The psychologist Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice (here’s his TED talk on the topic) was, for me at least, very persuasive. It made a compelling if counterintuitive argument: even though many people (economists especially) argue that more choice is almost always a good thing, Schwartz argued that too much choice is actually a bad thing, causing decision paralysis and unhappiness.
A lot of industries are obviously weather-dependent — agriculture, tourism, etc. — but I hadn’t known that the traditional production of roofing slate in the U.K. was also at the mercy of the weather. Here is but one of many fascinating things you can learn from Simon Winchester’s excellent book The Map That Changed the World, about the proto-geologist William Smith:
Last week we opened up the questioning for Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist whose fieldwork on street prostitutes in Chicago is the foundation of a long section of our first chapter. Here are his replies. Thanks to Sudhir and all of you for participating.
Bring your questions for George Atallah, and follow him on Twitter at @gatallah.
‘Tis the season for turkey shopping, and the price is right. According to this Wall Street Journal squib, the price of whole frozen turkeys has fallen from 94 cents per pound last year to just 66 cents per pound, with Wal-Mart leading the way, selling turkeys for just 40 cents per pound. (Note: price estimates vary.)
We spend a good bit of time in SuperFreakonomics writing about doctors’ hand hygiene: specifically, how important good hand hygiene is in order to cut down on hospital-acquired infections and yet how historically it has proven difficult to enforce.
Yesterday, and for much of the past year, I regularly did something that was perfectly legal.
Starting today, if I do the same thing, I am breaking a New York State law.
What is it that I’m doing?
The first correct answer earns a signed copy of SuperFreakonomics or a piece of Freakonomics schwag.
When we think about “scientists,” most of us probably envision people toiling away in the lab or the field, accumulating and analyzing data in order to test theories, leaving their personal biases at home, scrupulously considering any confounding data or theories and willfully distancing themselves from the political implications of their research.
How quaint.
Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitchen you’ve ever seen; nor is the cookbook he is producing like any other that’s been published:
Newsweek is running an online retrospective of the new millennium’s first decade. My favorite section to date is the “Overblown Fears” list. Here they are, in order:
1. Y2K
2. Shoe Bombs
3. Vaccines Cause Autism
4. Immigrants
5. Bloggers
6. SARS, Mad Cow, Bird Flu
7. Web Predators
8. Teen Oral Sex Epidemic
9. Anthrax
10. Globalization
In the first installment of our virtual book club, Emily Oster answered your questions about her research (co-authored with Rob Jensen) which argues that the lives of rural women in India improved on several dimensions thanks to the widespread adoption of television.
That story appeared in our book’s introduction. Now we’re moving on to Chapter One. We will probably feature a few Q&A’s with the subjects and researchers featured in this chapter, which is described in the Table of Contents like this:
Police in Hunan province, China, raided a workshop said to be producing counterfeit condoms. According to the (U.K.) Times:
Bare-chested employees were found using vegetable oil to lubricate the condoms to make them smooth and shiny before placing them directly in fiber bags without bothering with sterilization.
In Seattle recently, I met a pulmonologist who said that the H1N1 virus has him busier than he’s ever been, his hospital beds full of flu patients. The uptick hit particularly hard about 10 days ago, he said.
How has the flu been playing out across the country?
In SuperFreakonomics, we tell the story of how Robert Strange McNamara, an outsider at the Ford Motor Co., led the charge the put seat belts in automobiles at Ford. It was not a popular decision within the company nor with the public; pushing for a safety device in a car did a bit too good of a job of reminding people that cars could be quite unsafe. But McNamara got his way. Over time (a long time, it turned out), the seat belt won widespread adoption, saving roughly 250,000 lives in the U.S. alone since 1975.
Our first guest was University of Chicago economist Emily Oster, whose research, co-authored with Robert Jensen, formed the basis of the section where we discuss how the introduction of television turned out to be an unlikely boon for rural Indian women. (I should have also mentioned that we cite Emily’s fascinating research on how women were regularly put to death for centuries on charges of witchcraft.)
