to buy a soul. I’ve offered a dollar amount, between $10 and $50, for someone to sign a sheet of paper that says that I own their soul. Despite multiple debates with confessed atheists, no one has signed the contract. I have been able to buy several people’s Sense of Humor and one guy’s Dignity, but no souls. Additionally, will any Freakonomics reader take me up on this? I’m willing to spend $50 on souls.
He has so far received at least one offer, from reader Jared Doom:
Caleb B., I will absolutely sell you my soul. To be fair, this won’t preclude me from selling it again to other suckers who (a) believe in souls and (b) believe they can be readily transferred on purchase. To be clear I’m offering because I don’t believe (a)
If nothing else, perhaps this blog has a future as a market for hard-to-purchase goods?
In our “Weird Recycling” podcast, Nathan Myhrvold talks about TerraPower, the nuclear-power firm that he and Bill Gates are promoting, which would use depleted uranium (castoff waste from traditional nuclear plants) as fuel. TerraPower has impressive plans but has yet to build its first plant.
It was a long interview, only a sliver of which made it into the podcast. One leftover part concerned the U.S.’s skittishness about nuclear power:
Our “Folly of Prediction” podcast included an interview with Joe Prusacki, who directs the statistics division at the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. This means he helps make crop forecasts (read a primer here). As hard as the USDA works, the fact is that predicting the future of even something as basic as crop yield can be maddeningly difficult. The Wall Street Journal has the latest in an article headlined “Erroneous Forecasts Roil Corn Market“:
Government reports about the U.S. corn crop have become increasingly unreliable of late, contributing to wild swings in corn prices, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.
Over the past two years, the Department of Agriculture’s monthly forecasts of how much farmers will harvest have been off the mark to a greater degree than any other two consecutive years in the last 15, according to a Journal analysis of government data. This year’s early-season forecasts also appear to have been way off. The next monthly report is due on Friday.
In our SuperFreakonomics chapter about global warming, a central argument was that greenhouse-gas emissions (and pollution in general) are an externality, and it is inherently difficult to control and/or price externalities. So, while it might seem sensible to encourage fewer emissions by taxation or price controls — or international agreements — the reality is complicated:
Besides the obvious obstacles — like determining the right size of the tax and getting someone to collect it — there’s the fact that greenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries. The earth’s atmosphere is in constant, complex motion, which means that your emissions become mine and mine yours. Thus, global warming.
If, say, Australia decided overnight to eliminate its carbon emissions, that fine nation wouldn’t enjoy the benefits of its costly and painful behavior unless everyone else joined in. Nor does one nation have the right to tell another what to do. The United States has in recent years sporadically attempted to lower its emissions. But when it leans on China or India to do the same, those countries can hardly be blamed for saying, Hey, you got to free-ride your way to industrial superpowerdom, so why shouldn’t we?
The McRib is the Brigadoon of the food world, and inspires similar passion. Consider Willy Staley‘s long and entertaining report at the Awl, which wonders if the McRib’s very occasional appearances are related to low pork prices. Dan Hamermesh found this line of thinking sensible too.
But … really? Aside from the fact that the correlation between McRib reintroductions and pork prices isn’t very robust, I always wondered if a firm of McDonald’s size could be so nimble as to strike fast on something like this. In the comments on Hamermesh’s post, a reader named Jeff Birschbach tells us what he knows:
That’s the (tenuous) claim of this Guardian article:
According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), there was a 10% increase in the number of students accepted to read physics by the university admissons services between 2008-09, when The Big Bang Theory was first broadcast in the UK, and 2010-11. Numbers currently stand at 3,672. Applications for physics courses at university are also up more than 17% on last year. Philip Walker, an HEFCE spokesman, said the recent spate of popular televisions services had been influential but was hard to quantify.
Hard to quantify, indeed.
FWIW, we’ve been told by a lot of youngish readers that Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics led them to major in economics. John J. Siegfried addressed this possibility in a Journal of Economic Education paper called “Trends in Undergraduate Economics Degrees, 1991-2010”:
The Times today published a compelling report of first-hand observations of election fraud in Russia’s recent parliamentary elections. There are mounting protests; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voiced “serious concerns” about the election and called for a “full investigation of electoral fraud and manipulation.”
But what if those first-hand observations were anomalous? What if the outcome for Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia Party, as disappointing as it was for him, truly represents the will of the Russian people?
I recently switched banks, to Chase. So far, it’s been a pretty good experience. Indeed, the bank does a lot of very good things from a customer-service perspective.
But:
While using an ATM, I wasn’t able to pull up a list of recent transactions. I was sure I just wasn’t finding the right menu. I could print out the recent transactions but I didn’t want to print it out; I just wanted to look at it on the computer screen. Having failed to figure it out after a few ATM visits, I wrote to the very helpful and smart Chase employee who helped me set up my accounts. He confirmed that I couldn’t get recent-transaction data via the ATM screen. Furthermore, he wrote:
Your only other options at this point are:
1) Enroll your mobile phone for Chase Mobile which will allow you to receive a text message of recent history
2) Download the Chase iPhone application which will allow you to access real-time transactions
3) Stop in and sit with a banker who can show you recent transactions/pending or posted
At this time, there is no alternate way to view recent history at a Chase ATM.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Wha? “Sit with a banker” to see my recent transactions? Shall I bring my collection of buggy whips to pass the time while waiting?
