A reader named Mark Curry, who describes himself as a “cement truck driver trapped in the body of someone who does accounting-related work,” wrote to us about a brief passage in Freakonomics concerning our analysis of online-dating data:
The part about men with curly and/or red hair being a downer? “Downer” may be something of an understatement. As a young man I had red, curly, and sometimes, frizzy hair. My dad told me at age 13 or 14 that if I didn’t do something with it, I would never find out what sex is. I was devastated by his meanness. I consider myself very lucky to have found a woman who will tolerate my red hair. Now, married almost 18 years, a couple months ago I started shaving my head smooth, baby-ass, bald; does it feel good. Now, when I walk into an office, the bank, pick someplace, I don’t exactly have to ask people to stop undressing, but their receptiveness to me is noticeable. Although my wife and daughters are still getting used to my shaven head, at least a dozen ladies (that’s 10 women and two men) think my shaven head looks good on me.
I wonder if Telly Savalas was a redhead?
Last time I was in London I had a headache, and went to the nearest Boots to buy something for it.
In U.S. drugstores, I’m accustomed to finding half an aisle devoted to headache pills, with bottles ranging from small to very large — at least 200 pills in them. So that’s what I went looking for in Boots, but no such bottle was to be found. The only options were cardboard packets containing maybe 20 pills, with each pill in its own blister packet. (The pills were also larger than U.S. pills.) Hmm, I thought. I guess Boots finds it can charge a lot for a small amount of headache medicine since most people, when they have a headache, aren’t very price-conscious.
But I recently learned the real reason for this phenomenon while interviewing David Lester, a psychologist at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey who is the dean of suicide (and death) research. (We are producing an hour-long Freakonomics Radio special on suicide.) We were discussing the efficacy of SSRI’s on treating depression (and fighting suicide) when he explained why it’s hard to find a big bottle of headache pills in England:
The subtitle is Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. The book is forthcoming, and the author is Mara Hvistendahl, who was a very good research assistant of mine some years back. Mara transcribed many hours of interview tape with an economist named Steve Levitt for a profile I was writing. She has become an excellent reporter and writer; here’s my blurb:
“Yes, it’s a rigorous exploration of the world’s ‘missing women,’ but it’s more than that, too: an extraordinarily vivid look at the implications of the problem. Hvistendahl writes beautifully, with an eye for detail but also the big picture. She has a fierce intelligence but, more important, a fierce intellectual independence; she writes with a hard edge but no venom — rather, a cool and hard passion.”
Perhaps not where you think. A new Centers for Disease Control report is out: “Violence-Related Firearm Deaths Among Residents of Metropolitan Areas and Cities — United States, 2006-2007.” Notable patterns by geographic region were observed. All-ages firearm homicide rates generally were higher for MSAs in the Midwest (seven of 10 above the median MSA rate of 5.4 [per 100,000 inhabitants]) . . .
Here is another guest post on failure from author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford, from his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. In his first post, Harford wrote about why failure is often the mark of a healthy economy. Here, Harford writes about the process by which the U.S. military slowly learned from its early failures in the Iraq War. Hint: good ideas often come from the bottom and work their way up the chain of command.
Lessons in Adaptation: Winning the War in Iraq
By Tim Harford
In the spring of 1980, President Jimmy Carter gave the go-ahead for a daring special-operations mission called Eagle Claw. Fifty-two American hostages had been trapped for months in Tehran under a newly hostile revolutionary government, and negotiations appeared to have broken down. The operation called for helicopters and refueling aircraft to fly into the Iranian desert at night, under the radar screen, rendezvous in the middle of nowhere, refuel, and hide during the daylight hours.
From a Wall Street Journal article about Raj Rajaratnam‘s failed insider-trading defense strategy:
Mr. Rajaratnam is estimated to have paid as much as $40 million for his defense, according to people familiar with the matter and some lawyers not affiliated with the case, about two-thirds of the amount prosecutors said Galleon made from the insider trading addressed in the charges.
I bet I could have gotten him convicted on all 14 counts for $5 million, and I’m not even a lawyer.
What’s it like to wake up one day and realize Dad is a multi-billionaire? That’s what happened to Warren Buffett’s son, Peter — who then started to think about whether or not to join the family.
