My old band was called The Right Profile. (I talked about quitting in this radio show.) It wasn’t a great name probably but we stuck with it. I did love its provenance. It came from a song on The Clash’s London Calling, which is still one of my favorite records ever. “The Right Profile” was about the strange, sad life of the actor Montgomery Clift, who after a terrible car crash was shot from the right side. It was hardly the best song on London Calling — I wouldn’t even put it in the top five — but you come to love the names of people and things you loved, so I always loved The Right Profile.
So I was very jazzed to learn, via Variety, that a biopic of Clash leader Joe Strummer is in the works, to be directed by Julie Delpy, and it’s got a great title:
Details from The Right Profile are being kept under wraps, but the idea is to focus on Strummer’s life and his planned disappearance from the public spotlight in 1982. Pic is titled after the song “The Right Profile,” which appeared on the Clash’s seminal 1979 album “London Calling.”
An iconic figure of the British punk movement, Strummer died in December 2002, just a month before he and the Clash were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Can’t wait.
(HT: Mark Ehrenkranz)
Its content notwithstanding, what’s interesting to me about this picture is how jarring it is to see a black-and-white photograph these days. It instantly looks like an antique. There was a time, not so long ago, when 99 percent of serious photographers sneered at color photography. I worked at the N.Y. Times when it began printing color photographs in the news sections, and from some of the shrieking commentary you would have thought they were producing the color ink by pulverizing baby seals and kittens. The full-on proliferation of color photography is a good example of how quickly we get used to new things that we predicted we’d never get used to.
(HT: J.L.)
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
In the decade since the stadium opened, the personal seat licenses or PSLs fans bought for the right to purchase season tickets have soared in value, offering a far better return on investment than the slumping stock market or even the price of a barrel of oil.
Take, for instance, a fan who bought a license for a seat in an upper level of Heinz Field for $250 in 2001. It now is selling for an average of $4,306, an increase of 1,622.4 percent, based on 2011 sales at STR Marketplace, a website authorized by the Steelers to allow fans to buy and sell seat licenses.
A seat license that went for $500 in an end zone now is selling for an average of $7,486, an increase of 1,397.2 percent. And one that sold in a lower midfield section for $2,700 when the stadium opened now is going for an average of $17,131, a jump of nearly 534.5 percent.
Taken together, the 49,278 seat licenses sold by the Steelers for an average of $1,172 since Heinz Field opened now are selling for $9,802, on average, or an increase of 736.3 percent, based on the sales data.
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
What do Dan Marino, Jerry Rice, and MarTay Jenkins have in common?
Yes, wise guy, they all played in the NFL. But beyond that? They all hold all-time single-season records.
+ Marino (among his other records) passed for 5,084 yards in 1984.
+ Rice (among his many other records) gained 1,848 receiving yards in 1995.
+ Jenkins had 2,186 kickoff-return yards in 2000 for the Arizona Cardinals.
But Jenkins, unlike the other two, won’t be getting a call from Canton any time soon, even though he set a second record that season – for the number of kickoff returns, with 82. Eighty-two kickoff returns! That’s an average of more than 5 a game.
Care to guess the Cardinals’ record in 2000? They were 3-13. Yes, it’s great to be a kickoff returner when your team is getting kicked off to over and over and over again.
And so it is that MarTay Jenkins is the poster boy for our latest Freakonomics Football video, “When Good Stats Go Bad.”
In a Time magazine Q&A, the actor gives a fascinating reply to the question “Are you disappointed in Obama”:
I get angry at people who don’t stand for him, actually. If this were a Republican president, Republicans would say, “We were losing 400,000 jobs a month. We stopped it. We saved the car industry.” You could go down the list. Democrats should talk to Hollywood about how to posture some of these things. Say you’re about to get into tax loopholes. Instead of “loopholes,” say “cheating.” And then on the floor of the Senate, get up and say, “We’re not going to raise your taxes, but we’re not for cheating. Are you?” I just think Democrats are bad at that.
A few points: I assume the “people” he gets angry at for not standing for Obama are Democrats? If not … well … hard to imagine someone like Clooney getting angry at Democrats who didn’t “stand for” Bush.
Great point re the job loss and car industry! Perhaps not nearly 100 percent accurate, but still, a great point re how those accomplishments haven’t been framed as successes.
If you are in the least bit an airplane junkie, you should follow the advice of Jason Kottke (no relation to Daniel, or Leo, fwiw) and search for “planes overhead” on the Wolfram Alpha search engine. It returns a list of airplanes above your geographical location, including carrier, origin/destination, altitude, angle, type, slant distance, as well as a sky map so you can find the actual planes in the sky:
There’s a nasty secret about hot-button topics like global warming: knowledge is not always power.