Fact: in September, we put out an hour-long Freakonomics Radio podcast called “The Upside of Quitting.”
Fact: in September, more Americans quit their jobs than in any month since Nov., 2008.
Coincidence?
Actually, it’s not even a coincidence. The podcast was out on Sept. 30; the resignations (2 million of them) covered the month of September.
That said, more resignations would seem to indicate an improving economy. From Time:
According to a recent survey by job-search site Snagajob, 44% of respondents who quit in the past year did so believing they would find a better opportunity elsewhere, up from 31% the year before.
Why, you might wonder, is Time citing Snagajob rather than a government source? And should we believe those numbers?
We launched the Football Freakonomics series in the spring with an episode called “The Quarterback Quandary.” It examined the difficulty of drafting QB’s since they tend to be a) vital to a team’s success; and b) relatively expensive; but c) hard to assess coming out of college even if they have a substantial track record.
One thing we can all agree on, however: the NFL today is a quarterback’s league — isn’t it?
That’s the question we ask in our latest Football Freakonomics segment.
The numbers certainly line up in support of the quarterback’s dominance. As you can see in the accompanying graphic, there has been a sea change in the pass/run ratio over the past few decades. In the 1970’s, NFL offenses averaged roughly 26 passes and 35 runs per game. By the 2000’s, those numbers had essentially flip-flopped, with about 32 passes and 28 runs per game.
The “first minority to be a controlling owner of an NFL team” isn’t an African-American.
I find this story interesting and am surprised it has been so lightly commented upon.
The team is the Jacksonville Jaguars (that may be one reason why it’s so lightly commented upon), and the new owner is Shahid Khan.
That’s the claim of a new paper by D. Mark Anderson and Daniel I. Rees, put out by the IZA, titled “Medical Marijuana Laws, Traffic Fatalities, and Alcohol Consumption”:
To date, 16 states have passed medical marijuana laws, yet very little is known about their effects. Using state-level data, we examine the relationship between medical marijuana laws and a variety of outcomes. Legalization of medical marijuana is associated with increased use of marijuana among adults, but not among minors. In addition, legalization is associated with a nearly 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities, most likely to due to its impact on alcohol consumption. Our estimates provide strong evidence that marijuana and alcohol are substitutes.
If you were shopping on Amazon.com last night for a Fisher-Price “My First Dollhouse” with a Caucasian family, you would have been asked to pay $63.99. If, however, you wanted to buy what looks to be a nearly identical “My First Dollhouse” with an African-American family, the price was only $37.99.
Amazon reviewers have taken note, and aren’t pleased. When my son Solomon (11 years old) wandered past my computer last night as I was looking this over, he didn’t need any prompting: “That’s so racist!” he said.
Is it? What is it that we’re seeing here on Amazon — racial discrimination? Price discrimination? Neither?
Tyler Cowen writes books more often than some people brush their teeth. He also blogs many times each day, including weekends, and does a variety of other productive, interesting things.
His latest book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, is probably my favorite thing he’s written. (It’s not out ’til spring; I am lucky enough to have scored an advance copy.) It does such a good job exploring the economics, culture, esthetics, and realities of the food network that I don’t even mind the short shrift he gives Japanese cuisine (while being more thorough with Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Thai, Filipino, and especially Chinese food).
There are a number of mind-blowing ideas and facts in the book, the most interesting of them in a chapter called “How American Food Got Bad.”
From a reader named Paul Kilmartin, in response to Steve Sexton’s post “The Inefficiency of Local Food”:
Well, if we’re going to think like economists, then lets talk about how we got here. The food distribution network cannot thrive as it does now without the massive public works program called the Interstate Highway system, which subsidizes distant food movement. Large, “efficient” agribusiness is as much a result of farm subsidies leading to consolidation, and the percentage of crop land dedicated to corn is a function of ethanol policy. Furthermore, FDA policies prohibit or discourage the farming and production of items people want, such as hemp and unpasteurized milk.
On top of that, misinformation of the USDA has driven the public to choose grains over protein and fat, driving the obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates higher, which shifts resources to those with government-granted monopoly rights to market pharmaceuticals to treat those diseases.
So, in the absence of all these price distortions, would local food be at such a disadvantage? I contend not. So those liberals who want more local food should dismantle the nanny state and public works programs that made pseudo food so much more profitable.
Who cares to argue with Paul?
The U.N. is holding its big annual conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa. For those of you still paying attention to global-warming news, you may want to add a couple of links to your reading:
+ There’s been a second round of “ClimateGate” e-mails, (the first preceded the U.N.’s climate-change Copenhagen conference in 2009); the Times‘s Andy Revkin becomes a more prominent character this time around, for which he is attacked, and which attack he promptly defends.
+ A new study in Science argues with the accepted wisdom on climate sensitivity. From the website of Oregon State University, home to lead researcher Andreas Schmittner:
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.