A reader named Patrick Nash needs your advice:
My friend and I have developed a cutting-edge technology for social media. There are other similar technologies out there for social media but we could never compete with their resources. Should we just point blank say we are the cheap alternative as a selling strategy? Sounds cheesy and flimsy but may be our only avenue.
What do you have to say to him? I don’t expect a lot of you to have experience specific to his product, but I know there are a lot of starter-uppers among our readership (yes, both kinds of starter-uppers), as well as what you might call “psychology of pricing” pros. So let’s see what kind of advice you have for Patrick.
The Times reports on New York City kids who fail to get into any of the high schools they apply to. Al Roth, who helped design the school-choice program but has no hand in running it, reports on why this failure occurs. (One big problem, from the Times article: a school like Baruch College Campus H.S. received 7,606 applications for 120 seats, many of them coming from outside of Manhattan; but the school “has not accepted out-of-district students in many years, a fact not mentioned in the Education Department’s school profile.”
Roth’s advice:
For students: use all 12 choices. The system is designed so listing 12 choices won’t hurt your chance of getting one of your top ones. But if you don’t get one of your top choices, having some other schools on your list that you wouldn’t mind going to will save you some heartache.
For schools and guidance counselors: give these kids more useful advice! They should be told if the lists they are submitting include only schools for which they have little or no chance of being accepted.
… with a very good column, including these useful words:
Positive economics attempts to understand the world as it is; normative economics describes how the world should be. Most economists spend most of their time doing positive economics, but most economics columns advocate particular policies, which is implicitly normative economics.
It’s a good bookend to Greg Mankiw‘s column from a couple days ago.
I’ve known Tim Harford for a while; to me, he’s one of the best writers who also happens to be an economist (although in recent years he’s spent more time as a writer than a practicing economist, which may explain everything). Disclosure: Harford profiled Steve Levitt back when Freakonomics came out, and he’s had the two of us on his BBC radio show More or Less.
He writes a Financial Times column (on Saturdays) called “Undercover Economist,” and that was the title of his first book, published in 2005 (and just updated). His latest book, out this week, is called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. It examines the incremental, adaptive ways by which success is achieved across a number of fields. Here’s a taste, in the form of a guest post. It’s very good, and to my mind, here’s the best passage:
[W]here’s the churn in education policy or healthcare policy or policing? These are difficult problems. Why would we expect them to be solved the first time? They are surely no simpler than the business problems which seem so prone to experiment and error.
Fill in the blanks. I dare you. And then read the rest of the post to see who wrote this, and what it’s about.
We’re currently finishing up an hour-long radio program called “The Folly of Prediction,” and I have to say that it was bracingly refreshing to read this paragraph and the column that follows it.
After more than a quarter-century as a professional _________, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about _________. Indeed, the area of __________ where I have devoted most of my energy and attention — the ups and downs of _________ — is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers.
We put out a call for blegs yesterday — questions or quandaries that you want to put in front of Freakonomics readers — and received a lot of good ones. Let’s start it off with the following request from a reader named tish.
“What interview questions can I ask to help weed out weird people? “Weird” meaning antisocial, incompetent, lazy, disinterested, dishonest, unprofessional, combative and disruptive. I just got out of a work situation where one superior was all of these things, and I’d love to avoid people like this in the future. She seemed normal enough when I interviewed with her. Oh also, the person is in total denial that they are like this, by the way, so outright asking them probably won’t work. These would be questions to ask in both “interviewer” and “interviewee” roles.”
From a Project for Excellence in Journalism report on media coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death:
“In the mainstream press, coverage has focused on trying to parse out the details leading up to and during the dramatic raid, and on sorting through the national and international reaction to it. … On Facebook and Twitter, meanwhile, citizens have used these social media tools to express black humor about bin Laden’s death. The largest share of discussion there, 19%, has involved people sharing jokes. The second largest theme involved the question of whether bin Laden was really dead, and weighing the pros and cons of the proof offered. That discussion accounted for 17% of the conversation.”
Sick jokes and conspiracy theories — when did social media start to behave like Wall Street?
(HT: Romenesko)
It’s been a while, but let’s get back in the habit. You send us your “blegs” — that’s when you use a blog to beg for information, a solution to a tough problem, etc. — and we’ll post them here for readers to pitch in to solve your dilemmas.
