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.
An e-mail from Brazil:
My name is Mauricio Castro, I have a social communications degree and teach interface design and multimedia systems.
I have a story I’d like to share with you guys.
I live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Vitória, Brazil. Being close to the beach, the city code forbids tall buildings in order to maintain sunlight in the sand all time. The maximum floor number is three.
So it’s only natural that most buildings here don’t have elevators. Even some new ones are presented only with stairs, especially those built for the younger customers.
So I went to the health clinic the other day and the nurse was telling me about the rising numbers of youngsters suffering from strokes. There are lots of explanations for these numbers rising, but mostly lifestyle and drug abuse.
I’ve been thinking a bit lately about security overkill. This includes not just the notion of “security theater” — security measures meant to inspire comfort by mere show of force/complexity — but the many instances in which someone places a layer of security between me and my everyday activities with no apparent benefit whatsoever.
My bank would surely argue that its many and various anti-fraud measures are valuable but in truth a) they are meant to protect the bank, not me; and b) they are cumbersome to the point of ridiculous. It’s gotten to where I can predict which credit-card charge will trigger the bank’s idiot algorithm and freeze my account because it didn’t like the Zip code where I used the card.
And security overkill has trickled down into the civilian world. When the class parents at my kids’ school send out a list of parent contact info at the start of each school year, it comes via a password-protected Excel spreadsheet. Keep in mind this list doesn’t contain Social Security numbers or bank information — just names, addresses, and phone numbers of the kids’ parents. I can imagine the day several months hence when someone actually needs to use the list and will find herself locked out by the long-forgotten password.
A reader named Rodolfo Ostolaza writes in with a most heartfelt plea about violence in Mexico. He would welcome all suggestions.
I live in Mexico City and, although the wave of violence in my country has not yet fully reached this area, I’m worried because we are living a state of terror, with bloody attacks, and a lack of humanity. That is why I am requesting your help.
What do you think we can do to change this? According to the chapter on crime reduction in Freakonomics, a judge’s decision was more influential than a change in public policy and law enforcement bodies in reducing crime in the U.S. I wish we could apply this “recipe” (allowing abortion throughout Mexico, which is currently legal only in Mexico City) to keep the hope that, in the future, things will be brighter. However, considering the Mexican idiosyncrasy, with strong influence of the Catholic Church, I believe that this measure would have, at best, a marginal impact.
I want you to share this question with your readers. Give us suggestions, ideas, different perspectives to analyze the problem. What follows are some thoughts and questions of how, I think, the problem should be analyzed.
First we must understand precisely the problem itself. It is true that the violence began to grow exponentially after President Calderón declared war.
Did we needlessly scare ourselves into ditching a good thing? And, with millions of cars driving around with no passengers, should we be rooting for a renaissance?
The world is a more peaceful place today that at any time in history — by a long, long shot.
On a blog called The Sedulous Pleb, Jim Powell posts video reviews of podcasts he’s listened to, sermons he’s seen, and the like. When does he make these video reviews? While he’s driving! Jim seems like a bright and thoughtful guy; I just hope he’s a really, really good driver on top of that.
His review of a recent Freakonomics Radio podcast looks to have been done while he was driving at night:
(HT: J.L.)
Last week, I was out in Chicago for a couple of days working with Levitt. We had lunch at the Booth School cafeteria (with its great soda design) — or at least we tried to have lunch. There was a nice-looking case of sandwiches, and I asked the guy behind the counter for one of the turkey-cranberry sandwiches.
“No,” he said. “I can’t sell it to you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“We’re closing. I can’t sell it to you.”
It was about 2:32 p.m. on a weekday afternoon. The sandwich I was eyeing was one of maybe 15 or 20 in the case. And then the guy behind the counter drags over a big trash can and throws my sandwich into it, and then all the other sandwiches too. It might have been my imagination — or maybe just hunger — but he seemed to take delight in throwing away the food for which I was ready to pay full price.
A reader named Elliot Millican writes in to say:
At one point in SuperFreakonomics you mentioned a particular brand of hair clippers that are offered for humans and for pets. You noted that the human clippers carried a higher price even though they appeared almost identical. You went on to say that the pricing scheme is a simple result of the consumer’s willingness to pay more for their clippers than they would their dog’s. [Yes indeed: this is known as price discrimination.]
These hair clippers reminded me of something I experienced when my wife and I were engaged (8 years ago). Let me quickly give the background: due to limited wedding budget, we had our wedding at church and a reception at the church with cake, punch, and light food. This allowed us to invite as many people as we wanted because the church was free and the cake/food prices weren’t terribly expensive. But we had a second reception just for family and wedding party at a hotel (for about 60 people). This second reception was more like your traditional wedding reception… open bar, sit-down dinner, and a DJ. In short, it was expensive, but affordable with only a fraction of the guest list.
Season 1, Episode 5
You know the bromide: “a winner never quits, and a quitter never wins.”
To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure? Sometimes quitting is strategic, and sometimes it can be your best possible plan.
That is the gist of our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Upside of Quitting.” This is the last of five hour-long podcasts we’ve been putting out lately. Some of you may have heard them on public-radio stations around the country, but now all the hours are being fed into our podcast stream. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript here.)
