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.
An election cycle brings about more than voting around the world. There are many odd by-products, often inspired by how the incentives line up for those in power.
As someone who has written about geoengineering (and been hit with the requisite slime for doing so), I was more than a little surprised to see the results of a survey about the public’s view of geongineering (abstract here; PDF here) by researchers at the University of Calgary, Harvard, and Simon Fraser University, and published in Environmental Research Letters. From the press release:
Research on geoengineering appears to have broad public support, as a new, internationally-representative survey revealed that 72 per cent of respondents approved research into the climate-manipulating technique…. Public awareness of geoengineering is remarkably broad. Eight per cent of the sample were able to provide a correct definition of geoengineering, an increase on previous estimates; however, 45 per cent of the sample correctly defined the alternative term “climate engineering”, adding weight to the argument that “geoengineering” may be misleading and difficult to understand.
We are constantly wowed by new technologies and policies meant to make childbirth better. But beware the unintended consequences.
In the first segment of “Football Freakonomics,” Dubner examines the phenomenon of momentum and whether we can actually prove its existence in football games. Here’s a taste of what he found in the data: since 2007, immediately after a long kickoff or punt return, NFL teams are nearly four times as likely to score a touchdown on the next play than they are on a given play from scrimmage.
As readers of this blog know, I like the NFL quite a bit (although not, for whatever reason, college football). I have written about players from the past like John Unitas and Franco Harris; I also love to follow the modern NFL and all its tricky issues.
So I’m thrilled to be hosting a new segment on the NFL Network called “Football Freakonomics.” We did a short program together for the NFL Draft, called “The Quarterback Quandary,” and now we’re partnering up for an ongoing set of segments. The first Football Freakonomics feature will air this Sunday on the network’s “NFL GameDay Morning.” We’ll explore all kinds of issues — winning/losing, performance, salaries, etc. — and we’ll lean on original research as well as the insights of many brilliant people from sport, academia, and beyond.
The first segment is titled “Is Momentum a Myth?” (If you’ve read the fine book Scorecasting, you may know where we’re headed with this one.) I haven’t seen it yet but all the NFL folks I’ve been working with in production are absolutely top-notch, so I’m sure they’ve come up with something great.
That is the title of a new working paper by UCLA economist Roger Farmer (abstract here; PDF here).
Note that Farmer doesn’t argue that the crash “contributed to” the recession, or “was a leading indicator” of the recession — but, rather, that the crash “caused” the recession. It’s worth acknowledging that a) Farmer attributes the housing-market crash as the direct trigger of the stock-market crash; and that b) he does this in service of the larger question: how to beat back unemployment.
From the abstract:
This paper argues that the stock market crash of 2008, triggered by a collapse in house prices, caused the Great Recession. The paper has three parts. First, it provides evidence of a high correlation between the value of the stock market and the unemployment rate in U.S. data since 1929. Second, it compares a new model of the economy developed in recent papers and books by Farmer, with a classical model and with a textbook Keynesian approach. Third, it provides evidence that fiscal stimulus will not permanently restore full employment. In Farmer’s model, as in the Keynesian model, employment is demand determined. But aggregate demand depends on wealth, not on income.
High-stakes testing has produced some rotten apples. But they can be caught.
A reader named Clark Case encountered this wi-fi login window at a Doubletree hotel in Orlando. Paging Chris Anderson? Eh … probably not. While there might be some reasonable explanation — is the 24-hour connection ad-supported maybe? — my guess is it’s a simple error.
With the help of our latest podcast, “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?”, Freakonomics Radio has jumped to No. 1 on iTunes.
This happens once in a while, but is still rare enough to be a big treat. (Ira Glass — who once gave us some podcast advice — has pretty much taken up permanent residence on No. 1 iTunes Place; the rest of us mortals camp out down the street.)
If you visit iTunes this week, you’ll see a lovely promotional banner (below) for our program. That certainly helped with the No. 1 ranking. But so did you! Thanks to all of you for listening, downloading, and spreading the word. We have a great lineup of new episodes coming this fall, and our podcast has just gone weekly.
If you feel like letting us know your favorite (and/or least favorite) episodes in the comments below, that’d be helpful. Good feedback is valuable, in life and in art, but it can be devilishly hard to come by. So we’ll give you an incentive: we’ll send some Freakonomics swag to whoever writes the most interesting positive review and whoever writes the most interesting negative review as well.
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