Here’s an archive of past blegs; they cover everything from firefighter safety to your least favorite songs to settling a loved one’s estate without acrimony. You can leave your blegs in the comments section below or send them to bleg [at] freakonomics [dot] com . Remember, no problem is too hard (or small, or weird) for our readership!
Two months ago, we migrated this blog away from nytimes.com, where it had lived for three-plus years. The migration was generally a success, but not totally. There were some early technical difficulties (servers issues, caching issues, and other things you don’t care about), but those were fixed relatively quickly. The bigger problem was that we weren’t crazy about our redesign — and, you, dear readers, were even less crazy about it than we were. It was too grid-dependent, photo-dependent, not readable enough, etc. So we’ve spent the past several weeks re-doing our re-do, and you can see the result as of today.
Does Las Vegas increase your risk of suicide? A researcher embeds himself in the city where Americans are most likely to kill themselves.
Think back to high school. The quarterback on the football team had a legendary game over the weekend, and made everyone associated with the school so proud they could split their pants. On Monday, he’s treated like a hero.
But, interestingly, people find themselves thinking better of him not only for his athletic exploits. Suddenly, everything about him seems a cut above.
Remember Round 1? Here now, the two economics heavyweights square off again, in spectacular rap-ified fashion: You can find more related material here. It is the co-creation of Russ Roberts, who you may remember making some provocative arguments in our “What Would the World Look Like If Economists Were in Charge?” podcast. And here‘s a Q&A with Roberts about the . . .
Here now is the second in a series of guest posts from Charles Fishman, whose new book is called The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. (Fishman’s last book is The Wal-Mart Effect.) In The Big Thirst, Fishman tackles the debate around water as an increasingly precious resource while reminding us that water can’t actually be . . .
I like this question: If you keep a folder of important/embarrassing material on your computer’s desktop (or I guess a real desktop, even) and want to make sure that no one ever opens it, what’s the best name to give the folder? “Actuarial Test Prep” maybe? Suggestions, please. Also, does anyone know the name for this dilemma? ADDENDUM: Thanks . . .
As I type these words, the biggest insider-trading trial in years, that of Raj Rajaratnam, has just gone to the jury. I haven’t followed the trial too closely, but the gist is evident: the line between “insider trading” and the legitimate, if sharp-elbowed, acquisition of useful trading information is extremely blurry. This is hardly the only insider case at the moment. Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, famously said last fall that “illegal insider trading is rampant and may even be on the rise.” So it seemed a good time to put together a Freakonomics Quorum and ask a couple of straightforward questions.
Not long ago, Levitt solicited your questions for the economist Gary Becker. Dubner interviewed Becker for a new project called Expert Insight (see BusinessWeek writeup here), whereby various “experts” — in economics, poker, golf, etc. — can be booked for web-chats. Becker is, as always, fascinating and far-ranging, covering everything from immigration policy and organ transplantation to (at the suggestion . . .
Selecting a player in the NFL draft is essentially trying to predict the future, and human beings are simply not very good at it. Things get even harder when trying to pick the most important position in all of sports: the quarterback.
According to a new working paper that looks at Canadian compulsory schooling laws, an additional year of education leads to a 4 percent decline in the likelihood that someone identifies with a religious tradition.
Sales of eco-friendly household cleaning products have tanked thanks to the recession. Turns out our green conspicuous consumption habits only reach so far.
On his trip to Seattle, Stephen Dubner encounters the best coffee he’s ever tasted. The recipe comes straight from two former World Barista Champions.
Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger for EconLog, has written a new book called “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.” And he’s been guest-blogging for us about parenting. I had a chance to interview Caplan yesterday for an upcoming Freakonomics Radio show called “An Economist’s Guide to Parenting.” He had a great deal to say on the topic, all of it interesting and much of it provocative. I think you will enjoy it as much as I did.
A reader wants to know: How much energy is wasted each year by making ice cubes for all the cold soft drinks that Americans consume?
A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests a sensible, non-ideological take on why health care costs rise faster than their efficacy. This echoes a recurring theme here, that it’s often the cheap and simple solutions that work the best.
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