To help us understand quitting, we look at a couple of key economic concepts in this episode: sunk cost and opportunity cost. Sunk cost is about the past – it’s the time or money or sweat equity you’ve put into a job or relationship or a project, and which makes quitting hard. Opportunity cost is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else – something that might make your life better. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost. If only you could …. quit.
You know the saying: a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure?
Last week, we solicited your questions for John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, authors of the new book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength . You responded with a variety of interesting questions, and now Tierney and Baumeister return with some in-depth answers.
Thanks to everyone for participating.
Q. Is willpower a single commodity (so to speak), or is there, as I suspect, a one type of willpower for, say, dieting, another one for academic study, another for this, another for that? –AaronS
A. No, there’s just one single resource (or commodity). There’s one source of mental energy for resisting temptation and performing other acts of self-control, and this willpower is also depleted by making decisions. What you experience may reflect the fact that willpower is limited and so people have to allocate it: they use it at the office to work effectively and diligently, but have messy homes and are short-tempered in the evening. Or people who show wonderful self-control at dealing with personal relationships but can’t seem to meet their deadlines.
It was great to see some familiar names on this year’s list of MacArthur “genius” awards. They include Roland Fryer of Harvard, who has shown up many times on this blog as well as in Freakonomics and in the New York Times. His work on everything from the black-white baby-name gap to education incentives is well-deserving of MacArthur recognition, and I’m sure this is hardly the last award he’ll win. Another winner was Jad Abumrad of the wonderful radio show RadioLab. If you don’t know this show, you should. I was also very pleased to see Kevin Guskiewicz on the MacArthur list; he’s at the forefront of research into sports injuries, especially the kind of helmet-induced football injuries we’ve discussed in the past.
On the other side of the ledger is the very disturbing news that the online poker site Full Tilt Poker has been operating, in the words of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, as “a Ponzi scheme,” siphoning off customers’ money to make multi-million dollar payments to Full Tilt’s owners, who include Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, Howard Lederer, and Rafe Furst, who has appeared on this blog multiple times. Yes, we live in a world of presumed innocence; but this Journal article and the lawsuit highlights don’t paint a pretty picture. FWIW, here’s Rafe’s public response.
Human beings love to predict the future, but we’re quite terrible at it. So how about punishing all those bad predictions?
What’s the most coveted human virtue — empathy? honesty? courage?
Or how about … self-control?
That’s the assertion of the new book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength*, by Roy Baumeister, a research psychologist at Florida State, and John Tierney**, a New York Times science writer. The book builds off Baumeister’s research on the physical aspect of willpower, which he and his research collaborators found behaves like a muscle: it can be strengthened through exercise but it becomes fatigued from overuse. Willpower is generated in large part by sleep and diet, and feeds off of the glucose in our bloodstream.
Baumeister and Tierney argue that our ability (or inability) to exercise self-control is most often the key between success and failure. And it’s hard not to see their point: I type these words on the very day that a special election is being held in New York to replace the disgraced (and aptonymic) Congressman Anthony Weiner.
Here’s what the Red Sox slugger had to say recently about the sour streak his team has been on lately, endangering its playoff hopes:
“There’s nobody to blame but everybody.”
If I were a CEO, or the president of something, or someone with even the slightest responsibility for anything, I would tuck this quote in my back pocket and whip it out when things get grim.
There are more than twice as many suicides as murders in the U.S., but suicide attracts far less scrutiny. Freakonomics Radio digs through the numbers and finds all kinds of surprises
Is there any question that if Governor Rick Perry of Texas were a Democrat that all the left-leaning editorialists, economists, bloggers, etc., would be bending over backward to praise the Texas employment picture rather than bending over backward to belittle it?
Think you know how much parents matter? Think again. Economists crunch the numbers to learn the ROI on child-rearing.
We worship the tradition of handing off a family business to the next generation. But is that really such a good idea?
We’ve blogged a few times about the clever use of what you might call reverse incentives — that is, turning someone else’s unwelcome behavior into a positive outcome for yourself. Planned Parenthood turned abortion protestors into a fund-raising scheme; a comedian used this same “pledge-a-picket” tactic against the Westboro Baptist Church.
I recently ran across an older example, from the groundbreaking comedian and activist Dick Gregory, probably still best known for his autobiography, called Nigger.
The book was co-written by Robert Lipsyte, a longtime Times sports-and-culture columnist whom I interviewed recently for an upcoming podcast about booing. In Lipsyte’s rousing, fascinating new memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, he writes about his collaboration with Gregory (whom he calls Greg), and the latter’s shrewd understanding of human nature, incentives, and hatred. Excerpts:
Art Wright, a professor*, writes in to say:
I have this problem: I am course-planning for the fall term right now, and I’m trying to figure out the best way to develop an attendance policy. Many professors deduct points or letter grades for a certain number of absences. In contrast, I had someone recommend that I give points if students come to most or all of the class meetings. So I’m left wondering: What is the best way to incentivize class attendance for my students? What, in your opinion, will get them to attend most – if not all — of the class meetings?
What advice do you have for Art?
If you’re a professor, let us know what you’ve tried that has worked or failed. If you’re a student or used to be one (I assume that means everyone here), what did it take to get you to show up regularly?
*By the way, Art is a visiting professor of New Testament at the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. Am wondering how readers might answer (or engage with) his question differently if I’d introduced him as such rather than simply as a “professor.” Of all the assumptions we make and biases we carry, it strikes me that religion encourages some of the strongest ones.
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