Productivity, that is. One factor was the trimming of deadwood; the other seems to be old-fashioned harder work. From a new working paper by Casey Mulligan (emphasis added):
During the recession of 2008-9, labor hours fell sharply, while wages and output per hour rose. Some, but not all, of the productivity and wage increase can be attributed to changing quality of the workforce. The rest of the increase appears to be due to increases in production inputs other than labor hours. All of these findings, plus the drop in consumer expenditure, are consistent with the hypothesis that labor market “distortions” were increasing during the recession and have remained in place during the slow “recovery.” Producers appear to be trying to continue production with less labor, rather than cutting labor hours as a means of cutting output.
Once in a while, we do an FAQ podcast (that’s FREAK-quently Asked Questions) whereby you send us questions via the comments section and we answer them in a radio program. We’re gearing up to do another FAQ, likely to be released on Jan. 4, so fire away. Given the release date, you might consider asking about New Year’s resolutions (and the commitment devices we sometimes employ); the dangers of drunk walking; maybe even the reproductive provenance of your holiday meal. Feel free to ask followup questions on radio stuff we’ve done in the past too, like the “Prius Effect” (conspicuous conservation), the decline of hitchhiking, and whether expensive wines actually taste better. Thanks in advance.
Way to scapegoat, Chronicle of Higher Education!
An article about a Dutch psychologist accused of faking his research data wonders if academic fraudsters are responding to the wrong incentives:
Is a desire to get picked up by the Freakonomics blog, or the dozens of similar outlets for funky findings, really driving work in psychology labs? Alternatively—though not really mutually exclusively—are there broader statistical problems with the field that let snazzy but questionable findings slip through?
So the First and Second Ladies (Michelle Obama and Jill Biden) were brought in as grand marshals for the NASCAR season finale at Homestead (won in spectacular fashion by the absurdly entertaining Tony Stewart), and there was enough booing from the crowd to turn the story into “Michelle Obama, Dr. Jill Biden Draw Boos at NASCAR Event.” Video is here.
In our podcast “Boo…Who?”, we poked into political booing and sports booing, and how the two occasionally intersect. Bottom line: it’s often not pretty.
A couple twists worth noting in this case: these weren’t politicians getting booed but the wives of politicians (which would make the booing seem particularly hardcore); and they were there as part of a charitable campaign to help military personnel and veterans (which would make the booing seem to be a complaint about trying to score political points).
Now imagine for a moment that you were the person who handled this event from the White House side.
If you like words even a little bit, you should take advantage of Anu Garg‘s wordsmith.org. It is an idiosyncratic exploration of how language works; his “word a day” e-mail is particularly fun.
The “word a day” theme this week is “words with unusual arrangements of letters.” The first word in this series was “verisimilitude,” which Garg notes has perfectly alternating consonants and vowels. (Not bad, Anu, but my son’s name is even better, as it has perfect consonant-vowel symmetry while using only a single vowel: Solomon. An even longer example is Tunku Varadarajan‘s last name.)
“Verisimilitude” was followed by “syzygy” (“one could hyperpolysyllabically contrive a longer word having four Ys, but syzygy nicely lines up three of them organically in just six letters,” Garg notes) and “yob” (the rare word created by spelling a different word backward).
But today’s word is my favorite. It’s “kine.” Before you click this link, or look the word up elsewhere, try to guess what is unique about it. A slight hint: the answer is related to the topic of this post and, marginally, this one one too. The answer is below.
Our appetite for breast meat renders our holiday birds unable to reproduce.
That is the possibility raised in a new paper published in BMJ Open and summarized in Science Daily. The presumptive culprit would be environmental estrogen exposure. Add this to the bulging files of Unintended Consequences of Birth Technology (the theme of a recent podcast called “Misadventures in Baby-Making.”) First, from the paper:
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common male malignancy in the Western world, and risk factors associated with this cancer remain ill defined.1 The only acknowledged risk factors thus far are: age, ethnicity and family history.1 Several studies have suggested that oestrogen exposure may increase the risk of prostate cancer,2–4 while other studies have not found an association.5 6
We’ve noted in the past that various countries routinely elect economists to be president or prime minister — a trend that has decidedly escaped the U.S.
We also released a podcast a while back called “What Would the World Look Like if Economists Were in Charge?” — which, despite the title, was about the U.S. more than “the world.” (Yes, I am as synecdochically myopic — or is that myopically synecdochal? — as any other American.)