A while back, I wondered why flight attendants don’t get tipped. Here’s a nice response from a reader named Barb, who retired after 36 years as a flight attendant with US Airways. Her suggestion sounds pretty perfect to me. I particularly liked her “schmuck” observation:
There’s been a brouhaha over whether we “misrepresented” the research and views of the climate scientist Ken Caldeira, whom we write about in the global-warming chapter of SuperFreakonomics. We’ve been in constant touch with him over the past few weeks, since we wanted to amend future printings of our book if indeed there were misrepresentations. If you want to know the end of this story, just skip ahead to the bottom of this post. Otherwise, here’s the background:
The closest guess to be submitted before the deadline was from Dave Benner, commenter No. 93, who guessed 666,666. Apparently the devil really is in the details. Congratulations to Dave; he’s got some schwag coming his way.
How is a car like the Internet?
A reader named William Mack writes in with an interesting observation and question. It echoes a conversation I recently had with a friend who had been on the receiving end of some road rage — in a New York City parking garage, of all places. The driver behind her simply couldn’t wait for her to pull in, so he rammed her.
We’ve been doing a lot of media interviews for SuperFreakonomics, and once in a while you get asked a really interesting question.
But I don’t think this one will ever be topped. It comes from a journalist in India.
Here’s an e-mail from a reader named Nadaav Zohar of Akron, Ohio. I like the way he thinks.
Every election season, I can usually count on a Freakonomics blog entry or three about voting and why it is pointless. I very much agree with your analysis, and I don’t vote.
That was the question posed in this recent contest.
As usual, it didn’t take long for the correct answer to be posted. In this case, it came from one P. Mardel, commenter No. 3:
Both introduced low-cost interventions that had dramatic results. Both were also ostracized by the then-conventional wisdom. Ignatz Semmelweis promoted hand-washing in maternity wards, Robert S. McNamara introduced seat belts in Ford cars.
We blogged a while back about the sad state of financial literacy in this country. This has been diligently investigated by Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia S. Mitchell, who insert a few financial questions in government longitudinal surveys. Here’s an example.
Our critics accuse us of manipulation and cherry-picking and misrepresenting a variety of arguments about climate change and energy production. If everything they said was actually true, it would indeed be a damning indictment. But it�s not.
We have a chapter in SuperFreakonomics about global warming and it too will likely produce a lot of shouting, name-calling, and accusations ranging from idiocy to venality. It is curious that the global-warming arena is so rife with shrillness and ridicule. Where does this shrillness come from? Some say that left-leaning activists have merely borrowed their right-leaning competitors from years past. A reasonable conjecture?
In Stockholm’s Odenplan subway station, the staircase has been retrofitted to resemble giant piano keys, which produce real sound, to encourage commuters to climb the stairs rather than ride the escalator. According to this video — which seems to be part of a Volkswagen marketing initiative, though it’s unclear — it’s been a raging success.
For a few years now, this blog has included a link whereby readers could sign up for an e-mail newsletter. Many of you did so but for whatever reason we never actually sent out anything. If we had something to say, we’d just say it here on the blog. But now with a new book finally about to be published here and in the U.K. (and other English-speaking nations), we have fired up the e-mail list. The first missive went out last week. If you wanted it and got it, do nothing. If you got it and didn’t want it, you may unsubscribe and our feelings won’t be hurt. If you didn’t get it and want it, sign up here.
A quick visit to the U.K. confirms that environmental and global-warming concerns are, on the surface at least, acutely more pronounced here than in the U.S. Reminders and nudges seem to be everywhere, many of them seemingly intended to make you feel guilty for every breath you draw and every bite you swallow. A bottle of Belu water arrives at the table: “All Profits to Clean Water Projects,” it says. “The U.K.’s First Carbon-Neutral Bottled Water.”
Just landed in the U.K. for a quick bout of pre-release publicity for SuperFreakonomics.
Checked in at the hotel, turned on the TV to unpack, flipped through the channels, and came to CNN. I was expecting to see a familiar face, and I did. But not Wolf, not Campbell, not Larry: instead, it’s Jon Stewart.
Maybe it was because I saw the headline early this morning not on the N.Y. Times’s website or the Wall Street Journal’s, but rather on Google News. I instantly assumed that the Onion had successfully landed a story on the home page of that fine aggregator. “Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize,” the headline said. I chuckled, silently congratulated the Onion on its clever idea, and clicked the link.
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