Now, a British reader named Peter Bennett writes in with this challenge:
Looking forward to hearing your take on these new technocratic economists in charge in Italy and Greece.
Just how bad would things have to get in the U.S. before they’d call in the economists?
We will try to scare up a worthy contributor to answer both those questions in the near future.
We’re working on a Freakonomics Radio episode that will probably be called “Weird Recycling” (or, possibly, “What Do Chicken Paws and Tongue Depressors Have in Common?”). It’s about people who find or create value from things that are typically thought to be worthless (or worse!).
I’d love to gather a few more examples and I can think of no population in the world better suited for this task than the Freakonomics readership.
What say you?
Thanks in advance.
A small (?) bad-news item about electric cars:
Electric cars face new scrutiny after a fire in a Chevrolet Volt prompted a federal investigation into lithium ion batteries, even after U.S. regulators said their own crash test likely led to the blaze.
And a big bad-news item about electric cars:
Accounting for more than half of the about 216,000 new cars sold sales in Israel by leasing to corporations, rental agencies are balking [at buying electric vehicles] because of uncertainty regarding the cars’ resale value. Mr. Bar said that he fears vehicles with switchable batteries might lose as much as 70% of their original value in four years instead of the typical 40% loss by gasoline-powered vehicles over the same period.
“It’s going to be a nice niche, a gimmick, for people who are environmentalists, and corporations who want to show they are saving the environment, but I don’t see a savings in costs,” Mr. Bar said.
The takeaways from our “Church of ‘Scionology'” radio program were as follows:
+ Economists have found that family firms that pass the company down to the next generation perform worse than if they had brought in professional management.
+ Family firms are particularly dominant in less-developed countries, which tend to have weaker markets and rule of law. Here’s Vikas Mehrotra on that point:
In the developed world, you have good contracting environments, a good system of law enforcement, and so on. So, in the developed world, you can hire professional managers and expect a certain, you know, sticking to the contract law, and so on. It’s rather more difficult to have the same kind of adherence to the rule of law in emerging economies. So, in emerging economies, family firms sort of provide a second-best solution to this poorly developed institutional problem.
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
Icing the kicker: Even casual football fans have come to expect that when a game is on the line and the kicker is brought out to try a crucial field goal, the opposing coach might call a timeout just as the kicker approaches the ball.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? The coach can “ice” the kicker — mess with his mind, throw off his routine, make him stand around like an awkward guy at a cocktail party for all the world to see.
But does it work?
… this was still a puzzling sign to behold. It’s on Lenox Ave. (a.k.a. Malcolm X Blvd.), in the southern end of Harlem:
Did your mind get stuck for a minute when it read those words, or did it quickly skip ahead and fill in a blank? (Danny Kahneman writes nicely about this phenomenon in Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
Once you walk a few steps further south, the sign becomes complete.
We hear increasingly about the healthcare costs of obesity; but what about social costs?
A forthcoming Economics and Human Biology paper (abstract here; PDF here) by Mir Ali, Aliaksandr Amialchuk, and John Rizzo, titled “The Influence of Body Weight on Social Network Ties Among Adolescents,” makes this interesting argument:
We find that obese adolescents have fewer friends and are less socially integrated than their non-obese counterparts. We also find that such penalties in friendship networks are present among whites but not African-Americans or Hispanics, with the largest effect among white females.
In Book 2 of Plato’s Republic, Adeimantus poses a question worthy of an economics seminar:
Suppose now that a husbandman, or an artisan, brings some production to market, and he comes at a time when there is no one to exchange with him — is he to leave his calling and sit idle in the market-place?
Socrates replies:
Not at all; he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered States they are commonly those who are the weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose; their duty is to be in the market, and to give money in exchange for goods to those who desire to sell and to take money from those who desire to buy.
All right, the “weakest in bodily strength” crack isn’t so nice, but it is nice to see Socrates (and Plato) give credit where credit is due — to the hardworking salespeople and money-handlers who keep our commerce flowing.
(HT: Carlos Eduardo Soares Concalves, via JPE.)
In today’s Journal, David Wessel nails it. (If you ask me, Wessel nails it consistently.) First, he asks the question that needs to be asked:
It has been two years since the flames were first spotted in Greece, yet the blaze still hasn’t been put out. Now it has spread to Italy.
It’s been five years since the U.S. housing bubble burst. Housing remains among the biggest reasons the U.S. economy is doing so poorly.
On both continents, there is no longer any doubt about the severity of the threat or the urgent need for better policies. Yet the players seem spectacularly unable to act.
What’s taking so long?
Is booing an act of verbal vandalism—or the last true expression of democracy?
As a fan of both Walter Isaacson and of Apple products, I have happily begun reading (along with a few million others) the new Steve Jobs biography. So far I find it to be as compelling as expected. Just a few pages into it, I was struck by this thought: as much as Jobs is known for the iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc., I couldn’t help but think that the book itself is in some ways Jobs’s final product.
In the introduction, “How This Book Came To Be,” Isaacson — who, it should be clear, is a true heavyweight — relates how Jobs approached and repeatedly pursued him to write the book. The terms were clear: Jobs would participate fully, and give others (including those who might be hostile to him) the go-ahead to do the same, and Jobs would have no right to approve or edit material. “He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote, or even ask to read it in advance,” Isaacson writes. That said, it becomes clear that Jobs was infinitely interested in shaping the book. To wit:
His only involvement came when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When he saw an early version of a proposed over treatment, he disliked it so much that he asked to have input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented.
A recent Times article describes a new interactive database put together by NYU that lets you track all subsidized housing in the city.
As the article makes clear, this database performs a variety of worthwhile functions — allowing renters or buyers to locate affordable housing; letting affordable-housing advocates keep track of when subsidized buildings are scheduled to potentially lose their subsidized status; etc.
There’s one potential function the article didn’t mention, however. Am I a cynic (or a jerk, or maybe just a realist) for thinking that this database will also be used by renters and homebuyers eager to avoid neighborhoods that have a lot of subsidized housing?
A National Post graphic does a good job showing causes of death across Canada by percentage, and notes that, for the first time, cancer is the leading cause in every province, responsible for about 30 percent of all deaths. That is a heartbreaking number, not least because cancer is a disease (or set of diseases, really) about which so much is still unknown.
As we wrote in a section of SuperFreakonomics called “We’re still getting our butts kicked by cancer,” seeing cancer statistics like this might naturally lead one to conclude that the “war on cancer” has been a dismal failure. That, however, would be an overstatement. While it’s true that we are, as one oncologist told us, “still getting our butts kicked,” there is somewhat of a silver lining in the cancer death rate.
The following is a cross-post from NFL.com, where we’ve recently launched a Football Freakonomics Project.
Economics is all about tradeoffs. If you want to buy a top-tier performance car, it’ll cost you a lot more than a Camry. If you’re looking for an investment that’ll set you up for life, you have to be willing to take on more risk.
NFL personnel decisions involve the same kind of tradeoffs. Better players generally cost more. Bigger players are generally slower. Just look at the NFL Draft, and how hard it is to balance all these tradeoffs when making your picks – especially when you’re spending huge money on a team leader whose future is impossible to predict. (We explored this puzzle earlier in “The Quarterback Quandary.”)
In this installment of “Football Freakonomics,” we look at a different kind of tradeoff – the decision of how to handle a player who’s gotten in trouble off the field. Unfortunately, you don’t have to think very hard to come up with a lot of big names from the recent past: Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, and Plaxico Burress, to name just a few.
With guys like these, the tradeoff is pretty clear. The player has already proven his value on the field, so that’s the upside. But will his off-the-field trouble follow him back into the game? And then you’ve got to wonder how his physical performance will be affected by his time off for bad behavior.
It would be nice to be able to give a purely scientific answer to the following question: After getting into big off-the-field trouble, do players tend to perform better, the same, or worse?
A reader comment from the website of a certain well-read newspaper:
- Tom H wrote:
Here’s a lesson in economics for OWS. Explain to the “99%” that they are actually in the 5% of richest people on the planet. Then take their wealth and redistribute it to the 95% of the world that is poorer than them. See how they feel about wealth redistribution then.
However you may feel about the sentiment expressed by Tom H., you have to think that his framing skills would be admired by Messrs. Tversky, Kahneman, and Thaler.
I like keeping up with things, large and small, as much as the next person.
Or maybe I don’t. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
As someone who’s done a lot of journalism, I certainly have an appetite for being first with a story. In fact, most of the journalism I’ve written was stuff that no one else was writing about. But there’s a big difference between looking off the beaten path and trying to land a scoop within a beat that 100 other journalists are covering. I was never much into that. I understand that news organizations value the scoop but I do question how valuable such scoops really are — especially these days, when the first-mover often gets drowned out by the 1,000 who follow.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the information flow from the demand side rather than the supply side.
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